Posts tagged: OPEN SOURCE

Does this Fox News opinion piece leave you slack-jawed and sputtering like it did me? Before you fire off that e-mail to James Prendergast explaining basics he seems not to grasp – like the difference between OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument, or the difference between monopoly control and competition, or how openness is in fact a “merit” just like price and software quality – read the response offered by Groklaw. It’s quite thorough. Also make sure you follow the link to background information on Prendergast’s Americans for Technology Leadership, “frequently described as a Microsoft front group.”

ITConversations has posted two more audio recordings from OSCON; Kim Polese’s From DIY to DIT and, today, Jeremy Zawodny’s Open Source at Yahoo!.

The shows will continue to trickle in, but I’ll stop posting about them now that ITConversations has the OSCON 2005 series page linked from their main navigation bar. Enjoy!

Another in a weekly series of unearthings.

Two years ago my titanium PowerBook died and I took an unplanned six-week leave from OS X. Afterward I wrote up my experiences in an essay called “FreeBSD, KDE and Me” (you might miss the title reference if you’re not of a certain generation). Within 24 hours the essay had gotten about 10,000 page views – easily the most popular thing I had ever posted.

Tim Bray recently posted an update on the Massachusetts OpenDocument decision, dissecting some leaked talking points from Microsoft. These expand on the one-liner I quoted in my previous post on the subject. This passage gets right to the heart of it:

The notion that using standardized formats and protocols gets in the way of innovation is twenty-year-old thinking, it was wrong then and its wrong now. I remember perfectly well, back in the Eighties, IBM and Wang and Pr1me and DEC explaining why their proprietary networking stacks were much more innovative and better than this new-fangled least-common-denominator Internetworking thing, and why their proprietary operating systems were more innovative than Unix. (Hey, most of those companies are out of business, aren’t they?)

ITConversations has posted a second talk from OSCON 2005, Asa Dotzler’s “Linux: In Search of the Desktop”. The talk grew out of a controversial blog posting Asa made, which was then slashdotted.

I agree with most of what he says. I shouldn’t be surprised at the number of people who disagreed with his basic assumption – that Linux has a place in the mainstream desktop computing world – but I am. This argument (“Linux should not try to accommodate regular people”) is, well, stupid. There will always be obscure distributions for people who enjoy being obscure. Or they can move to NetBSD or QNX or unpack their Amiga. I sympathize with the desire – I use Postfix instead of Sendmail, Python instead of Perl, Debian instead of Red Hat, MacOS instead of Windows, Camino instead of Firefox. But if the mainstream OS is Windows, and Windows sucks, then something else needs to move into that space – and devotion to being “alternative” means one is forever marginal by definition.