Re: [ox-en] CNET: Lindows, anyone?
- From: Russell McOrmond <russell flora.ca>
- Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 10:00:37 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Graham Seaman wrote:
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, geert lovink wrote:
(It is interesting to see how recent releases of OpenOffice,
Mozilla and Lindows are slowly opening up the field for
mainstream MS users. Ciao, Geert)
And all three heavily tied in with commercial interests who don't have the
free software community's interest at heart :-(
OpenOffice.org is LGPL'd, Mozilla is Free Software (non-GPL), while
Lindows (the OS, not the service) is a proprietary add-on to Free Software
(Based on Xandros which is based on Debian, but what make Lindows
different isn't Free Software). I don't think we can lump them all
together.
While I'm not a fan of Sun or AOL, they are restricted in what control
they can exert on these projects. If the community doesn't like what
these companies are doing, they can take the ball and run with it without
input from Sun or AOL.
Lindows actually makes me nervous a bit. It is a merger between Windows
and Linux in how it operates, but that includes some of the "flaws" in
Windows. One is that most Windows systems, as well as Lindows, runs by
default as administrator/root. I have long since believed that a system
that encourages end-users to log in as root simply doesn't belong
connected to the Internet.
Will it provide a clean migration path for people otherwise afraid of
Linux? Will its designed-in windows-like flaws end up hurting the
reputation of Linux?
It will be interesting to watch this!
---
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions
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