If It Works For SuSE and Red Hat...

...why not for Microsoft?

SuSE Linux and Red Hat both have open source versions of the OS for people to use. Now the idea as I see it is that the Linux community will either download OpenSuSE (SuSE Linux) or Fedora (Red Hat). The distro is installed and all the bugs are found by the user community and the finished product is released as the Enterprise version that businesses purchase.

"El Gee, MS already does that with Release Candidates (RC). The user community tests the software and the bug reports are given to MS and they fix them before the product is released." I know that, but you are comparing apples to oranges. In the two Linux flavors mentioned previously, you can continue using he code and even tweak it if you so desire. With MS, you are not allowed to tweak the code and the RC times out eventually. I can continue using Fedora Core 5 for example for as long as I want, although support for that specific distro would not be offered. I would have to hack together all my own support. With MS, you are borrowing it..."Free as in Beer" as they say. IIANM, the code for Linux is "free as in speech".

Why doesn't MS do what SuSE and Red Hat are doing? "El Gee, they sell their software, they cannot give it away..." SuSE and RH sell theirs as well, it is the open source version they give away. MS could make a lot more friends in this world if they did that. The release "Open Windows" or whatever and let the open source community play with it. Let them tweak it. Let them find the bugs, LET US KEEP THE SOFTWARE. When you get it fine tuned, box it up and sell it to corporations. If you want to put it in stores, so be it. Make a little money for your trouble ($50-75) on each CD you sell or offer it for download on the 'net free.

As you can tell, I am a fan of open source. I think it is the future. Eventually the OS's will be either free or very cheap and the support will be what you pay for. That is okay...there is nothing wrong with that.

Another issue is standards. There are a lot of open standards that get used but MS finds the need to make their own in the guise that it is better for consumers. It is only better for MS because the open source community has to hack something together to get the proprietary formats to work. we do not need asf, asx, wmv, etc. Ogg, and mpg work just fine.

The open document format is xml based and should be the defacto standard the world uses...not doc, ppt, xls. mbox files to hold mail, not unstable pst's that can only be opened with Outlook. If your products are so darn superior, then make them read open standards and SHOW us how superior your products are. I can bet you that if the open document format was a standard sales of MS Office would PLUMMET. the big reason people buy office is because the doc/xls/ppt formats are used everywhere, thanks to guerrilla marketing by MS. Yes people are hooked on Outlook, but Thunderbird with a few extensions can do what it does or you can just use Evolution. So there, you have a full office suite with free software if the world had a formal OPEN document standard that everyone used. Then if people wanted to buy MS Office for features, so be it. For me, I would stick with Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird and I would have a lot less problems.

Makes Sense To Me

Corel Office to start supporting the OpenDocument format. Wow, what a concept. Okay Microsoft, your turn. it is a standard used by 11 million + people and will continue to increase. MS supporting this is a way for my dream to come true. Create a document in one program and have the ability to open/edit it in a number of others or even in a different OS. We can do that with jpg, txt, csv and many other formats...why must the single most used productivity formats be proprietary? MS still would make a ton of money from corporations that will keep using the standardized MS software, but more and more people will be able to share documents no matter what office software or OS created it.

Smart move, Corel. All we need to do now is have MS embrace this so we will be more unified in our standards.

Free, As In Beer.

Knightmare had a pretty good post on his blog the other day and it really made me think. I understand his concern about Linux "zealots" (we call them 'fanboys' here) and share it to some degree. However he has made a statement that I do not agree with and it may be semantics so if it is please forgive me.

He mentions the labeling of things as 'non-free' and it appears that his bothers him. The word 'free' in the software world has several meanings and when we are talking about 'open source' software and GPL software, people have to be careful how the term is used. I know be cause I have been corrected on this myself.

When a company offers you software for free, it is free as in "free beer". What I mean by that is you can consume all you want and the person who gives you the free beer can cut you off whenever they like, so you enjoy it while you can. Many pieces of software are handled this way to get people interested in it. 'Freeware' as we are used to seeing it in the Windows world is usually this. Adobe Reader as an example is 'freeware'.

Now the 'free' that the Linux community (the GPL people specifically) is concerned with is "gratis", free as in 'free speech'. It is given without any strings attached. You can include it in distributions, decompile it, alter it and in some cases, sell it. Now if we use Adobe Reader as an example as we did earlier, we cannot: decompile it, alter it, or sell it at all. Adobe holds the copyrights to it. Evince, for example is 'gratis', do with it what you please.

Now the Linux purists are upset that certain companies will not release source code to drivers. The reason they are upset is that they think that certain softwares should be free. The OS and hardware drivers are core for this and the purists think this should be made available to them. If they want to stop offering their support for Ubuntu, then so be it. Ubuntu is trying to bring Linux to the masses and if that means using 'free' (as in beer) drivers, I do not mind. It will make certain things easier on all of us. However I stand by the choice to used the language 'free' and' non-free'. It tells me a lot about the software I am using To be fair, most Debian distros have repositories for this. They usually will give you the disclaimer that the software will not always be 100% free to use any way you want, but if you are just installing it and have no plans on recompiling or repackaging it.


Another area that we have to be careful in is copyright infringement. Micorsoft I am sure pays royalties to include the codecs and drivers they bundle with Windows. If a company does not pay these royalties, then they cannot legally package them with their product. One interesting news item that comes to mind is Microsoft and Adobe. For the past several years, many freeware utilities offered the ability to export to pdf format. Mind you they could not allow editing of the pdf's, but they could offer the ability to export because they were not charging for that and if they did, they were paying royalties to Adobe. MS Office has never had the ability export to pdf because they refused to pay Adobe royalties and they also wanted to have the ability to edit the pdf's. That has changed somewhat with Office 2007, which now offers a free download to allow you to save your word docs as pdf's. Way to go Microsoft! You finally caught up to the rest of the world.

Also, ever wonder why you find freeware to edit a pdf file DIRECTLY? That is because Adobe has a patent on that. If you want to edit a pdf, you have to export it to an editor make the changes and export it back. Hmmm double exporting...I wonder how much of the original formatting is lost... :-)

Yep, Knightmare has really dug in with his testing and I am proud of him. With a little more research he will be a good person to go to with basic Linux questions. He has already answered some of mine regarding issues that I have never delved into, so when when I am ready to dive into those areas, his blog will be used as a resource.

Thanx, Duck.

Free Your Mind

And the rest will follow...

On a suggestion from Knighmare, I installed VYM (View Your Mind) mind mapping software on my work Linux desktop (which is a rogue, so I am just 'testing' this ... snicker) and I see the value in it. While my mind map is not as cool looking as his (I guess that says something...), it will help me track getting a Linux machine up and running from scratch.

It has a feature that is nice: It exports to ASCII. It takes the image and coverts it to text clockwise. That is a neat feature.

This is only a couple of minutes worth of scribbling...but you get the idea.

Thanx Knightmare.

BtW, the version for Windows does not work, so I am going to try Free Mind on my work machine. There is a version of FreeMind (Java) for Linux here. Has more features than tVYM, but it is Java, so it is slower. I had some dependency issues, but I finally got it to work.