[Wylug-discuss] Open Source attacks.

[James Holden]

Hi Shaun,

It's down to an almost religious belief, plain and simple. As an
athiest, I encounter this occasionally - people with whom you can't have
an educated discussion because they don't understand the rules of the
game, for instance logic, scientific method etc.

A while ago (by "a while" I mean around 1999/2000), I had an epiphany.

I was a Windows expert. The creme-de-la-creme of desktop and server
support staff. I knew every registry tweak, every DLL conflict, I could
bring a Windows machine back from the dead with Voodoo and a DOS boot
disk.

Then, Windows 2000 appeared on the horizon.

I realised that all my knowledge and career was based on was a bunch of
stupid tweaks and hacks, and that everything I knew was about to be
obsoleted by the inevitable pointless progression in the Microsoft
world.

This upset me deeply and I quit the day job and went freelance, building
web thingies with open source tools, installing Samba servers and the
like, putting to use all the Linux skills I'd accumulated as more of a
curiosity over the years.

Life was good, except for the fact that freelancing was unpredictable
and I had a growing family.

I grabbed a full time job as an open source developer at an ISP and later
on a telecoms company.

Today, the horrid proprietary Windows world is a distant memory, and to
be honest, when I read or hear about the latest technologies (ie:
Vista), it all seems like some weird parallel universe where everybody
seems intent on doing everything the hard way.

These days, there seems to be people with a clue, and people without a
clue. Those without a clue are the ones clinging to the MS way of doing
things (after all, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft), and
those who do have some sense of clue are doing things the open source
way.

This pervades into general life. The culture of openness or closedness
is everywhere.

I wanted to know the tide times at Sandsend in North Yorkshire this
weekend.

You can find the tide times at Whitby quite easily on the Internet, but
the tide times at Sandsend (which will largely be the same) are
available via the Internet on paper for 50p plus a SAE.

This in itself seems to embody the closed-mindedness of the Microsoft
world. It'd be far more productive for the community to offer the tide
times free of charge with the support of a single banner from a local
guest house.

The Microsoft world appears to me to be a pathetic penny racket like the
Sandsend tide tables mail-order service - devoid of any real value, and
fleecing sheep-like followers of their cash for products that have
viable (and indeed often superior) alternatives elsewhere.

It's not about the technologies used, but the results gained. Services
that I build are there to last, and the reason that's possible is that
nobody's about to pull the rug out from under them by means of any
scheduled obselescence or other forced upgrade paths. I need to rely on
this, and I can't do it in the Microsoft world.

The latest is not the best, change for changes sake is pointless. I'm
immnune to this backwards thinking by operating in the free software
community, thank goodness

Cheers,

James


On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 02:33:04PM +0100, Shaun Laughey wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I have a great little discussion starter here.
> 
> You all remember the "Get the facts" campaign by Microsoft trying to
> make out that Windows was cheaper and more secure than Linux?
> 
> Well I've been seeing those arguments used more and more recently by
> the "general public" or people posting comments on semi-technical
> sites such as the one below.
> 
> http://www.pcretailmag.com/news/29647/Gartner-claims-open-source-will-rule
> 
> I wonder if Microsoft is now funding teams to repeat the company line
> on websites or is Windows becoming so bad that people are obsessing
> about it and repeat the standard excuse for why it's so bad "It's not
> our fault we're so successful" much how smokers have excuses as to why
> they want to die horribly of cancer (spot the ex smoker) and kill all
> those around them despite all the evidence.
> 
> At the moment I'm porting a VB application to Ruby on Rails and the
> .NET sites can be quite virulently opposed to open source and linux in
> both their content and the comments.
> 
> So my question is what is the threat to Microsoft and by extension
> their fanboys? Surely OSS runs on Windows too?
> 
> If they were attacking Linux I'd understand but the attacks seem to be
> at Open Source Software.
> 
> Regards,
> Shaun Laughey.
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk
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