“Geen Stijl” is a highly controversial weblog in The Netherlands with a right-wing affiliation. Recently “Geen Stijl” published an entry on Linux, saying that “Linux is a kind of communist Open Source Operating System and Hugo Chaves, dictator of Venezuela, understands this”. Later on it states that “Everyone who uses Linux supports terrorism, atomic weapons, high oil prices and the destruction of the earth”.

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Linux munchkins are a mixture of hardworking programmers, fanboys and trolls and they will do everything to debunk your article with varying degrees of politeness. Let’s make it clear that I don’t want to deny anybody the right to comment on an article, especially when he is right. But I doubt the usefulness of some comments.

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If you happened to have read the update on my previous blog, I was contacted by KDE4 developer Aaron J. Seigo. In the following screencast he provided you can see how you can create desktop icons in KDE4 and judge for yourself whether you need to be a rocket scientist or not (as some people have claimed) to get your “Old Skool” desktop back.

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There are some disturbing developments and they are happening in the key components of our systems: the desktop. KDE has spawned a new release. People are not only complaining about its instability, but also about its direction. Gnome is in trouble as well. There is the Mono controversy and some people feel it has become a dead project, because it has ceased to be “exciting and innovative”.

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You know what the difference is between a professional blogger and amateurs like us? They write about the community and we are the community. We can write about things they will never be able to cover properly: our own experiences. A view from the inside. Usually, it doesn’t take too much effort to write a blog entry like this, because I love writing about what I do.

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It is a natural process. Whenever groups are formed, fractions will emerge. And when those fractions unify for one reason or another, there are others who won’t agree, stay behind and found new groups. In Open Source, nobody owns anybody. If you can’t find what you need, if you don’t agree with somebody, you make your own.

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In his article “Why the Linux world should embrace the BSD’s”, Steve Lake proposed a closer cooperation between Linux and BSD. Although I have the utmost respect for BSD and what its developers have accomplished, I don’t see what good it would do. I think his reasoning is flawed and the arguments he uses are - at least partially - invalid.

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In his article “Why the Linux world should embrace the BSD’s”, Steve Lake proposed a closer cooperation between Linux and BSD. Although I have the utmost respect for BSD and what its developers have accomplished, I don’t see what good it would do. I think his reasoning is flawed and the arguments he uses are - at least partially - invalid.

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People want to get the job done. They don’t have or take the time to learn a new tool, even if this investment makes them more productive in the long run. That behavior is one of the most important obstacles in the adoption of Open Source products. People are only willing to change if their applications don’t change.

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Classifying people is dangerous. The best and the worst have tried and failed. Classifying people has been one of the core evils in human history. It has been used as an excuse to murder, deport, mutilate, enslave, exile and torture people throughout time. It’s what I’ve been calling “labeling” all the time.

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Sometimes you stumble across an article that makes you wonder whether people are spreading FUD or whether they are really that ignorant. When you take it down, bit by bit, it becomes more and more obvious how ridiculous their statements are.

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I expect people of the free press to defend the right of free speech, not to call for its restriction or abolishment. If free speech disappears, what does free software mean? “Free” like in “free beer”? If you express an opinion there will always be someone who doesn’t agree with you. That comes with the trade. That is professionalism. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

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There is a lot of respect among the people that form the community. Disqualifying entire parts of the community by suggesting they are fruitcakes is unheard of. You may expect such a thing from a rogue FOSS fundamentalist, who cherishes each and every pure GPL line, but not from someone who made it his profession to give the community a voice.

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It’s about the name-calling these Microsoft fans do. I heard ‘zealots’, ‘bigots’, ‘advocates’, the whole lot. What may be not too clear to these Microsoft zealots is why I am a fanboy. It’s not because I really dig this “free the software, free the world” ideology. That came much later. It’s because I like this “gimme the source” idea.

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Playing Al Gores ‘An inconvenient truth’ adds to the problem it is trying to solve, because the hardware burns 25 to 30 percent more energy than it actually needs to. Why? DRM. Who pays for all that? You, the consumer. Microsoft - and all its DRM buddies - continue to claim up to this very day that DRM won’t affect the consumer too much. However, behind closed doors the bird is singing quite another song.

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Jim Morrison once said “You can’t petition the Lord with prayer”. To paraphrase that it I’d like to say “You can’t address the OSS community”, because it is much too varied to be addressed. What do you expect when you address the community like it is a company? That there will be a board meeting? That we will issue a press statement? That all of a sudden the community will change its corporate strategy? We have none of those things!

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In the last part of this series, I mentioned how Jim Allchin came in, saved the day and everything was hunky dory again. Wrong. The story that “Windows was broken” came out in September, 2005. The same month a blog was published about the up and coming reorganization of Microsoft, stating that is was “just just shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic”.

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Windows security was primarily designed for a single user, stand alone Operating System. Instead of fixing the fundamental problems, Microsoft has continued to add kludges, which in essence don’t solve anything. And don’t think Vista will do much better. Apart from being nagged by UAC popups, it will only get worse since Microsoft has decided security cannot be left to third parties. Well, that feels good, being totally dependent on Microsoft for your digital security..

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Corruption of computer magazines? Far-fetched? I don’t think so. Correction. I know it is not far-fetched. If you happen to live in Europe, you may have seen many computer magazines this summer that included the Microsoft Office 2007 test suite on CD. You may have bought such a magazine and wondered why they were so friendly to Microsoft.

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I don’t have to argue here that the FOSS community has been the victim of FUD tactics a number of times. To name a few myths: no support, open to attack, unprofessional, viral licenses and so on. Each and every time the community has answered in a appropriate, accurate and responsible way. But how effective has that been? Well, not. We’re fighting it every day.

[I could not agree more. - Scott]

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In my most conservative estimate, it will infect about sixty million PC’s in Europe over the next three months. That is twice as much as Vista in a quarter of the time. That will generate $80 billion in the EC due to “cascading economic benefits” from increased employment and taxes, creating a stronger economic base. That’s not bad for one night work, isn’t it, Mr. Beez?

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A lot of managers are afraid to use Open Source Software, because it doesn’t come with any support. Of course that isn’t true. It is a classical piece of FUD. And then again, how much is support worth?

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Microsoft tolerates the bugs riddling the software, since problems can always be patched over. However, with each patch and enhancement, it becomes harder to strap new features onto the software, since new code can affect everything else in unpredictable ways. In short, the software becomes unmaintainable. And Vista reached that point.

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“Three reasons to use Gnome” shocked me. Sal Cangeloso is free to use what ever he wants and list his reasons for using it. But he is not free to spread FUD and use some very questionable arguments. I’ve used KDE from the first moment I installed Linux and I’ve never been disappointed.

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On thing that the recent KDE-Gnome war has learned me is that the smartest people of all are the “civilians”, our users. They just use a mixture of what is there and don’t understand what the fuss is all about. They happily shop in the giant bazaar for whatever they need.

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IMHO speed is overrated. Benchmarks execute hundreds of millions of the same instructions, taking ages to finish. In real life that is almost never the case, except for some pretty processor intensive jobs you’d never dream to write in a scripting language. Telling an interpreter it is slow makes just as much sense as telling a bicycle it is slow. Although that is true, millions of Dutchmen find good reasons to use them every day. If you need to go a long way, you simply won’t use a bicycle. If an interpreter is too slow for a job, you grab a compiler. It is as simple as that.

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DRM infested content will never be as easy to share and manage as unprotected content, no matter what. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of DRM: unprotected content has better value than protected content. Where there is a margin, there is profit; where there is profit there is a market; where there’s a market there are suppliers. DVD Jon is not the problem, he is the inevitable consequence.

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The recent survey of Associate Professor Alan D. MacCormack proves again statistics are lies with his study “Developers Do Not Want GPL 3 to Police Patents”. Still, eWeek found it important enough to mention. Knowing a thing or two about statistics and how to manipulate them, I thought let’s see how well the professor does.

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A lot has happened since I debunked Alan MacCormack’s research. First, a very clever attack from some “Rufus”. I have contacted Rufus through email, but have not received any response yet. Maybe what “DB” wrote isn’t too far from the truth: “Looks like Microsoft are reading this too. And if this was an exploratory survey they wouldn’t be trumpeting it as the real thing.” Of course, I tried to comment on the eWeek article, only to find that I was banned.

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The last decades a little war has been fought in the small town of Fuddenheim. A group of private citizens decided some 15 years ago to introduce free public transport in order to combat air pollution and congestion. Donations allowed them to buy a few buses which were operated by volunteers. The free transport slowly became a hit and the commercial operator, Omnifast, couldn’t ignore it anymore.

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