Re: [tlug] How to Push Linux! .......................

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Lyle" == Lyle Saxon <Lyle> writes:

    Lyle> Yes I have.  Now those W-users... you should talk to them!

No, I shouldn't.  I have a tendency to be overwhelming---surely you're
aware of that!, and that's just going to turn them off, don't you see?

Now, if they already know I'm overwhelming (arrogant, efficient,
irritating, unanswerable, choose your vowel, or 3 for a quarter), and
I *just listen* to them and at most make a quiet suggestion or two,
that will be a lot more effective.

    Lyle> It's probably an impossible hope, but I would hope the
    Lyle> situation could be changed somehow.  At least the people
    Lyle> I've talked to can no longer say that they have never heard
    Lyle> of Linux.

That's a very big step, no doubt about it.  Getting past awareness to
interest is going to require marketing, though.

    Lyle> Were MS not a threat (in an illegal and insidious way) to
    Lyle> honest companies and organizations, I wouldn't worry about
    Lyle> it, but it is, and I do.

Oh, c'mon.  You live in Japan where something as simple as the eikaiwa
industry is rife with fraud and sharp practices, where the whole
construction industry is a house of bribes ready to fall at the
mildest shake, where a politician convicted of accepting bribes from
foreign agents is now rehabilitated as an expert on foreign policy.

Some of our best friends work for a company that has aggressively
asserted a really trivial but useful software patent, and the
organization that provides more information to more people has agreed
to censor over 1 billion people for improved geographical location for
a few of their servers.

MS is a big threat and some of their practices are arguably illegal,
but freedom is under attack from all sides.

    Lyle> Much more than being anti-MS products, I'm anti-MS, because
    Lyle> they are bunch of dirty rotten scoundrels!

How about Josh and Mauro, who work for Amazon, and Guido van Rossum
(Python), who now works for Google?  Are they dirty and rotten too?
Or even folks like Simon Peyton-Jones (leading Haskell developer and
authority on functional programming), who now works at Microsoft
Research.  (Can you spell "this century's Bell Telephone Laboratories,
with more Nobel Prizewinners than the entire country of Japan"?  It
could happen; I suspect Bill Gates has such philanthropic ambitions to
go along with his industrial ones.  Cf. the source of my advanced
degrees, Stanford, and Carnegie-Mellon U.)

You're welcome to your opinion about Microsoft, and it would be nice
if something could be done about Microsoft's aggressive behavior.  But
I'm afraid aggressive, "gray-area"[1] business practices will be with
us always.

Broken software, on the other hand, can be made irrelevant by
something better.

    Lyle> Again - I strongly feel that the real issue here is one of
    Lyle> needing to stop an illegal company from dominating our
    Lyle> lives.  Whether their products work or not isn't even the
    Lyle> issue.... well... not the main issue.

The problem is that their products *do* work, and that for most of the
market they work *well*.  If that weren't true, they wouldn't be a
threat as currently constituted.  Of course the threat is that they
can use their position to undermine potential competition in some ways
that are probably antitrust violations, and in others that have the
effect of detracting from the value of their product to customers (by
preventing use of improved add-ons from third parties).  But in the
long run the only way to eliminate this threat is to provide a product
that customers can turn to as an alternative.

    Lyle> Tyranny must be opposed!  The longer people wait to stop it,
    Lyle> the more difficult becomes the task.

Sure!  But there are legitimate issues to be debated about what kind
of opposition is going to be effective, and what to do about the
livelihoods of the nice people who work for the bullies.


Footnotes: 
[1]  This includes RGB:x/x/x for 0.0 < x < 1.0. ;-)

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.