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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: Licensing (Was: [kde-promo] What's the community up to?)
From:       Philippe Fremy <phil () freehackers ! org>
Date:       2004-12-09 11:55:00
Message-ID: 41B83D14.501 () freehackers ! org
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I think Aaron has a point.

There are still good reasons to switch to Linux but these reasons are 
diminishing. Security is improving slowly on windows. Of course there is 
a huge security gap between a linux typical setup and a windows typical 
setup but people are just satisfied to know that the situation is 
improving. Windows XP has now a builtin firewall. Personally, I don't 
run any antivirus software, I just have a free spyware killer (spybot 
serach'n destroy) and a free firewall (zonealarm) and I have been safe 
for two years. There even are some open source anti-virus software (clamav)

I running windows XP for two years now for my day-to-day work and I must 
say it is fairly stable and reliable. It has lot of goodies for laptop 
users like me:
- I can adjust the consumption profile of the laptop: maximum battery, 
maximum performance
- it can make the laptop go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity 
(think battery life again) and I can restore all my applications in the 
exact state they were before

=> equivalent features exist to some degree on linux but are usually 
both unstable and not as good engineered as the windows version.

- when I plug the network cable, it launches automatically a dhcp 
request, I don't need to be root for that. We are far from the sudo 
/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart + password.
- it takes me one minute to install a new application, just run 
setup.exe and everything works. No dependency problems, no glibc 
problem, no x11 problem, no packaging problem, no hardware problem, no 
configuration files to edit, no faq and man pages to read, no search on 
internet to fix font problems.

A few things things sucks, like the absence of multi-desktop feature and 
the very poor text terminal. But you find applications workarounds for 
this. With a full cygwin environment + gimp + oo + thunderbird + zinf + 
gain or xchat + vim + winmerge + win (gpg stuff) + tortoise CVS + 
tortoise svn + putty + winscp + emule + gribi (finance stuff) + qt non 
commercial + source navigator + eclipse + videolan, it makes a pretty 
good platform. Ah, and of course, you have to re-order the program menu 
in a KDE like fashion, with graphics, audio, dev, ... Some applications 
are even better on windows than on linux, like tortoise cvs or winscp.

I guess the kde on windows is a philosophical issue, just like the GPL 
vs LGPL and LGPL vs BSD.

I personally would love to see and run KDE on windows because I do not 
believe that linux is going to make it that much in the desktop of 
enterprises. But more importantly, KDE would bring choice. Most of the 
computer users mostly believe that Microsoft is the only software 
provider of the world, and that there are only two choices for OS: Apple 
or Windows. By bringing more choice, we start to show them that there is 
more than one way. If you want to buy a car today, you've got plenty of 
choices. How come you have almost no choice for software ?

Breaking the mindshare monopoly is the most important task. Once people 
get used to diversity, moving to linux will be easier. They will see 
that some people use outlook, some use thunderbird, some use kmail.

What is even more important is that KDE comes with tons of applications. 
On my new laptop, I had few pre-installed applications but that's 
nothing compared to the diversity of what you get with a standard linux 
distro.

KDE on windows would allow pure windows users to use free software. We 
could get mindshare, people would realise that free software can develop 
very valuable good software and is not reserved to the linux junkies.


	Philippe


Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Thursday 09 December 2004 02:51, Aaron Seigo wrote:
> 
> > this means that Windows has MS apps + Free Software apps. Linux/BSD/etc has
> > Free Software apps. why would ANYone in their right mind who is used to
> > Windows switch to Linux or BSD for a web browser? they have no reason to.
> 
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/alyon/
> http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=48&story_id=14270&name=Belgium+invaded+by+spyware
>  
> I'm not saying that these problems will never happen on Linux, but at the 
> moment switching to Linux is a valid option for users to evade such problems.
> 
> Cheers,
> Waldo
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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