Linux: Fighting the FUD of Forking 261
sebFlyte writes "Fighting the MS FUD machine is a full time job for some open source developers, especially now Microsoft have thrown in the issue of the possibility of Linux forking (as Unix did)... it would also seem that Gates has moved on from telling people to 'get the facts' and creating FUD around patents and IP to criticising the open source communty's ability to create interoperable software."
That's rich... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:That's rich... (Score:5, Informative)
Interoperable Software - Not Created by MS (Score:1, Informative)
Apple and Convergent had IS first, about the same time as Digital's 'All in One' office suite, when all MS had was DOS!
OSS is getting better. FireFox and Samba demonstrate this. And at least these interoperate with the OS, without bypassing the OS security model.
Re:Linux distros *are* forking (Score:3, Informative)
Since when is forking a bad thing? (Score:3, Informative)
In IT though maintaining many microlines is viewed as a bad thing, unlike with biological life where things maintain themsleves. This is where the FUD really is. But one should realize that it need not be a big concern if the developers take that concern into account. An example of how to mitigate this is to use XML for settings. Any microline specific sub-tree of settings need not interfere and is only used by the microline.
HOWEVER this is an area where OSS has been deficient. Backwards-compatibility is not a highlight of OSS. OSS has gotten better, but even as recently as a year ago it was the policy of Mozilla to have the user manually do a uninstall before an upgrade. Such annoyances contribute to the magnitude of fear. What is more, backwards compatiblity policies vary from project to project. I do expect this to get better, and it has notten a lot better.
the difference between MS/Unix and Linux/OSS is... (Score:3, Informative)
And programs like Apache, OpenSSL, OpenSSH and others are based on standards.
On the other hand when Microsoft and other propriatory software vendors make forks, they are often incompatible by design.
Re:Just like politics (Score:3, Informative)
pick one (use any criteria you desire), learn it.
Pick another one, learn the differences.
Try a third, more difficult distro (pick gentoo)
learn it inside and out.
Give yourself a long break from Windows (a month should do it) now go back to Windows and hate it properly.
Then never ever ever again ask What is the best distro..... as the answer will always be Gentoo anyway (ok ignore that last bit
Re:Just like politics (Score:1, Informative)
The majority of Open Source and Free Software is written either because the developer enjoys doing it, in which case they couldn't give a shit if someone else uses their work, or because they're truly being altruistic and believe in Free software, in which case they couldn't give a shit if someone else uses their work. See a pattern?
If you're writing Open Source or Free software for some other reason then you're doing it wrong. If you're going to freak out about someone else "stealing" your work then you've totally missed the point and should probably just sit quietly in the corner until you get it. Of course I bet you have no problems downloading all that free work from someone else to use in the creation of your masterpeice, do you?
Interoperability, feh! (Score:1, Informative)
1. Each new version of Windows breaks some applications. Discussions about how much effort Microsoft puts into being compatible with older products only have relevance to you if you are a multi-million $ consumer of Microsoft products. Everyone else just sucks up the cost of many application upgrades whenever another version of Windows comes out!
2. Microsoft's own products don't interoperate well. Flame me if you must, but I have personally experienced the difficulties of working with Word documents from one version of Office to the next. And I went through one interation of the Basic macro programming language in Office that caused me to scrap every damned macro I wrote and do it again from scratch (there may have been more than one, but I didn't ever consider it again so it wasn't my problem anymore).
3. Microsoft always feels free to hijack existing standards to create their own, proprietary standard that they refuse to release any details on to deliberately keep people from interoperating with them. The recent hijacking of Kerberos authentication protocols is one example of this.
Microsoft made a deliberate choice of not supporting interoperability. They love the "churn" that they cause in the market. As long as everyone is busy fixing their applications to run with the newest version of Windows, discovering and then implementing their newest version of a hijacked standard and upgrading/reinstalling new applications nobody ever has the time/energy to devote to any real innovation in the market. The more Microsoft ties up everybody else's resources, the less that Microsoft has to worry about any real competition.
I find it kind of hypocritical for Bill Gates to accuse others of not being "interoperable".
Re:Just like politics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just like politics (Score:2, Informative)
I would agree that you should get your hands on Fedora. (And one day you'll end up on Gentoo). In the install screen you'll want to install Apache, PHP and mySQL and install that. (...and before you get to that screen, whatever it proposes for drive partition is probably fine, in linux you need to define the amount of space for memory to overflow to) - A quick Google found this guys guide: http://www.johnmunsch.com/articles/FedoraCoreGett
Those crazy Linux commands can be dificult to learn, though powerfull. Are you going to be near this box a lot? If not it might help you to learn more about VNC and use the GUI interface remotely over the network - it functions like Remote Desktop.
Lastly, it's not really forking. At the moment their just diffrent implementations of the same standards. The linux distros are closer together on 'the linux standard' than Netscape and IE were on HTML.
Re:I thought only BSD has forks... (Score:3, Informative)
That's a daemon, damnit!