Posted on 08/18/2003 3:05:07 PM PDT by yhwhsman
I guess you're right. If you don't mind having to ask your customers to donate to your legal fund every so often.
The Linux market doesn't give a damn what the government wants...
That may change when they step into a US Federal Court soon.
The government isn't funding an operating system, it is buying a seat in the market of an existing and well-established operating system so that it can participate in that market for its own ends...
This link is from 2001, but according to the NSA website today, this version of Linux quote "is not an attempt to correct any flaws that may currently exist in Linux". Sounds like nothing more than fooling around with it, what they most certainly do to all operating systems.
For how long a period did you use linux before reaching this conclusion?
Bingo! This is exactly why I had to go with Mandrake 9.1, and its XFree86 v4.3.0 w/ support for my Radeon 9000. However, I have been very disappointed with Mandrake. I may try the 9.2 release candidate, RC2, but I'm not sure. They also seem to put things in non-standard places, which made me have to do a lot of extra work on a few open source projects I was interested in. It has been a few months since I looked at this, so I can't recall the details.
SuSE claims that SuSE 8.2 supports the later Radeon cards, so I will probably try it out. You can see that about halfway down this page, and I thought that they had a list of all supported hardware, but I can not immediately find it. I think Redhat has a similiar facility for supported hardware. Redhat is typically not on the cutting edge of driver support, and similiarly use more stable/older versions of things like XFree86, etc.
I don't know anything about Gentoo, but I do know that BSD is the most secure OS out there. Certainly, if you have the time and patience, try them all!!!
I used to dual boot, but I'm more comfortable running Linux on the machine I build recently (dual Athlon CPUs, mucho RAM, big disk, etc), and run Win2000 on an 8 year old 233 MHz Pentium, which is perfectly happy, even though it is probably worth about $50, and also serves as a router for my home LAN.
It isn't that hard to do any of them. How do you get on in the world?
Even if some company was able to make Linux useful for the masses, the hackers would then target it for worms and virus.
Yes and no. You might see more exploits in Linux, but many of the virus/worm problems in Windows use "features" of Windows that have no real equivalent in Linux or any other operating system. Most other operating systems don't do things the way Windows does them for a good reason, and Windows does them for backward compatibility. The fact that a rather large percentage of all routable net connected systems run Linux means that you would expect to see a fair number of worms that affect Linux systems, but you don't in practice.
In the short term, Linux has a good future as a web server operating system.
Understatement of the year. It has kind of become the de facto server operating system for just about everything already. It scales very well these days and all the big enterprise software runs on it, and runs on it quite well. I see many companies routinely running mission-critical enterprise database systems on it.
I agree that it isn't coming to the desktop any time soon in a big way, but it is also apparent that you aren't entirely familiar with the current state of the art in that domain. The Linux desktop has become very slick, a little worse than Windows in some areas, and a little better than Windows in others. The desktops where you do see it taking over is in engineering departments. Lots of engineering departments either have already converted over or are in the process of it. Lots of upside, precious little downside.
I don't use Linux myself, but every-damn-body is using it for servers at the companies I work with. And while it isn't used everywhere yet, I've watched it slowly take over the server rooms over the last few years. It IS a solid server OS; my gripes are nitpicky Unix-vs-Unix things.
Five minutes? And it is still true 5 years later. See my post#46.
Nonsense. If someone wants to spend money on a billion man hours (ala MS) developing a better user interface/experience on any number of non-MS OS's, there is nothing stopping them.
And the 9000 is not that new.
Gentoo isn't bad; the "portage" system that is a quasi-clone of the BSD ports management system kicks ass though. Given enough time, portage could win the package management wars.
And definitely BSD on the security side. Clean, super-fast, bulletproof, and DAMN secure. FreeBSD may not be on everyone's mind like Linux, but a lot of very big companies entrust their public servers to it. FreeBSD really is the ultimate Internet server OS and a joy to work with -- very well engineered.
I would love to see an operating system that takes the best of FreeBSD and the best of Linux and puts them together. FreeBSD has a killer kernel but has a somewhat weak and generic Unix GUI. Actually, MacOS X sort of meets this criteria.
And I mean "usable" in the way that a 10 year veteran of software development would mean it, not the way the average end user would.
I'm sure the authors of the Soviet's five year economic plans were similarly condescending, and I'm sure they were certain that they knew more than anyone else in the USSR about economics. And I'm sure, like you, they made some compelling points about why investment and spending should flow this way and that. But that's not how our system works.
The government isn't funding Linux directly per se because there is no avenue to "pay for Linux".
Donating code to Linux = direct funding. Developers cost money, and the government picks up the tab. Therefore, it can be quantified monetarily.
Linux doesn't have a price, therefore it doesn't respond to pricing pressure.
When I put on my buyer hat, I want my suppliers to be motivated by the almighty dollar. Hell, it's the only real influence/control any buyer has over its suppliers. If the Linux business is incapable of properly sucking up to the fattest customer in the world (our Federal Government), then it's not worth resuscitating.
Many agencies of the government have a long history of contributing code to the public domain that they developed for their own use.
Linux and GPL code does not equal "public domain" code. I'm surprised an economist like you doesn't know the difference. Microsoft, SCO, IBM, Apple, etc. are not free to incorporate the Federally-developed Linux code into their proprietary OS products, because it has the GPL attached -- Despite the fact that their tax dollars were applied for the development. Only Linux companies benefit. So, in essence, the Government is interfering in the commercial software marketplace. It's like welfare for the Linux community.
BTW, If the Federal Government wishes to modify Linux for their own use, as you claim, then I wouldn't have a problem with them keeping their additions secret and not releasing them to the public. At least the commercial interference is minimized.
I'll make a prediction, though: This federally-funded Linux thing will bomb anyway - Government forays into private industry usually suck. Unfortunately, while they're doing it, they suck tax dollars away from efficient, private corporations.
You can either buy it, or you can develop it in house. Due to the low cost of acquiring the raw materials, the government has chosen the much cheaper route of developing in house. Is that so hard to understand?
No kidding. I've been sooooooooo frustrated with it. I fully expect the window manager to lock up twice a day. I had really good luck with SuSE in the past and some friends don't seem to have any complaints.
Oh, one other neat thing about Mandrake is that it is bundled with the WindowMaker window manager, which is the open souce version of the NextStep system ... the best OS (of its time) ever IMHO!
Based on what. Unless you have a complete database of every security parameter of every possible O/S out there, you have no way of knowing what is "most secure". Maybe the NSA has an idea, but even they would not ever make such an unsure and unsubstantiated claim about any operating system. Security is about process, and the admin servicing the system is far more important than the underlying architechture.
And just how large would the market for Tempest-tested inkjet printers be? Will we be seeing these on the shelves at Costco?
All the spook agencies have weird requirements that are never going to make sense as commercial products. There are a handful of Beltway Bandits who help them out with this stuff, but the volumes are tiny by computer-industry standards and they always will be.
You'll notice they tossed this out there 2 years ago in an unfinished state. All they wanted to do was get people talking about it, and maybe implementing some of it in commercial products. As for what they might be using themselves, their FAQ basically says, "If you have to ask, you don't realize who you're dealing with."
Hardly nonsense. Microsoft rode a "new hardware platform" to it's current dominance, and that is probably the only thing threatening them. That is why they lost money for years on XBox and Pocket PC, because those are the real threats and they are/were fighting them at a loss just to engage.
As far as Linux goes, it is mainly killing Unix, which was the only thing keeping money out of MS's pockets. Now even though Linux is gaining market share, it has no income, and is making MS a higher percentage profit of the overall software market than ever.
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