[ale] OS advocacy (was Re: [ale] AOL sues Microsoft)

[jeff hubbs]

> Yeah, there's been a lot of pain.  A lot of time I've spent trying to 
> figure out how to make it work, when I could have just fallen back to 
> the pre-install Windows that once had graced my corporate laptop.
> 
> Have I made a difference?  I don't know, but there is now a Linux vpn 
> client for our corporate vpn and I'm running my vpn through a little box 
> that is provided by the corporation and is a firewall/router that's 
> running Linux.  I never thought I'd see the day, truly.
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I still have to fire up vmware/windows to view some 
> word docs, because they aren't properly formatted by anything I've found 
> on Linux.  But, I'm not going to just give in.  I am so much more 
> productive now that I've got a real operating system to work with.  So 
> the initial pain was worth it.

I can very much relate to this.  At my last employer, I was the ONLY 
person using Linux as their primary desktop system and I eventually 
accrued the "rep" of being THE person you could go to with a niggly yet 
showstopping problem and get it fixed.  I overheard some people in the 
training department having trouble with converting .wav files to MP3 - 
the result "sounded bad" (too much aliasing).  I said, can you share 
them out for me - I'll see what I can do, and an application of notlame 
later, I had great results for them.  Someone came to me with a bunch of 
brochure pages in PDF needing them rearranged.  At the time, I didn't 
know the first thing about how to do it, but lo and behold, I found the 
tools and did the job!

I had a few hundred scanned photo images; I needed to get them on an 
intranet Web server so people could see them.  I looked up some stuff on 
Freshmeat and found a script that took a pile of image files and made a 
Web page of thumbnails - you could click on one to see the whole picture 
- all set and ready to drop into Apache doc space.  If I knew bash or 
perl real well - and even though I don't right this second, I know that 
I *could* - there's no telling what all little tricks I could accomplish.

And I won't even go into the time some people on the ALE list helped my 
write a bash script that went through a directory tree cutting the 
semicolon and trailing numbers off of the names of thousands of files 
that had come from a VMS system.

GNU/Linux and all the software tools that have grown up around it appear 
to have been created by people who need and want to *get things done* 
without a whole lot of drama or sugarcoating.  Linux rewards commitment 
and hard work.  In Windows-world, you can only take things so far, and 
as I came to understand, you're only *intended* to take things so far.

Think of the MS Knowledge base.  I was once very dependent on it and I 
was frustrated by the degree to which it was a one-way exercise - words 
from the "cathedral."  None of the "papal edicts," if there were one 
that fit your situation, could be questioned or delved into deeper 
(although I loved the one - if they still have it - that talks about how 
to remove Linux from your system in favor of Windows that winds up 
reading like an ad for Linux - "Linux understands 45 different 
filesystem types whereas NT understands only three").

In IT, being able to address any problem and get to any Point B from 
whatever Point A you happen to be at is, IMHO, REAL power.  Linux 
facilitates that; Windows falls way short.  And, as I've said time and 
time again, I'm not some AIX/Ultrix/Digital Unix/HPUX/IRIX greybeard; I 
never spent any significant time on a Unix-like machine until 1998. 
Prior to that, I was almost all NT and VMS.

You have to also understand that, having started out professionally with 
VMS, I found working with Linux to be much more like working with VMS 
than working with NT.  NT was conceived, I believe, for noble reasons 
and lofty goals, but it became a cog in MS's unstoppable machine.


Bit of a subject change:  just like in physics where interactions and 
behaviors follow a certain set of rules until your masses, distances, or 
velocities get too high or too low and those rules break down, I think 
there's a similar "physics" of commerce where supply/demand, etc. don't 
ring true anymore when companies and governments get too powerful. 
Because of this, I don't think it's right to look at MS' monopoly 
position and conclude "the market has spoken."  Some kind of power 
threshold got crossed such that MS was in a position to gag and/or 
"puppet" the so-called "market."

- Jeff




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