Hmm, seems that France is thinking of legislating open source software as the standard for the public sector (http://www.osslaw.org has the details en francais). Now that MS Outlook is being eaten alive by viruses, just like the OS community always said it would, it could be that the choice before the Webbed world is information socialism or a complete systems crash. What do fellow penguins on this list think? Is France on the right track, and if so, should local communities here in the US start doing something similar, i.e. adopting open source as their model?
-- Dennis
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When I was following the BSD news groups, I got the distinct impression that Mexico, central Europe and western sections of Russia were definitely setting up their networks with some variant of unix. Also a fair showing in Australia, Japan, and Korea. My guess at the time (about two years ago) was the language issue: support for keyboards, screens, etc. Plus the cost.
I suspect the reason US communities, schools, public institutions haven't followed the unix or open source model is that M-suck has created the illusion that you can buy their crap and escape the need to hire expensive computer people to run and maintain it. This is coded as `business friendly'. I also get the idea that the reason small and mid-size businesses don't use it is a mix of reasons. Partly, the illusion of cost--that pre-packaged software is cheaper than a computer literate office, and most of the common (inadequate but cheaper) accounting/payroll/inventory applications used are designed for Win/NT.
This may turn out to be something like the metric system, where the US and its imperial corporate colonies manufacture in US/English units, while the rest of the world uses the SI.
It's really a sham that schools use msuck, since it is impossible to learn anything with it--because it is close, protected, copyrighted, proprietary, anal. The result is that everybody's conception of computers is a consumer product, rather than a tool or production system.
I gave up trying to convince my work buddies to try FreeBSD. So I took one of the 486 boxes to work. I set it up on my ISP account and leave it on during work for anybody to use. Most of the use is from the disabled crew who roll in and have to wait to get their chairs fixed. So, they go over to the station and fool around on the web. The wild graphic screen savers usually attract their attention (god, people are such suckers for this shit). Then they wiggle the mouse and there is X-windows with Netscape/communicator--which is a familiar interface for the web, newsgroups, and mail so they can ignore the evil, scary, unix CLI. The gamers and graphic types don't like it because it is old and slow--but then I tell them, well, fuck, it was free--as in free everything: box, parts, OS, applets, all of it.
The best review so far was from a woman who works at UCB as sys admin. She rlogined into her net and did some remote system checks and fiddled around with the mail. All the utilities and programs work the same as her system, so she thought it was cool that such a pathetic looking box did the same stuff.
Chuck Grimes