RE: someone at The Daily Mississippian gets it right about Linux

<Devil's Advocate Mode>
Yes, but...I look at the hours and hours and hours I've spent over the
past several months working through issues between RedHat and Xandros
and Novell, at the fact that many of these "free alternative" packages
require a fair amount of programming knowledge or pure luck (or both)
just to compile so you can *then* try to install them...and I can see
where people are quite happy in pre-compiled,
most-things-work-out-of-the-box Microsoft land. *still twitching* I
just don't _wanna_ spend the rest of my life RTFM'ing. I've got a nice,
pretty book about hobbitses and stuff that I wanna read if I can _ever_
climb out of compiling hell.
</DAM>
Alright, flame me if ya gotta.

Stephen King
Instructor, Information Technology
Charter College
2221 E. Northern Lights Suite 120
Anchorage, AK 99508
(907) 777-1370
=20

-----Original Message-----
From: Royce Williams [mailto:royce@alaska.net]=20
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 9:56 AM
To: aklug@aklug.org
Subject: Re: someone at The Daily Mississippian gets it right about
Linux

On 10/29/2004 9:51 AM, Stanley Long wrote:

> ... for nearly every software package that Microsoft makes, there's a=20
> cheap or free alternative, which is generally just as good as=20
> Microsoft's version.

I would have liked to have seen: "For nearly every basic software
package commercially available for Windows, there's a free alternative."
Every time I go to Best Buy and see all of the CD-burning, firewall,
anti-spam, etc. software for $40, I wince. While some of these packages
are nicer than the open-source alternatives, most people buying them --
and, I would argue, most people targeted by marketers of these packages
-- don't need the extra bells and whistles.

-royce

--=20
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Royce D. Williams - IP Engineering, ACS
personal: [first]@alaska.net - PGP: 3FC087DB/1776A531
work: [first.last]@acsalaska.net - http://www.tycho.org/royce/
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Received on Fri Oct 29 12:31:53 2004