Much of the concern over the use of proprietary material is that it'll eventually be relied-upon with no alternative. If that happens and then the owner of the proprietary software has a change of heart or goes belly up, there are problems.
For example: if everyone uses ATI's fglrx drivers, there's no need for the open source ones. If ATI goes out of business, everyone's using this huge black box to power their ATI cards. Bug fixes would have to be in the form of unofficial binary hacks, and new feature implementation is next to impossible.
By not using any non-free (as in speech) components, such a calamity can be avoided.
It's amazing how many of my classmates I've converted to Ubuntu because they saw how sexy it was with proper theming and the use of a few desklets. Yes, even to senior level computer science students, eye candy sells.
...Of course, once they actually tried it out and used the slick features like apt-get the first time, they were head over heels.
I agree. This gives me a good chance to see it for myself: test the waters, so to speak, before passing it along to the less initiated. From the description, it sounds like a killer distro: I'd love to have proprietary codecs and the like installed out of the box. If this distro ends up being all it's cracked up to be, I might just subscribe to the click and run even though I know how to use apt-get already: just to support it.
Of course, I'll have to really give credance to the FSF's take on proprietary software first: I'd hate to be damaging progress for the sake of convenience, if that really is the end consequence.
If you're going to RTFA, perhaps you should really pay attention to what you're reading.
TFA:... losing their desktop users didn't just mean "losing the suckers who didn't pay a cent anyway" (this is not a quote, by the way), because a lot of those "suckers" were system administrators, who will soon have to decide between Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Server.
You:...does not actually detail any valid reasons about why Ubuntu will displace Redhat in the market.
That looks like a pretty valid reason to me: If admins use Ubuntu on the desktop they get to know how to use it. When they need a server later, are they going to choose to learn a whole new system (RedHat) just because the admin down the street uses it? No, they're more likely to go with what they know: Ubuntu or at least Debian.
I don't think the author was accusing RedHat of any wrong: just saying perhaps they made an unwise decision. Of course there's nothing wrong with RedHat focusing on where the money was. The point the author makes is that if an OS takes the desktop market, sysadmins become more familiar with it (since they use it more), and are prone to use it for their servers rather than use 2 different systems.
I know that I'm used to Ubuntu now - if I was to set up a linux server for something, I'd probably use Ubuntu because I'm already familiar with its configuration and administration. RedHat would have to have lots of VERY substantial benefits over Debian for me to take the time to learn how to administrate it.
I can vouch for this. A while ago I hooked a box running snort up to a residential cable connection as a databases class project. It logged attacks perpetrated against it, ran whois queries on offending IP's, categorized attackers and attack density by country, etc.
You'd be amazed how frequently attacks and scans were perpetrated. Heck, 2 of the first 10 attacks on our server came from IP's owned by the US Department of the Interior:-p
I don't want to slashdot the server (residential cable is pretty brittle...), but I can watch its homepage and watch the little AJAX ticker of the latest attack change a few times a minute...
I appreciate (and not sarcastically) that you took the time to designate that this is your opinion. I'm no GTK+ fanboy, but I think it's cool that you had the class to state your opinions as just that: opinions.
Kernel upgrades invariably cause recompiles with the ATI drivers as well, but the forums really came to the rescue for getting them up and running again. I mean hey, I have a pretty crummy card that has horrible support and buggy (at best) drivers supplied by the manufacturer, and I was able to get it up and accelerated (XGL/Compiz, even) in a little time after work one day. Not bad at all, as far as support goes.... in contrast: my network interfaces stopped recognizing any form of connection in Windows, and after 3 days of research I ended up just reinstalling.:-p
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that the purpose of a Grammar?
Much of the concern over the use of proprietary material is that it'll eventually be relied-upon with no alternative. If that happens and then the owner of the proprietary software has a change of heart or goes belly up, there are problems. For example: if everyone uses ATI's fglrx drivers, there's no need for the open source ones. If ATI goes out of business, everyone's using this huge black box to power their ATI cards. Bug fixes would have to be in the form of unofficial binary hacks, and new feature implementation is next to impossible. By not using any non-free (as in speech) components, such a calamity can be avoided.
It's amazing how many of my classmates I've converted to Ubuntu because they saw how sexy it was with proper theming and the use of a few desklets. Yes, even to senior level computer science students, eye candy sells.
...Of course, once they actually tried it out and used the slick features like apt-get the first time, they were head over heels.
I agree. This gives me a good chance to see it for myself: test the waters, so to speak, before passing it along to the less initiated. From the description, it sounds like a killer distro: I'd love to have proprietary codecs and the like installed out of the box. If this distro ends up being all it's cracked up to be, I might just subscribe to the click and run even though I know how to use apt-get already: just to support it.
Of course, I'll have to really give credance to the FSF's take on proprietary software first: I'd hate to be damaging progress for the sake of convenience, if that really is the end consequence.
Now I can pay at the arcade to mimic a siezure in front of people! Sweet!
If you're going to RTFA, perhaps you should really pay attention to what you're reading.
... losing their desktop users didn't just mean "losing the suckers who didn't pay a cent anyway" (this is not a quote, by the way), because a lot of those "suckers" were system administrators, who will soon have to decide between Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Server.
...does not actually detail any valid reasons about why Ubuntu will displace Redhat in the market.
TFA:
You:
That looks like a pretty valid reason to me: If admins use Ubuntu on the desktop they get to know how to use it. When they need a server later, are they going to choose to learn a whole new system (RedHat) just because the admin down the street uses it? No, they're more likely to go with what they know: Ubuntu or at least Debian.
I don't think the author was accusing RedHat of any wrong: just saying perhaps they made an unwise decision. Of course there's nothing wrong with RedHat focusing on where the money was. The point the author makes is that if an OS takes the desktop market, sysadmins become more familiar with it (since they use it more), and are prone to use it for their servers rather than use 2 different systems. I know that I'm used to Ubuntu now - if I was to set up a linux server for something, I'd probably use Ubuntu because I'm already familiar with its configuration and administration. RedHat would have to have lots of VERY substantial benefits over Debian for me to take the time to learn how to administrate it.
but even a non-hooker expert gets the point
:-)
Good thing there's such expert guidance around
I can vouch for this. A while ago I hooked a box running snort up to a residential cable connection as a databases class project. It logged attacks perpetrated against it, ran whois queries on offending IP's, categorized attackers and attack density by country, etc. You'd be amazed how frequently attacks and scans were perpetrated. Heck, 2 of the first 10 attacks on our server came from IP's owned by the US Department of the Interior :-p
I don't want to slashdot the server (residential cable is pretty brittle...), but I can watch its homepage and watch the little AJAX ticker of the latest attack change a few times a minute...
I appreciate (and not sarcastically) that you took the time to designate that this is your opinion. I'm no GTK+ fanboy, but I think it's cool that you had the class to state your opinions as just that: opinions.
Kernel upgrades invariably cause recompiles with the ATI drivers as well, but the forums really came to the rescue for getting them up and running again. I mean hey, I have a pretty crummy card that has horrible support and buggy (at best) drivers supplied by the manufacturer, and I was able to get it up and accelerated (XGL/Compiz, even) in a little time after work one day. Not bad at all, as far as support goes. ... in contrast: my network interfaces stopped recognizing any form of connection in Windows, and after 3 days of research I ended up just reinstalling. :-p