Quoting Alexander Maryanovsky, from the post of Wed, 08 Jan: > 1. The "Ila" guy seemed to misunderstand the whole "use Linux in > govt." proposition. This has been discussed a lot, but worth > repeating: His argument was that if Linux is good, it should compete > and win based on that, and not on a law. This is all well and nice for > private organizations and people, but for the government, one of the > *features* of Linux and OSS is their openness and auditability.
DO keep in mind that forcing one family of products over another is against the freedom of choice and locks out good software from good vendors that does not always have usable or scalable OSS alternatives. FREEDOM OF CHOICE, is a basic right demanded by Free Software proponents. it's quite rediculous to demand people to choose it. what you SHOULD demand by law are open STANDARDS of data exchange and retrieval, be it database access or document formats. if the government office offers a free Email service on MAPI instead of POP3, or more likely - publishes info on an MSIE-only website, it's a problem. if they serve good HTML from IIS I could not care less, since it doesn't hurt MY freedom of chioce as a civilian, how to get the information and use it, as long as I can get and interpret it. > > Especially disappointing was Moshe Bar's lecture. I've only heard > about him until now, but since he teaches the "OS design" class in TAU > (which I'm going to have to take for my degree), I assumed he's more > knowledgeable that that. Of course, it could also be that I'm the > ignorant and uninformed one, in which case, I'm sure you folks will be > happy to put me in place :-) in my summery I tried to go very light on him, but he did have some extremely odd major mistakes. all who listened in my row agreed it fealt like the guy is totally in a fog as to what the movements and ideals of the group are. MB, here's some homework: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html > 2. Nobody is making money from selling Free software? This may be true > per se, but it's a very bad statement. There are many companies who > are making money *developing* Free software, so who cares if they're and proof was Zend and a few others. I agree they don't make their bread ONLY from OSS. Red Hat are not "in the black" AFAIK either. it WAS a problematic statement, and dangerously inclusive. Trolltech may indeed be the only example I can think of now. > 3. Linux is Open Source? FreeBSD is Free Software? Am I missing > something here? Last I checked, Linux was GPL and FreeBSD was BSD, > making Linux Free Software and FreeBSD OSS. I would've believed it was > an honest mistake, unless he repeated it (in various forms) so many > times. The "Zend" guy seemed much more proficient regarding the > GPL/LGPL/BSD than Moshe Bar... there I agree is a complete salad. MB repeated several times sentences that refer to OS and FS as two parallel non-overlapping things, and that's rediculous. see the nice graph at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html > > 4. OpenOffice a fork from last available open version of StarOffice? > I'm not 100% sure that it's not true, but AFAIK more than half of the > people working on OO are Sun's people. From what I understand, > StarOffice is just OpenOffice with various useful add-ons... Am I > wrong? you're not. openoffice.org IS a project supported and funded by sun. they are the copyright holders and they use that fact to publish the closed Star Office. same as Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project. >5. The Theodore Ts'o lecture was of course much better, but too >business oriented for me. I would've preferred to hear about Linux >kernel development, relationships between the main developers, perhaps >his stand on the BitKeeper issue, etc. Not his fault of course... this >is what he's been asked to talk about by IBM. they payed the trip, hotel and salary, come on :) but that was the reason for the Q&A at the end, and I think that he would have been happier to be bugged at lunch time by questions about the kernel rather than about Gimp. it was pathetic :( > Alexander (aka Sasha) Maryanovsky. Ira (aka "seriously? he's NOT a russian girl?") Abramov -- Keep refrigerated after opening Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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