[svlug] time for a Digg fork?

[SL Baur]

On 2/25/08, Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com> wrote:

> No, but I do have respect for the vast amount of traffic that comes to their
> site, _and_ I think that lots of people hear about Free Software for the
> very first time by cruising Digg, merely because it has become such a
> destination for general users.

I would be astounded if that was the case.  2 decades ago, nearly every
engineer knew about Free Software.  Complete systems weren't
complete then, but everyone supplemented (or had someone) supplement
for them their commercial Unix system with Free Software.  After all, we
were all using X11 then and X11 was the first truly successful piece of
Free Software that "killed" *the* commercial giant of the time - Sun
Microsystems.  X11R4 (1988?) had the stunning port of SunView to X11.

You're implying that somehow we've misplaced a generation in
between and I just don't believe it.

> If we are going to increase the Free
> Software installbase on the consumer desktop past 51%, we are going to need
> to use lots of commercially available tools, including Digg.

It's going to take something more than that.  Are you aware that Microsoft
is currently dumping (in the illegal sense) Microsoft Windows in China
selling it at US$5 a license?  When I worked at Turbolinux around 2000,
we were struggling to be able to sell the distro in China for under US$15
and cut all kinds of corners to get it down to US$12.

My personal opinion is that advocating Linux and Open Source software as
free-as-in-beer is a complete mistake and instead we should be highlighting
what it can do for you instead.

For example, I was recently asked the question "when was the last time you
had to reboot a computer due to an operating system fault?"  I came back
with several different answers.  If you just mean commercial Unix and
designated stable Linux kernels, that would be 1998, when I did
something stupid and had a removable hard disk cartridge eject.  However
last year, when I was undergoing a voluntary Microsoft Windows XP
appreciation "course" I observed that it locked up and/or crashed regularly
usually twice a week (that same machine by the way has *never* crashed
since it was reborn running RHEL 5, so it's not bad hardware.  Lenovo T60s
aren't exactly obscure machines either).

Anyway, I think you're missing the point.

-sb