> In this regard, I would have to disagree with you. Linux was beganas a > hobby project, and once it had gained momentum, it was continued > out of sheer love for the concept. Thousands of people from around the > world thought so; they joined in, and helped him.
I can't help but look at the kernel changelogs and notice how many @intel.com, @osdl.org, @redhat.com, @suse.de, @ibm.com email addresses are doing the bulk of the work. These people are all GETTING PAID to work on the kernel (and that is truly what Linux is, a KERNEL. If you want to talk about an OS, you need to qualify your statement with GNU/Linux..but I'm sure you know that.) If I had a choice as to a) getting paid for hacking on GNU/Linux or b) getting paid for hacking on Microsoft, the choice is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, there isn't that choice here. > Linux wouldn't be anywhere if it weren't for guys like Alan Cox, > all-day all-night coding machines, who would still be coding even if > they weren't making a living coding. Or Eric S. Raymond, who simply saw > something that needed doing, and did it. And these are just the big > names I can think of off the top of my head. I would throw in Bruce Perens, Hans Reiser, and Donald Becker as some other big names. All of those people are getting paid to hack on Linux in some way shape or form. I think that's great. However, if your claim is that they would work on it all day and night whether or not they are paid, then they must not have families! Would you want your wife waiting up for you all night while you ran down that pesky buffer overflow? > I can easily say that 95% of what I use in Linux today, was created > out of someone's generosity, and that they weren't getting paid to do > it. And the same goes for the code that I've given to the Linux > community. As well as bug reports, technical support, and just plain > opinions. I use Samba, ReiserFS, XFS, SMP, ALSA, and Nvidia drivers in my daily use of GNU/Linux. All of those things (with the possible exception of ALSA) were created based off of monetary contributions / DOD contracts / ported from other OS's. I'd call that about 15-20% maybe as much as 30%. That makes 70% free software contributed on someone's spare time. And that's ASSUMING that no code in the xorg-x11, gnome 2.8 projects was written by someone earning a paycheck. > However, mindsets like yours -are- obstacles; that money can replace > hard work, drive, determination, and principles, and that the only way > that Linux is going to be successful is when it is selling in stores, > and you have to fork over the cash just to use it. And that is so > terribly wrong it makes my head hurt. I think mindsets like RMS's and yours are terribly wrong. It's nice to have a free software ideal, and believe that software should be free, but until the cost of living for programmers becomes $0 it just isn't realistic. You guys are simply blind to the fact that most meaningful contributions to Linux are made on the paid dollar and if it were for hobbyists we'd still be at exactly where the GNU Mach/Hurd kernels are right now, 0% market share. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it). I would go further and say that until there are standards, 1 standard distribution of GNU/Linux (free or not free, it doesn't matter to the users) then it will not have the success it is looking for. When a user gets introduced to Linux he sees 1000000 distributions and it's like "Where do I go from here" > Secondly, Baton Rouge isn't exactly where I would want to have a > programming job -and- raise a family. Sure, some can do it, but by the > same stroke, MOST have left Baton Rouge. Believe me, I know quite a few > programmers and they all left Baton Rouge. As I will, as soon as I have > completed my degree. Please forgive me for falling in love with my high school sweetheart, marrying her, and having the ability to raise a beautiful son in close proximity to his grandparents and having a loving center of support all around us. Forgive me for not having useless ideals that cause me to hop around $8/hr LAMP jobs. Forgive me for taking a great paying Microsoft development job that allowed me to buy a nice house in Shenandoah Estates at the age of 23. > Tell that to John Carmack. Or a dozen other developers who have > done the same thing. I said "don't usually". Oh, on the Carmack subject, you might want to read his latest blog about that very thing. "I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn't the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I'm pretty sure there would be some hard feelings." It's all about the Benjamins baby! > I find that statement completely, and totally repugnant. I am going > to cut it short right here, because the only thing that can fly from my > fingers is a healthy dose of anger. I will say that, for the record, I > have "converted" a few dozen people at LSU to switch to Linux because of > "some elitist's free software ideal", and for no other reason than they > believed in free software. I too was a student analyst for some time at LSU, in both the departments of OCS and ISDS (I graduated in August 2002 in Computer Engineering). The amount of sheer ignorance about basic computing functions precluded me from introducing Linux or anything else (and neither were any distros really ready to introduce to anyone back in 99-00 when I was at OCS). Those people would have looked at it once and said "Where's Internet Explorer?" then rebooted right back into Windows. I understand that there are more intelligent free thinkers in some of the engineering departments and of course Computer Science (is that still a non-accredited degree?), but that was the environment I was in. > My gut tells me to ask you; WHY are you using Linux? I would love > to hear your arguments, and when you do, BRING PROOF. I use GNU/Linux because it's geeky and cool and appeals to my personal sensibilities. I like learning technical things and keeping myself up-to-date in computer technology so I can be competitive in the job markets. I don't delude myself into thinking my mom should switch over to it because "software deserves to be free" or some such BS. _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
