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Re: [LUG] today's meets and some observations etc.



Matt Lee wrote:



Debian makes it's intentions clear with that first paragraph from its website. It's not attempting to be "UserLinux" or "Linspire" or "Microsoft Windows Replacement" or "Mac OS X that's free" -- it's the GNU operating system, and the Linux kernel. Unlike most[1] other distros, it makes itself perfectly clear. It doesn't try and confuse the issue, by referring to "Linux" only, nor does it try to hide away from what GNU is, or where its philosophies lie. It's clearly, a free software operating system.


Neil was apparently under the impression that the things discussed on saturday would be over the head of windows users, my experience contradicts this, in my experience if you want to UTTERLY confuse a windows user then recursive acronyms, BSD licencing versus GPL, pick any distro from distrowatch vs pick any other distro, I could go on and on and on.

Linux in 2004, far more so than in the early days, and you only have to go to sites like slashdot for absolute proof of this, has a significant proportion of users / advocates / adverents / proponents that have managed to turn it into a priesthood or religious cult, where before you even start you must sit down and study the meaningless language in order to worship with the correct words and not cause a riot on the altar by using the wrong word for the wrong situation, like it or not, for most windows users joining the church of linux is about as appealing as being audited by the scientologists, studying dianetics and accepting the ultimate truth that el ron was right and aliens are in charge.

I don't care how much you dislike this statement, because it isn't a statement of opinion, but it is a statement of fact, and if you stop and think for a minute instead of just reacting you will see that it is true.

Windows has NONE of these sorts of issues, it is baby simple, you buy it or you warez it, either way you ignore the EULA, you install it and it looks feels and works the same across pretty much any x86 hardware, and any application software you want to install you have the same choice, buy it or warez it.

For people like the crediton guys this makes life dead simple, in a business enviornment they cannot be using warezed software, so, buy copy of windows server, buy copy of sql server with x clients, buy copy of visual studio 8, jobs a good un.
Note this whole process takes about 3 minutes online, very very very simple questions / decisions, simple pricing, simple to cost it out and factor that into their prices to their clients to buffer the profit margin.


Contrast this with Linux, where COMMERCIAL companies actual feel that there is COMMERCIAL need and demand to include LEGAL INDEMNITY COVER when selling something to other COMMERCIAL companies, so that Darl McBride cannot sue their asses off at some future date for using SCO owned code and this screwing up the profit and loss accounts for each job / client.

Just think about that, companies with large, retained and expert legal teams cannot definitively decide if an action is right or wrong, so they find an indemnity clause is actually a factor in making a sale!!!!

What hope does the home user have? (no good saying it doesn't apply, the home user doesn't know that, salmonella in eggs etc)

Case in point, is there or is there not a commerical licence for MySQL?
Clearly there is, https://order.mysql.com/?sub=vt&id=software
as I said correctly, without having signed a non disclosure and had sight of the crediton guys project, it is PURE speculation to say whether or not they should or should not pay the licence fee. My comments were made in the windows language, windows users like that, they can deal with it in 10 seconds, these guys can sit down with their project manager and when asked the question say
"Worst case scenario financially is a 500 Euro per server licence, which is unlimited connections, which makes it cheaper than MS SQL server. Best case scenario is it is free"


That last word will generate a discussion amongst the linux nerds about "ah yes, but free as is speech or free as in beer" and bang, you just lost another convert, I have seen this happen _________so_________ often you wouldn't believe it.

Home users similarly mostly couldn't care less whether their copy of linux is free or warezed, if it doesn't "phone home" (which they will know because you say, in plain english, no this software doesn't phone home unless you tell it to) who cares, not them, they are won over by the fact that the GUI is close enough they can work it out, the odd prompt, Kmail is like outlook, but better, they are converted by things like
little johnny cannot destroy the OS
no more viruses so no hard choices every day about virus scanner active or fast computer
no defragmenting
no spyware or trojans
feels faster than windows on any given box
most of all they want to be told that no matter what aunt sue in australia uses, they can share documents, digital pictures, johnnys schoolwork, etc


you know what they don't care about (and yes I know linux isn't immune to malware, but windows users dont care about the fine detail) what they dont care about is linux much vaunted reliability, because xp is pretty stable (minus malware and magazien cover disk crapware) and they turn their computers off all the time anyway.

you want to know something, windows users will even accept an use a linux that is inferior to windows, JUST because it is free and legal and dispels minor worries about the law, in fact the huge irony is the ONLY guaranteed turn off is the very thing a large proportion of linux users are keenest to do, insist on communicating only in high latin.


I like Debian. For me, Debian makes me feel warm and fuzzy, because I am someone who outside of computing, makes media stuff. My little would-be-dotcom-organisation, plods along happily doing what its always done, which is to make media for the web, TV and radio. However, at the moment, I work as a developer... for me, software freedom is important, and Debian offers me that in a way that nothing else does. It's far from perfect, and I find myself finding things wrong with it quite often, but it's the best we've got, I believe.


I'll make it plain.

You can do one of two things in the world, you can act so that things generally get a bit better for your passing, or you can act so things generally get a bit worse.

In the mists of time, some monkeys moved from grunts to the rudiments of language, this alone allowed everything from "me friend" through "food over there" to extinction of the mammoths and human population spreading over the globe.

pretty recently there came hardcopy language, you could read how your grandfather dealt with a wheat blight, except the ability to read and write was strictly controlled, as was access to printed material, until very very recently the printing press and illicit copies of the holy bible translated into plain english, everything that has come since from Apollo 11 on down is inextricably rooted in that.

very very very recently there came tcp/ip, in this day the "scribes" were the media companies and giovernments themselves, note well that 1984 was written at the end of the second age and just before tcp/ip

tcp/ip is undeniably going to have far greater effects on human society and culture than the written word or hardcopy print or broadcast media.

quick side trip here prompted by the apollo reference about why is it SOOOOOO F********* IMPORTANT to do things right now.

The US Space shuttle design and size was absolutely limited by the size of the strap on solid boosters.
The plant that was able to make these boosters was a long way from the vehicle assembly and launch site, and the boosters were too big and dangerous to transport by road, so they went by rail, unfortunatley there is a mountain range in the way, so the track goes through a tunnel, so the maximum size of the boosters is limited by the size of the tunnel.
The size of the tunnel is denoted by the size of the railway track gauge, which of course came from old blighty (pity brunel's wide gauge was killed off for short term commerical and political aims... wide gauge doesn't tip when it derails to hatfield and london train accidents would have been far less deadly) where we used 4 foot 8 and a half inches.
We used 56.5 inches for the same reason we use £, tradition, from the Romans, it was the width of a roman cart wheels.
The Romans came up with that dimension because it was about right for a cart pulled by two horses.


So there you have it, the space shuttle, a technological marvel of the late 20th century, was design limited by the width of a roman horse's ass 2000 years ago.

so lets skip back to today

the GUI is the OS to most people, so what is the FUNDAMENTAL difference between windows and linux?

how many of you thought "The Registry"

Windows registry is like soviet russia, there are no street signs because if you don't know where you are going you have no business going there.

Windows registry serves one purpose and one purpose only, DRM or digital rights management, it makes commerical software possible.
On the old acorn (Simon will know this from Nova / Xara / Computer Concepts days) you could take an excellnt application and simply copy the installed folder off a hard disk to another acorn and it worked, no registry, commerical software developers are NOT going to invest big in something as easily copied as that.
Incidentally the old acorn riscos 3.x had gui features that windows xp STILL doesn't have, survival of the fittest does NOT apply to computer software, linux advocates take note


Microsoft became a huge success BECAUSE it got into bed with software companies to help them protect their investments, DRM.

This is spreading to EVERYTHING digital, which means it is spreading to EVERYTHING.
If I edit my home movies ripped from cine via vhs to digital in windows movie maker I face serious issues getting those movies to play on my brothers computer, just so time warner sony etc can have DRM for Rocky 27
(The irony being that "hollywood" only moved the movie industry there away from new york to escape patent licencing issues, edison etc)


Debian in particular, and uniquely, is the furthest away from this and the closent thing to the common ability to speak or to write that we have all shared for hundreds of years now. Debian is the closent thing in software to the legal relationship I enjoy to the hardware that I own that it runs on.
Debian is the only distro that cannot go commerical and drm incorporated because it is the only one that is owned by everyone equally, like the ability to speak and write.


Mepis and Knoppix ARE debian testing when installed to hard disk, in windows terms each has very slightly different "themes" and very slightly different bundled application lists, but they are as close as twin brothers. Mepis and Knoppix are the 2004 equivalent of that old mass printed and translated into plain english holy bible.

If that holy bible had been crushed, and it could have been, we would be living in an unrecognisable world today.

Now is not then, a knife will cut both ways, modern governments and corporations have far more power than ever at any time in the past, because information is power and this is the digital age, this "rights" battle that we are seeing now is no different and no less important than the state and church vs pirate bible printing operations back then.

Both Microsoft and Debian are transient, perhaps not ten years but 50 and certainly both will be in the realms of the altair, intel 8008, pong and punched cards, its not about that and never has been, it is about digital rights and always has been and always will be unless we manage to reach critical mass before they do, and Warren and Klaus are the people we should be singing praises to, not Linus or RMS.

The whole high latin linux geek speak thing, the whole microkernel vs macrokernel (for what it's worth my money is firmly on microkernel being as dead a duck as the 16 bit mx stuff) things, the whole GNU IS NOT UNIX is not unix recursive acronym thing and gpl vs bsd thing and all the other crap is just that, knowing your present for past participles is good, as is knowing a simile from a metaphor, but neither is essential and neither is included in "A is for Apple"

Oxbridge dons discussing the finer points of the english language, precise nuances and roots, whether things are worthy of inclusion in the next volume of the complete dictionary are NOT influencing the language, they are NOT at the helm, they are NOT influencing it in anyway, they are merely recording the changes that are happening at the grass roots level, post natal.

Deep geekdom is hacking microkernel is the above, sure, do it because you enjoy it or are paid for it or just for kicks or a challenge, but if youre going to live and breathe it in the high priesthood you aren't going to be advancing the church or religion, the bishop might robe himself in fine raiment but the parishioner running the soup kitchen is the one enhancing the church.


Today was about enlightenment for a lot of people, I believe. It wasn't about trying to convert people who use Windows or proprietary software to use Debian,

that's where we differ.


the crediton guys work for lawyers, there was mention of a thousand clients, lets say ten lawyers per client, my god, imaging being able to expose TEN THOUSAND lawyers to Debian, all those memes being absorbed, sure as hell their ears will perk up next time words like "European Intellectual Property and Digial Rights Management" are uttered, or blunkett twitches, etc

man, 10,000 lawyers is worth more than doing a bernie ecclestone or dressing up as batman or burning your bra.

it was more about showing what Debian is about, and what can be achieved with free software. GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd, it doesn't matter, the goal is still the same.

I enjoyed Kai's talk on web applications, I just wish we could have convinced more people that free software is the way to go.

you won't, ever, until you decide to speak their language, african missionaries who only speak high latin ended up in the pot innit



I think we should put materials on the site to help people understand why GNU/Linux is good for them. We need to preset freedom in a way that's clear, and we need to understand that what we need to succeed.


no, you need it installed on as many computers as possible and marketed as virally as possible so ongoing infection rates can reach pandemic proportions as soon as possible, you do not want to make the vectors of infection as difficult as possible, eg you can only get infected if you speak high latin fluently.... a mepis / knoppix hard disk install and a live cd for them to take away is the way to go.

when they come BACK a few weeks later you can give them a english to high latin dictionary and sit down and show them the shell and kernel hacking.

cheers

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