John Walker, the creator and for years the principle maintainer of Speak Freely, posted the EOL message months ago, and since then the Speak Freely community has been organizing ways to continue the project and extend the lifetime of the software.
As a long-time user (since 1997) of Speak Freely, I can attest to the care, overall quality and highly useful nature of this package. It has not merely saved large amounts of money, but changed the very nature of the way I conduct communications with friends and collaborators around the world. I am sure it has done so for a great many others as well. New mailing lists have been established to replace the old, and at least one online forum has been offered as another place to carry on discussion about Speak Freely.
Overall, news of the demise of this package is greatly exxagerated. While the founder is leaving, it has already found new homes, with three projects on sourceforge, and developers working on other efforts as well.
This is a natural development in many OSS projects, the orginator sees less utility in the project than others do, and they are free to pick it up. Rather than mourn the loss of this excellent software or wring my hands over the end of OSS, I believe this is in general a healthy develpment, and I'm looking forward to more years of using this package.
In 1999, the Kalamazoo Linux Users Group developed a Linux-based system suitable for use in Cybercafes, and it was used by a local Cyecafe for almost three years, until the business was sold (the new owners developed a restaurant idea that did not involve Internet access). The installation of this system replaced an earlier Wondows-based cybercafe system.
I would not call what was developed a "distribution" in the formal sense, although it was quite easy to install what was developed. The system, based on Red Hat 6.0, was quite secure, and provided two levels of use, as well as a control sation, which kept track of billing and printed receipts on demand.
The project team was talking about how to support wireless access when the Cybercafe was sold.
This project raised funds for LUG activites, got many people exposed to Linux, and even got a couple of articles in the local newspaper. Also, several people learned networking and other skills by working on the project.
On the whole I view this article as fundamentally correct in it's sense of the marketplace. We can argue the details here, but this article reflects the overall attitude I've been hearing from clients (who range from single professionals to multinational manufacturing and financial services organizations) for some time now (2 years, in many cases).
That said, there are still a great many IT people and users who still believe that Microsoft defines IT these days, and it will take years for the views expressed in the Inquirer article to catch up with them. I view this as a normal process, and I often see that perception lags progress by 18 months or more.
My most serious problem with this article is that I cannot show it to any serious business clients;
the article shows almost nothing but contempt for them as a whole, and they will (wrongly) take that as a reflection on the Linux community; the editorial choices made indicate that the author is very blatantly pro-Linux. This tends to reinforce the perception that Linux and OSS folk are rather anti-business, playing into the hands of FUD spreaders.
We need this message delivered, but with better packaging, primarily since it will be more effective. Note that packaging and presenting is perhaps Microsoft's greatest strength, and we would do well to improve our packing as much as possible, although we certainly don't need to follow Microsoft in this regard.
My oldest working machine is an IBM PC/AT, vintage 1984, with a spacious 640 K of useful memory, powered by MS-DOS 3.4, with a brilliant EGA display card and NEC Multisync (without any of those pesky numbers and letters after the brand name) monitor. I have upgraded this wonder with a 120 Megabyte (with an M) MAXTOR hard drive (full height), which is, I believe, the largest MFM drive they made.
In ADDITION, I have THREE external hard drives, which were manufactured by ESS (Electronic Storage Systems) in 1981.. each drive is an 8" PRIAM, and they run daisy-chained off a driver card that shipped with the units (the whole thing looks sorta almost kinda SCSI-like). With the driver software, each physical drive appears to be a
pair of 56 Megabyte drives. This brings storage to almost 500 MB, total, a very large amount of storage for this level of technology.
One of these has an internal tape drive, in case you need to backup the data. I've used the tapes,
and the software to run that, but in all these years I have had NO PROBLEMS with data loss of
disk problems, all this hardware still works flawlesly after more than 20 years.
I am still using it to publish a pair of letters I have to send out quarterly, using PARADOX and WORDPERFECT.... there are number of other applications that run on this machine, but they have fallen into disuse, and are mostly trotted out to show visitors (some of whom are younger than the system) just how modest hardware can produce some very fine results.
I could migrate the letter production and mail-merge to a number of other systems here, but I get such a kick out of using this old machine that it's would be hard to part with it now. In case of tragic failure, I put all the essential data into a portable form, but I don't have plans to retire this machine just yet!
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As a long-time user (since 1997) of Speak Freely, I can attest to the care, overall quality and highly useful nature of this package. It has not merely saved large amounts of money, but changed the very nature of the way I conduct communications with friends and collaborators around the world. I am sure it has done so for a great many others as well. New mailing lists have been established to replace the old, and at least one online forum has been offered as another place to carry on discussion about Speak Freely.
Overall, news of the demise of this package is greatly exxagerated. While the founder is leaving, it has already found new homes, with three projects on sourceforge, and developers working on other efforts as well.
This is a natural development in many OSS projects, the orginator sees less utility in the project than others do, and they are free to pick it up. Rather than mourn the loss of this excellent software or wring my hands over the end of OSS, I believe this is in general a healthy develpment, and I'm looking forward to more years of using this package.
I would not call what was developed a "distribution" in the formal sense, although it was quite easy to install what was developed. The system, based on Red Hat 6.0, was quite secure, and provided two levels of use, as well as a control sation, which kept track of billing and printed receipts on demand.
The project team was talking about how to support wireless access when the Cybercafe was sold.
This project raised funds for LUG activites, got many people exposed to Linux, and even got a couple of articles in the local newspaper. Also, several people learned networking and other skills by working on the project.
A win-win-win-win situation!
That said, there are still a great many IT people and users who still believe that Microsoft defines IT these days, and it will take years for the views expressed in the Inquirer article to catch up with them. I view this as a normal process, and I often see that perception lags progress by 18 months or more.
My most serious problem with this article is that I cannot show it to any serious business clients; the article shows almost nothing but contempt for them as a whole, and they will (wrongly) take that as a reflection on the Linux community; the editorial choices made indicate that the author is very blatantly pro-Linux. This tends to reinforce the perception that Linux and OSS folk are rather anti-business, playing into the hands of FUD spreaders.
We need this message delivered, but with better packaging, primarily since it will be more effective. Note that packaging and presenting is perhaps Microsoft's greatest strength, and we would do well to improve our packing as much as possible, although we certainly don't need to follow Microsoft in this regard.
My oldest working machine is an IBM PC/AT, vintage 1984, with a spacious 640 K of useful memory, powered by MS-DOS 3.4, with a brilliant EGA display card and NEC Multisync (without any of those pesky numbers and letters after the brand name) monitor. I have upgraded this wonder with a 120 Megabyte (with an M) MAXTOR hard drive (full height), which is, I believe, the largest MFM drive they made.
In ADDITION, I have THREE external hard drives, which were manufactured by ESS (Electronic Storage Systems) in 1981.. each drive is an 8" PRIAM, and they run daisy-chained off a driver card that shipped with the units (the whole thing looks sorta almost kinda SCSI-like). With the driver software, each physical drive appears to be a pair of 56 Megabyte drives. This brings storage to almost 500 MB, total, a very large amount of storage for this level of technology.
One of these has an internal tape drive, in case you need to backup the data. I've used the tapes, and the software to run that, but in all these years I have had NO PROBLEMS with data loss of disk problems, all this hardware still works flawlesly after more than 20 years.
I am still using it to publish a pair of letters I have to send out quarterly, using PARADOX and WORDPERFECT.... there are number of other applications that run on this machine, but they have fallen into disuse, and are mostly trotted out to show visitors (some of whom are younger than the system) just how modest hardware can produce some very fine results.
I could migrate the letter production and mail-merge to a number of other systems here, but I get such a kick out of using this old machine that it's would be hard to part with it now. In case of tragic failure, I put all the essential data into a portable form, but I don't have plans to retire this machine just yet!