linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX

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Darksyde wrote:
>
>
> Hi all!
> With no desire to stir up a riot, I am interested in hearing everyone's
> opinion on a matter. It seems that there is a bit of a division growing
> in the GNU/Linux community, one which has probably been developing for
> years.
> On the one hand there are those of us who use a variety of distro's
> developed and maintained by for-profit organizations or at least by
> individuals who have some affiliation with such companies.
> Then we have the GNU-crowd who feel that it is unfair and contrary to
> the original philosophy of GNU/Linux to incorporate non-free packages
> and to (minor beef here) minimize the importance of GNU in the original
> development of the wonderful platform we enlightened folk use today.
> Surely this riff has been developing for years, possibly since the
> development of Red Hat? I'd like to know how the non-newbs (or even
> fellow old newbs) feel about this issue and if you feel that there might
> be some problems ahead. I'm sure the evil empire (M$) would love this,
> capitalist bastards that they are!
> Mark
>

I run Linux, BSD-UNIX, and Microsoft Operating systems.

Linux = the Linux kernel.

Everything else tacked onto the various distributions is not Linux.
those extras are distribution-specific.

Some distros follow GPL license strictly, others, less strictly.

The BSD-UNIX distributions have a different license, that has very few
restrictions on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

I like OpenBSD. It is a great OS for servers, but it takes a lot of
work, to set it up as a Desktop OS.

I like Linux Red Hat Enterprise and Linux Mint for everyday Desktop use.

I am currently running a Microsoft Vista installation, as well. It
does a lot of things well, and easily, that Linux and BSD-UNIX do
either less well, or less easily, or not at all. The price for running
Microsoft Vista, is that it still as a lot of security issues, that
the *nix distros do not suffer too much from.

My strategy (as opposed to having an opinion), is to just run all
three, each in the areas that they perform best in, while avoiding the
ares where they perform badly.

So my servers, and my employer's servers, which I admin, run OpenBSD,
Desktop machines that receive mail, and do a lot of browsing and other
web interactions, I try (as much as possible) to have them run Linux,
for the people I can't entice to run Linux, restricted-user
permissions on a Microsoft OS.

I figure that all three OS's will continue to gradually improve over
time, and to a certain degree (especially on Desktop machines), become
more 'like' each other (or... more like Mac :)), regardless of the
licensing scheme.

- --
- -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/
http://robertwittig.net/
http://robertwittig.org/
.
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