David Rankin wrote: >You know, > > I can sympathize. Not because the change is necessarily a bad thing, but >more because of what the change represents. To me the shift signifies the >beginning of the end of a wonderful era of camaraderie when the linux >community worked together as one to develop the best product we could. The >shift represents the realization that capitolism has enetered the linux >frontier and the logical forgeone conclusion and fate of the era of >camaraderie is the same as the fate of the American Buffalo. Capitolism is a >great thing, but don't kid yourself it does have its downside. > > As far a the little operating system that could: > > Odyssey 7.2 > > [david@Nemesis david]$ uptime > 12:46pm up 275 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 > Ummm, was that ever more than a myth? Look at the sniping posts here and the marketing employed by some linux firms and the gathering of people who say, "The best of this distro should be moved to xxxyyyzz distro where my favorite tool wronk-gronk is available," or atr the folks who see a problem reported on the newbie list who say
"Works on Boozer linux" when in fact it might work for the poster but I have probably seen reports from Boozer users who say it doesn't work for them. (USB is a good example). Or look at the posts here and on MandrakeForum which come out right around release time to poison the release like Is this LSB compatible, yet? (when in fact no distro can really claim to be because the official test software for compatibility isn't even official yet--still beta-- and the sniping of our "incompatibility" is in the "gray areas" of the Filesystem Hierarchical Standard where no clear direction is given and the interpretation of the other distros is probably as equally valid as ours and all different) or Is the situation with left-handed gronklies being mistreated by bash fixed? (when in fact it was never broken) Camaraderie? Try to post something favoring GNOME or favoring KDE on Mandrakeforum and watch the list moderators go into a frenzy to keep the forum civil, usually by having to delete posts. We don't do that unless things get way too personal. Well, we're not here to fight FUD with FUD, which is why I carefully did not name distros. But I would say Microsoft has taught us all too well how to market our product at others expense rather than on its own merits. As for the free linux--it is still out there and can likely never be killed. It is an alternative to the other OS only for very skilled people, though. The purpose of most distros are to allow the folks with less skill than that a chance at freedom, certainly not to make the principals wealthy. Mandrake has been fortunate to have some oof the best engineers in the world, folks who make me look on in awe, folks who could be making triple what they are almost anywhere else. But they came to Mandrake to work on free software. Civileme
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