____/ Mark Kent on Sunday 03 February 2008 08:04 : \____
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> ____/ [H]omer on Wednesday 30 January 2008 17:44 : \____
>>
>>> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>>>
>>>> French police deal blow to Microsoft
>>>
>>> Double-blow ... it's not Ballnux, it's Ubuntu.
>>
>> Yes, I worried about that at first. Other government departments in France
>> chose Mandriva or Ubuntu as well. There's just that one school that put SLED
>> on 3000 (or 13000?) PCs.
>>
>
> Don't forget, though, that once someone is on Linux, most of the lock-in
> evaporates. Movement between Linux distributions is relatively trivial,
> indeed, a huge amount of choice is out there.
>
> In fact, it's just dawned on me *why* the Microsoft Shilcosystem here
> complains so often about the number of Linux distributions, and it is
> precisely this reason. If you stay on the Microsoft side of things, not
> only are you paying fees in perpetuity, not only are you fighting a
> constant battle with viruses, trojans and spyware, not only are you
> handling highly unreliable software, *but*, you have essentially zero
> choices within that space.
>
> If, contrarily, you move to the linux world, then you have thousands of
> carefully tailored distributions from which you can choose; from slick,
> polished, commercially supported distributions, to scientific specialist
> ones, to "ultra-free" ones, to tiny ones suited to small PCs or even
> routers, to phones, to distributions designed for clustering and the
> construction of super-computers.
>
> I suspect that once someone moves away from Windows, and realises that
> the sky did not fall in, they will then be in a position to pilot a
> course of their own choosing, free from "vouchers", "protection money"
> or any other mafioso-inspired "offers you can't refuse" from Microsoft.
Indeed.
http://media.slated.org/albums/userpics/reservoir-dos.png
Thank goodness for /choice/. The other day, Joe Wilcox echoed my analysis and
said that Microsoft wants to cage Linux users inside one distribution (SUSE)
and then crush it like it crushes companies.
--
~~ Best of wishes
Proprietary, lockin-based tools lead to regrets. Doc(umen)tor, heal thyself.
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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