[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Alan DuBoff]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008, Don Marti wrote:

> Sure.  The early Linux scene could have had a lot
> worse than the Windows 3.1 market to contend with.

True, but Win 3.11 came out sometime around '88/'89 timeframe, 
it was the first version of Windows to have network drivers 
included in the OS. Linux was several years later, and Linux was 
not even a contender until '97/'98, IMO, after many folks had 
migrated to NT. Remember, NT stood for "New Technology" which 
Cutler was hired for. Linux was more of an alternative for NT in 
the early days, since it was a server for the most part, and 
setting up the desktop was still quite cumbersome.

> MSFT only lost its mojo when it started smoking
> whatever makes you think DRM is a good idea, gave
> up on users and decided to empower the IT Department
> and the Media Cartel instead.

> A lot of the companies that now sell Linux are much more evil.

This is true, IMO, also. When we say companies, those are the 
same corps I was referring to, where they try to take possesion 
of the sources for their own good.

> The main problem with getting companies to make code Free is 
> _not_ managers acting in the interests of their shareholders 
> or in their own interest. The main problem is just inertia. 
> If the policy at a company has been "never release source 
> code" you have to do something to make it happen the first 
> time, and you can't justify putting in the time to do it 
> unless you can say that you have to.

I agree with you. In fact, as an example, Sun did encourage LSI 
to release a driver under open source recently, it was the first 
time for LSI to do that. It is my hopes they will continue and 
release more open source. It is difficult for companies to do 
this, it is like pulling teeth in some cases. Oddly, it is 
sometimes not so much that they don't want to release the 
source, in many cases they can't because they have used 
proprietarty 3rd party libraries and/or other code that prevent 
them from doing so...(i.e., dev libs, configurators, other UI 
components, etc...).

To make it worse, most large companies have legal staff to 
obfuscate things with their own view of what they believe to be 
right/wrong.

> And I want a pony.  If you're big enough to make lots of 
> devices cheaply, you're big enough to be an attractive lawsuit 
> target.

True, but look how embedded linux is tossing the industry on 
it's ear! This is the one area that has the most potential to 
attract many, many vendors. The carrot of licensing is a big 
issue, and there is a lot of $$$s at stake for closed 
solutions...some of them scrambling to come up with open source 
and/or linux specific solutions, they realize they can't avoid 
it. But it's still not clear if their intentions are good.

> Google will change a license if a high-profile blogger
> mentions it.

Seems like an unusual way to determine licensing, and I'm sure 
that was not Google's intention for it to work like that. But I 
have to wonder why they alienated the MPL recently, Mozilla was 
one of the most instrumental pieces of software for most all 
open source systems. This is why I mentioned my concerns with 
Google. They have done some great stuff for the open source 
community, no question, but they also have the power to 
influence some things that happen, alienating MPL is an example. 
They also alienate other licenses.

I'm anxious to see how they can help the community have an 
service provider that we can connect our Androids up with, and 
what they might have to do and/or sacrifice to allow that. Most 
of the cell phone companies are not so warm to the idea of 
allowing you access to the data. I see involvement in LiMO from 
companies like Motorola and Nokia to name a couple. Sometimes it 
seems to me that these companies are just running in fear, and 
it's not clear what their real intention is in being involved in 
Linux, other than they don't want to miss out. That is a start, 
but do they really want to develop open source?

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration