Older blog entries for lsdrocha (starting at number 2)

Today is a great day

I think I just got my first win as an Open Source Evangelist. A very meaningful win, at least for me.

Yesterday, one of my uncles called me for some help. It seems that his home-work PC was behaving in a very weird way (for a Windows box, of course). I tried to help, but by phone is very difficult. So we agreed I should drop by his work today to talk to him personally, and lend him an old Win98SE CD.

His computer got a virus. BugBear I guess. But I couldn't tell it for sure. He then asked me how I was handling the internet virus at home, and if I was having trouble with them. "I don't", was my answer, "I'm using Linux at home".

My uncle got curious. He said he was thinking of using Linux, but was afraid of not being able to do what he does, or send - via email - proposals in a format everyone could see.

Perhaps this is the best time to explain what my uncle do for living. He has a small company who makes measurement instruments, like pHD readers and stuff, from the design of a box, to the chip programming. Everything.

I answer his question. I told him that he could use Open Office, so he could still write/read .doc, .xlt and all MS office suite files. And he could still do emailing in the Windows way with KMail or Ximian Evolution.

But my winner was when I told him about gcc. He was already willing to see this "Unix Wonder" when I told him the advantages of working with the gcc compiler. For I guy that uses C and Assembler every day, this argument was irresistable.

Not to mention the financial aspect of the switch. He have about twenty employees (or even less) that actually use computers, so he won't have to expend tubes of money with training. Plus, he'll be free from MS-Windows/Office costs (upgrades, new OS, etc...). For a small company, this is a great deal.

I invited him to show up in the weekend to play a little with my Linux box. I'm pretty sure that the virus affected PC will be restored as a Linux box. A test one. And probably will leave it in his office for a while.

If everything goes right, with time, he'll be using only Linux in his company. And all his employees will be exposed to Linux too.

Not bad for an Observer, hah?

Darn.

I just read the "Free software/open source software in a Win32 environment" article by Alleluia and I liked the idea. And I wanted to post my comments on the article and perhaps some suggestions to OpenCD.

But since I'm still an Observer, I can't post comments or replies to articles, so I'll post it here, and hope someone read it.

I liked the idea. Really. A "free-as-beer" CD loaded with "free-as-speech" software sounds like a good, short-range weapon against proprietary software. As said, developers, hackers, techies can find open source software to their needs, browsing the web or even scratching some personal itch. Regular, computer-illiterate users, most of the time, can't. A CD with good quality, useful, stable software would be a good thing, it would make easier to reg-users to find good software that fit their needs.

I would like to suggest some other softwares to be included in the CD, like PostGreSQL (alongside with MySQL), because is a good db. Bluefish is a good, WYSIWYG, HTML editor, that should be included.

I just finished reading an executive e-mail that Bill Gates sent to some people that signed for some MS service. I got it from a friend, who recieves this letters.

The paper is about Trustworthy Computing and is cleary directed to MS-fans and people who use MS software. The letter is from 18.july, but I didn't see no comments about it.

At first sight, looks like a simple letter talking about trust over the net. It goes on and on about how services should improve to provide more reliability, how the net should improve its services to avoid virus to spread so easily and things like that.

I agree with the fact that net service should (and will, I presume) improve. Has been like that so far. Services will always be improving, as long as people continue to work on it (which is the great moto behind OS).

The point is the solutions he offers to this matter. First he advices MS user to always keep their machines up to date with MS products. Not just the bug fixes, but with the new releases. He uses this new virus "Flehem" spree to justify it. According to MS, the new Outlook was able to filter this treat, but only systems with the most recent version of Outlook avoid the virus.

And worst than that, he says in his essay that, to improve trustwothy computing, MS is working with some other companies to improve the Internet Protocols. This is shifting standards. One may say that this is not news, and I would agree. The problem is that MS is trying to convince his costumers that their standard is better than the open standard. And this may mean trouble to free software/open source advocates.

This may be happen for a while, but I just got this thing now and I pretty much don't like the sound of this.