Isolationism

A recent blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth (owner of Canonical, creators of Ubuntu Linux) describes a gripe about audience response to his presentations about Linux: “pervasive support.” I think Mark and I agree that this level of product support is required, but our opinions perhaps differ a bit on perceived vs. actual levels of “support” in/for Linux, or even the multiple meanings of the word.

He first points out that commercial distribution vendors are willing to offer end-user support for their products—for a fee of course. He however neglects to point out there are multiple levels of end-user support, including the “non-critical” variety that is acceptable—even preferable, in some cases—to home users and DIY types (who prefer to learn to fish rather than be handed one when they get hungry)—as well as those working on a budget who don’t have the extra cash to shell out for support (or the operating system itself).

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Anyone watching the news has no doubt long-since encountered the news of Novell entering a “protective covenant” with Microsoft to essentially line Novell’s pockets in exchange for “protection” against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, because according to them, Linux infringes on many of their patents, and Ballmer has made a lot of noise (read: FUD) about how Microsoft is going to start to pursue legal action to protect them. It smacks more of posturing tactics to me; kind of like how they got caught red-handed lining SCO’s pockets through investment intermediary BayStar Capital, except this time they’re operating overtly instead of covertly.

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I confess I was surprised when I read that Microsoft had a change of heart on the subject of allowing Windows Vista to be reinstalled. Apparently someone at Microsoft got the message from the online community that their previous position—which was to allow the software to be reinstalled once only, ever—was pretty stupid, and that its discovery and wide publication was doing them more harm than good for a product that is already receiving a hefty share of criticism from the community on other issues.

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I apologise for a quiet couple of days here on the blog; I’ve been busy doing a bit of maintenance on my desktops.

While I was eventually successful in upgrading Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I experienced frequent lock-ups for no good reason (while the machine was doing literally nothing more than playing music in Amarok). It goes without saying that if an OS can’t be trusted to play an mp3, I don’t want to depend on it for anything more important (which is just about everything).

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…or:

Why I Won’t Be Buying Vista Or Any Software From Microsoft Ever Again

I’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to get my old copy of Windows XP up and running inside the free VMWare Player package using Ubuntu as the host operating system; getting the player up and running was easy; I just marked the package for installation in Synaptic and a couple minutes later it was ready to run.

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