On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 00:19, Ken Foskey wrote: > I was very disappointed with the responses to the two articles. > Take a look at how we sell our message...
*Yawn* Another story about how Linux is/isn't the next big thing, I think the media trundles these out about 3 months apart alternating between it is and it isn't. I'm all for Linux advocacy, I just wish I had more time to pursue it. I notice "free" gets a good bashing in these articles. The air I breath is "free" and it is most certainly worth far more then I payed for it... Dismissing any "free" software because of the price seems rather small minded. Every piece of free software has had at least one person spend some of their time creating it. Chances are that person spent their time designing, coding, testing, re-coding, documenting and then finding a method of distribution so that others could benefit from their effort. Of course for the larger projects those actively involved at one point or another stretches to the thousands. To belittle free software is to ignore the efforts of so many donated for free. I'm sure nearly all the people who have been aided by the State Emergency Service, or the Bush Fire Brigade, or the Volunteer Surf Life Savers (Do they still exist?) will tell anyone that asks them that these volunteers are priceless. So dollar for dollar, Linux R&D can't compete, developer hour for developer hour (and the tester hours and documenter hours and translation hours and ...) I don't think the case for the commercials is so clear cut. If the media every comes to the realization that libraries are not bookstores (among other things), perhaps we will see more enlightened coverage regarding the futures of commercial and free software. In the mean time I won't be holding my breath (I'll be breathing my free air) and I'll certainly be spending more time advocating Linux then reading tired old rehashed "news". Cheers, Malcolm V. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
