This is a thoughtful response, Jef.
Do you think Sue will understand it?
--g
_____________________ ____________________________________________
Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent. the
Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the
] [ dumb. --mcluhan
On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 8/24/05, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > What do we have to say to her?
>
> Honestly.. I'll tell her that perhaps linux is not right for her...
> and to check out other for-pay linux distributions which include
> proprietary technology instead of being completely open source. Moving
> to completely open source solutions has an opportunity cost, you
> either value the benefits of open source over the costs or you
> don't... and that determination comes down to personal situations.
> I'd also tell her that crossing any operating system boundary has a
> portability price associated with. The price is higher when you
> crossing from proprietary to an open vendor. And while there are some
> technical solution which help.. there is no universal solution to the
> problem..either for proprietary binary portability or proprietary
> content portability.
>
> For binary portability...anyone walking into the process of 'major'
> operating system change certaintly needs to expect to have to stop
> using some binary applications that you were using in the previous
> operating system. While wine and winex do a good job at helping get
> access to some windows applications.. they are not universal
> solutions... just like virtualPC was never a perfect solution. I
> think point-blank statement about binary compatibility from windows to
> linux is a very sensible statement to make upfront and I think most
> people would find that sort of expectation adjustment reasonable.
>
> Whether or not wine or winex are helpful solution to this particular
> person's game problem is a matter of specifics. As for configuration
> of wine, until someone takes up the challenge again inside RedHat or
> Fedora to start integration work, its not going to get any easier for
> the average Fedora or RedHat user to configure wine. As to the
> anti-virus issue, without knowing the specific vendor there isn't much
> to say or discuss. Generally speaking, at some point the packaging
> standardization discussion that is on-going at fedora-packaging is
> going to have to expand to include proprietary software vendors who
> are trying to keep up.
>
> For proprietary content portability, things like attachments in
> proprietary formats..or web content such as flash or multimedia, there
> is some long term hope that open source can re-engineer open solutions
> as demand for access to this content grows, but such efforts are
> continually hampered by political and legal issues. This one is the
> really tough nut. Its completely rational to expect to be able to
> access your data regardless of what operating system its own..or to
> access content on the web regardless of your choice of browser or
> operating system...or hardware. That is every user's dream..every open
> source developers dream. But some intellectual property laws make it
> extremely difficult for the open source vendors to make this work
> widely available without risking a legal assault.
>
> There are only 3 ways to make this situation better.
> 1) RedHat stops being an open source solution provider and licences
> proprietary technology from other vendors. For every person that would
> like to see this happen there is another one who would be
> disappointed. This is a zero-sum game.
>
> 2) Technology vendors properly support and embrace the open source community,
> market share catch-22
>
> 3) Laws change so that open source developers and vendors can provide
> technical solutions without risk of lawsuits due to concerns such as
> software patents.
> When I run for US senate, I expect everyone in this community to be
> donating to my campaign.
>
>
> -jef
>
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