Brad N Bendily wrote: >It was really nice to meet most of you in person. > >The movie was great. > >The thing that struck me the most at the end of the movie was the >fact that we are still in the middle of the OS revolution. >The OS/Free Software war is still raging. I can't wait to be >there on the sideline when we see one of the opponents defeated. >I am going to make sure I know as much as I can know about >each side. > >
As much as you folks hear me bash M$ I am sure that you will be surprised to hear me say this. I really don't think that it is a war of open source versus closed source. I tend to agree more with Eric Raymond, rather than Richard Stallman. I think that commercial and open source should co-exist. I personally despise M$ and feel that they are evil blood sucking leeches on the tech industry, however I do not feel that way about most other commercial software companies. I will just as quickly buy a piece of software that is closed if it suits my purposes and is priced fairly. In fact I have purchased a PHP IDE that was very useful for me. My differences with M$ are more about their business practices and their perversion of standards and interoperability. I despise Bill Gates and have often called him the antichrist when talking with people. However, in general I do not despise commercial software and the companies that offer it. I will just aas quickly use a commercial product as an open source one depending on my needs at the time. I love the whole idea of OS software, but sometimes there are reasons to go the commercial route. I think the best thing that Linux and OS software has done is to create competition and changing attitudes in the industry. It is not OK anymore just to develop a crappy piece of software, slap a pricetag on it and peddle your wares with poor support. Today comapnies realize that to sell a piece of commercial software you have to have value and quality that comes along with the pricetag. The guy that wrote the O'Reilly book on administering LDAP works on both the OpenLDAP and Samba projects. he has given several tutorials on LDAP at the USENIX conferences, one of which I attended a couple weeks ago. His words were that the Sun LDAP server is the most stable and fastest one out there. He claimed that if you really need reliable, enterprise class LDAP servers, that the Sun route is the way to go. This coming from the guy that helped write OpenLDAP. I believe that Open Source Software will bring Bill Gates to his knees begging for forgiveness, but I think that other commercial companies that offer real quality will still be around for long time and will do relatively well, assuming we have a healthy economy. I personally use linux almost exclusively on the desktop. However most of my critical servers are Solaris. My VPN servers are OpenBSD. My file servers are Linux. I use the best tool for the job at hand. That best tool is never Windows though, it seems. I guess all of my years of blue screens, data corruption, lost email in .pst files, corrupt registries, hours upon hours of reinstalling my programs when all I needed to reinstall was bloody windows, non-interoperability with other products, viruses, trojans, CDC BackOrifice, etc. etc. etc. has left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to M$. Can anyone in here really blame me? The funny thing is that I was studying for my MCSE (and was half way there) when I seriously started to learn linux. I have never looked back and I am better off for it. I have more money in my pocket and enjoy what I do now. My servers typically average >1 year uptime. Versus W2k server which can't seem to stay running consistently for more than a month, and corrupts its AD data in less than six. But like I say, if there is a war going on, I do not believe that it is between commercial/OSS. I think the only real war is between M$ and Linux, not OSS vs. closed software. Many commercial vendors are porting their apps to Linux. I think the future is bright for those that have caught on and really offer value. Like I say, I believe that the best thing is that OSS has brought on healthy competition and changing attitudes. Shannon >Not that I like one more than the other, but I have to work, and >if I only know about one side the I might not find work on the other >side. > > > > >Later >Brad B > > >_______________________________________________ >General mailing list >[email protected] >http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > >
