yeah, I agree, we don't want to get involved in this sort of thing... However, we don't have the M$ advertising budget,,, the open source comunity needs to start a centralised "awareness" campaign,,, think of ways we can get the good word out there about just how good the software is... we have several things to lure people in. 1. a FREE Operating system if one choses to get it that way, and very cheap if they want to buy it. 2. Shitloads of FREE applications for nearly everything. 3. Support from some huge companies like IBM. 4. Unparalled stability when compared to any winblows version. 5. Unmatched web exposure with Apache. 6. Free Programming languages like perl. 7. A performance Gap has appeared in some areas with Linux and its growing. There are more too, but you get the idea... The more people we all make aware of this, the more things will change, the only reasons MS FUD and other tactics work, is because people don't know any better and generally won't go out of their way to find out. If everyone on linux lists convinced two other people of its benefits and unbeatable TOC... the number of "informed" people would grow at an unparalled rate... just my thoughts... but I really think Mandrake/Suse/Redhat/Caldera and all the others (possibly even IBM and similiar) need to have a big meeting and work out ways to Advertise "the good word" the open source way.... All of those companies together still don't have the power of MS in advertising and FUD and Lawyers... but they certainly have alot more then any one of them alone.. And its in their best interests,, the more people that know, the more copies they will sell... Also, it will benefit all of them because people who get a start on linux usually end up trying several different Distro's... I did it myself, Slackware, Caldera then Redhat and finally Mandrake, which I am sticking with... it does the job nicely, its easy to setup for the most part, and its as up to date or more so then the other distros... I still use windows sometimes, but I don't use it exclusively and will slowly phazing it out,,, for one thing, M$ will never get a cent out of me for XP... One last thought, if all the distros put more of a contribution (more time and programming expertise then money..) into WINE, and get it to the point that it can run nearly any software, (preferably even the ones that M$ has used their nasty tactics to make difficult...) Then windows wouldn't have a leg left to stand on... particularly if WINE became intelligent enough to run as a background process and detect win32 apps automagically... rgds Frank -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 10 September 2001 8:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [newbie] Open source hits back? i just read this article and i am incredible disturbed by what i read. Either this guy (the one who wrote this article) is unbelievable stupid or he's a paid MS crony. Basically, what he's suggesting is to bark back at the dog that barks at you. Figure that one out!! ---------------
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