Bam, leaping into the fray without reading ALL the thread to date ...
The idea that OOo will do unless you really need to spend money on
Office, or that the only reason you'd stick Linux on a PC is to avoid
the MS "tax" (often as little as about £20 on mass produced machines),
does nothing to promote FOSS. It's been possible to buy cheap Linux PCs
for ages, almost always as a way to keep the cost down; if there is the
opportunity for buyers to give feedback it'll be littered with "really
good cheap PC, wiped Linux and installed XP no problem". We risk
positioning Linux and FOSS in general as "great if you can't afford MS
stuff" which is ludicrous when you think about it, and there are plenty
of examples of Linux/FOSS being chosen for non-financial reasons
(Apache/PHP/Firefox/etc).
Has someone actually mentioned yet that cost of support of linux/unix
machines can be higher then support of microsoft (possibly due to
availibility).
Also, the problem is that its very hard to compare the two systems - Windows
can run as fast if not faster then linux if run by a decent system
administrator, however the default install of windows is a long way away
from that efficient beast, which gives an unfair perspective to many users.
The idea that windows is insecure often comes from the same people who are
using it under administrator accounts, often with read write access to the
entire hard drive. A linux person who sets everything to +777 would be
laughed at continously, the same for someone who logs in as root all the
time (and yes Im aware of many peices of software which have been programed
wrong so they have to run as administrator - that dosnt make it right, it
makes it very very wrong, and it shows that the programmer probably hacked
it together for their personal use first then didnt think about what it was
being done with).
But there are plenty of examples where Linux/FOSS falls short, and where
they exist the only people we can blame is ourselves, so if we can find
a project we can contribute to we should - I think we'd gain a lot from
it.
Non freedom/open source software can solve distinct problems by throwing
resources at it. Look at the main successes of FOSS and you see commonly
used applications, such as web servers, mail servers and even compilers. Its
the low number of used programs on the fringes which are not supported very
well - things like warehouse managment, barcode readers etc, and its these
outer strands which companies pay lots of money for, and therefore want to
keep their investment, so dont make it foss.
Money can solve problems - you pay a good engineer a decent wage and give
him a good working environment and he will solve problems more efficiently
then a volunteer worker [not that FOSS is all volunteer- far from it].
The other idea that Windows means non-foss is daft. I've been running a
mysql server, php, perl, mono, eclipse, you name it on a windows machine for
years. Hell, I even use Gimp and Thunderbird. At work, we've uses FFMPEG
libraries in our c# application to convert mms vidoes on the fly to flv's.
We've even used zedgraph libraies to generate statistic graphs nicely.
Well thats my tuppence.
JT
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