Linux Freeware

[Richard Steven Hack]

Cropped

I just did a Google search on Linus Freeware out of curiosity wondering if
it could be loaded on my unpartitioned hd just to look at and see what all
the conversation was about. I found this on the first page up........

Linux: freeware--at a price
Last modified: February 8, 1999, 6:35 AM PST
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com


news analysis Linux is leaving its freeware image behind as companies try to
make money off the operating system's growing popularity.

Note that is 4 years old. What has happened in the meantime?

Not much to make Linux not free. About the only thing recently is
that Red Hat has given up on supporting a consumer edition of Linux
(or at least supporting it directly to the consumer - they still
support a community project called Fedora - and they are concentrating
on their server edition and have changed their license for that
product to charge per server - which has irritated some of their
customers who have huge numbers of servers.

Otherwise Linux is still as free as it ever was. You can download it
from all over the place, or buy up to 9 CD's full of a distro and its
applications for $15-20 on various Web sites.

Tons of free programs out there to do almost anything you want done -
though of course there's still not as many as on Windows. In terms of
applications, I'd say Linux is where Windows was back in the days
before Windows 95 or maybe 98 - lots of development, but not much that
is multi-release mature yet. In five years that will change as more
projects mature. In the meantime you can still do pretty much
anything Windows can do - except run all proprietary Windows software,
of course.

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

One example - I've heard OpenOffice (maybe StarOffice) is going to or
already supports MS Office Macros which has been a vulnerable area.

Depends how they execute them. If they merely interpret them and not
try to recreate all the capabilities in terms of system access, it
might not be a problem. Also the file system permissions will still
be in effect which will limit a rogue macro's impact.

Also, there have been accounts of people become susceptible to Windows
based viruses by running Windows apps under WINE.

Here's a comment about the Sir Cam virus running under WINE I just
found via Google via a Vnunet article:
=========================================================
Reports emerging over the weekend have confirmed that the Sir Cam
virus, which spread across the internet throughout July, runs under
Wine.

However, it has been noted that because of the way Wine is
constructed, Sir Cam is unable to create the relevant registry entries
to make itself relaunch at boot. And for users of Wine without a
Windows mail client installed, the virus is unable to mail itself out
to names in the address book.

One Wine user commented: "The effect was that Sir Cam was exposed but
not functional, and I was able to explore its code without fear. There
were no registries to infect, no exchange list to exploit, and the
'hidden' Trojans were easily seen and removed. Sir Cam is totally
harmless on Linux under Wine."

The discovery caused more than a few chuckles amongst the die-hard
Linux community, with many joking that the only way Linux can run
viruses is under emulation, "otherwise it wouldn't have any."

Another user commented: "Wine supporters have finally ported the
single most popular Windows application to Wine. It took a lot of work
and years of research and determined effort, but it can finally be put
to rest. Yes, thanks to the efforts of hackers worldwide, Linux is now
capable of running Virus programs designed for Windows."
========================================================

I think it's a losing battle to try to take
market share from an OS by providing emulators to allow users to do
this. As good as some emulators are, they typically are noticeably
less stable and more sluggish than the real thing. I think a
brilliant example of how this approach fails is OS/2.

WINE - as the acronym title states - is not an emulator. It is a
reverse-engineering of the Windows APIs to work on Linux. I don't
think the point is to take market share - although the obvious
complaint most non-techie users have about Linux is it won't run
Windows programs. Well, it will run a lot of them. The entire
Microsoft Office suite through the XP version runs using the (not
freeware) Codeweavers CrossOver Office utility which is an enhancement
of WINE. The point is to allow Linux to run the scores of thousands
of Windows software that is out there. There are also emulators for
Linux for virtually every other OS that has ever existed - from CP/M
to MacIntosh and videogame OS's.

Also you can't compare OS/2 to Linux in this regard for two reasons:
first, although OS/2 had its own applications, it was pretty much all
closed source. Secondly, IBM's horrendously bad marketing was the
cause of OS/2's "demise" (it's still around somewhere, isn't it?)
Remember, too, that originally OS/2 was a combined IBM-Microsoft
project. OS/2, when it became an IBM-only product, was technically
superior to Windows - but IBM couldn't match Microsoft's marketing or
head-start with developers. Linux doesn't have either problem - the
"marketing" is community-driven (and supported by the big boys) and
while a lot of commercial developers aren't porting Windows stuff to
Linux, the open-source community has developed enough to generate tons
of Linux apps on their own. Finally, the attitude toward Microsoft by
a lot of developers and consumers has changed since the early 90's. A
lot of people are switching to Linux more because they are pissed off
at Microsoft than for purely technical reasons. So the lack of as
many apps as on the Windows platform does not necessarily deter them.
That's true in my case, for example. I know I don't need all the apps
on Windows - I just need the ones I need and I really hate Windows 98
for the unreliable crap it is. If I was using Windows 2000 or XP,
which are more stable, I'd still hate Microsoft and want to get out
from under. Not to mention the money issue.

And I acknowledge it as well. I just happen to feel that the
magnitude of this difference is not a large as commonly "advertised".

Well, what is "magnitude" and who is advertising it? That's a
subjective perception. We just agreed on that. Hundreds versus ten
is still at least an order of magnitude difference - objectively.

Not all of it. In general, I would without a doubt say that Windows
as far as ease of use for the typical user is still significantly
ahead. There are possible two types of users that this would not be
true of. First, the super geek who would prefer the CLI over the GUI
and second, the user who never, ever diverges from clicking on two,
maybe three icons - email and web browsing. But that's really a
different debate.

I still have to differ. For most of the functions running on the
USUAL user's system, Linux can run them all from a GUI - just like
Windows - not the command line. Every time a new release of a distro
comes out, something that used to be command line has a new GUI
front-end for it. There isn't much left that needs to be run from the
command-line. While it occasionally helps to know that in fact a
command-line utility is being run by the GUI, or the details of that
command-line utility's options, most of the time you can run it just
like any Windows GUI app. The average user doesn't know or care what
hoops Windows jumps through to do a task - and they won't care on
Linux either if nobody tells them that their "program" is just a Perl
script or a GUI front-end calling a command-line tool like cdrecord.

There are some problems with consistency with cut-and-past apparently
in some apps, I can't remember what they are - but in general the same
GUI concepts apply in both OS's. And a lot of people in businesses
who have bit the bullet and switched their users to a Linux desktop
have found that their users pick up the differences quickly - the
retraining is not nearly as extreme as some people think it is.

The only problems that arise occur when an end user has to futz with
hardware that doesn't work. But even in Windows, there are times you
have to run msconfig or ipconfig or whatever to troubleshoot a problem
with hardware or software. That's not significantly different from
having to edit a config file under Linux. If it needs to be done, the
user has to find someone who can tell him what to do and how to do it.

On the other hand, although I can't prove it and don't have enough
experience using Linux apps versus Windows apps personally to prove
it, I suspect there is a lot less conflicts between programs under
Linux than Windows. Getting a Linux program to run in the first place
can be a problem due to dependencies on specific program libraries - a
result of the continually changing Linux environment - a problem which
is similar to Windows "DLL hell" - but once a Linux program is
running, I don't think they tend to conflict with other programs, or
at least less so than on Windows. This might be less of a problem on
the later Windows than on Windows 95 and 98, but it's a major source
of problems for many Windows users. And on those versions of Windows,
again, the problem of an app taking down the OS is a major irritation.
On Linux, while this can happen, most of the time you just kill the
offending task - and unlike the task explorer on Windows, a Linux
process gets killed FAST and permanently - none of this "wait twenty
seconds then complain again about it" crap - which drives me nuts in
Windows 98.

So all in all I suspect that once one gets used to the very real
differences between Linux and Windows - less great than between, say,
DOS and Windows, something we older users had to go through - I think
end users can use Linux just as easily as Windows. And this will get
better as inconsistencies between desktops like KDE and GNOME are
ironed out over time.

Recent articles in the last couple weeks indicate the "Big Boys" are
planning a major push to put Linux on corporate desktops over the next
couple years. Added to the groundswell against Microsoft in many
foreign countries, this could eventually lead to proving that Linux is
as good a desktop as Windows is. I think the next five years will be
pivotal for Linux in that regard. And the news is going to be all bad
for Microsoft.

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

Let me correct that. I mostly meant usability. To be sure, this can
be much different than flexibility. I mean this in the context of the
typical user, not some uber geek. Virtually everyone who has argued
with me on this was such that they felt GUIs at best were necessary
evils to allow idiots to use Linux. And when examining many of the
GUIs designed for Linux/Open Source, it appears to me that this
mentality is common.

The GUIs for Linux seem perfectly usable to me. There may be
inconsistencies between desktops like GNOME and KDE, and they may be a
little more highly configurable than I need, but that's generally a
good thing. Also, I think that while command lines have their place
(to enable scripts to work easily, mostly), I think most things should
be run from a GUI - and nowadays most things can be on Linux.

I also am confronted with anecdotal stories of how someone set up
their Grandma with Linux and she does just fine. I don't doubt that
there are cases like this out there, but to extrapolate that out to
cover the majority of users like this is, IMO, a total pipe dream.

Well, if you're talking about the average end user, most of them can't
effectively use Windows either. For them, the Mac is the only OS that
seems to be usable - and I have my doubts about the Mac, too.

And it is regrettable that this is so. I see a lot of denial that
there is a problem here - much like the denial you hear from Microsoft
about their security problems. IMO, what would give Linux a big boost
is some top notch GUI and usability improvements. Now, I'm not saying
that the usability is awful. It is not. In fact it has improved
dramatically in the last 3 years. But I feel it still falls short.

Well, where I see significant improvement as well, I don't see a
massive shortfall. And there is intense work being done by both the
KDE and GNOME people as well as numerous lighter-weight windows
manager developers to iron out inconsistencies and add capabilitiy.
So the big boost is coming, especially since the "Big Boys" have
decided that Linux is or will soon be ready for the desktop.

Any criticism of
their preferred OS is instantly viewed as an attack by the enemy and
without merit. There is no concept of constructive criticism.

I think that's a general symptom of humans and not limited to OS
advocates. You get religious wars over programming languages, CPUs,
and god knows what else. It's not Linux or even Windows specific.

There is nothing I would like better than for there to be 2 or 3
affordable OS's out there competing with each other.

Me, too - but Gates doesn't see it that way which is why we have one
monopoly OS and one low-cost competitor (and one formerly
closed-source which is now trying to catch up, ie. Mac).

As far as the Mac goes, I am surprised it remained at #2 as long as it
did. They killed themselves by being greedy and not allowing any
clones which would have made them affordable. The window closed on
them and they lost market share big time. Now they are still more
expensive, but not outrageously so. The problem being that there is
not that much of a compelling reason for the typical user to spend any
more money to buy a Mac. And of course now they are charging $130
every 6 months for OS upgrades. I don't think they'll ever exceed the
roughly 5 - 8 % market share.

You're probably right. In fact, the biggest boost they have going for
them now is the fact that their OS is now a variant of UNIX and
porting of Linux/BSD open-source stuff is going to be easier. If
anything saves the Mac, it will be Linux - or more precisely Linux
spinoff.

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

Can you provide a link?

Here you go (long, may wrap - if they move it or something, just
Google for "Dan Kusnetzky International Herald Tribune" and it'll come
up):


http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=70026

 

[Kevin Davis³]

Here's a comment about the Sir Cam virus running under WINE I just
found via Google via a Vnunet article:

That wasn't the instance I was referring to. The instance I read
about was a user who did claim that the virus in question, did indeed
function as intended under WINE.

WINE - as the acronym title states - is not an emulator. It is a
reverse-engineering of the Windows APIs to work on Linux.

That is a trivial distinction and largely dependent on how one defines
an emulator. This particular topic was debated in a slashdot
discussion just a few days ago, and for the most part when it got down
to it, most agreed that when it comes down to it, despite it's
acronym, WINE, in fact is an emulator of some level.

I don't
think the point is to take market share

Sure it is. If you really think about it. The only reasons for the
emulators to exist is to allow users to either run they couldn't
normally with that OS, or run applications they like better with that
OS. Bottom line is that the goal is for user to be running OS X
instead of OS Y which translates to a shift in market share.

Also you can't compare OS/2 to Linux in this regard for two reasons:
first, although OS/2 had its own applications, it was pretty much all
closed source.

I don't see the relevance here in terms of emulators.

Secondly, IBM's horrendously bad marketing was the
cause of OS/2's "demise" (it's still around somewhere, isn't it?)

Again I don't see the relevance here in terms of emulators. But I
would certainly agree with you. IBM's marketing of OS/2 was
absolutely horrific. Yes, OS/2 is still around. Not really in the
consumer market, though. AFAIK, most of it's application is in niche
areas like ATM's.

Remember, too, that originally OS/2 was a combined IBM-Microsoft
project. OS/2, when it became an IBM-only product, was technically
superior to Windows - but IBM couldn't match Microsoft's marketing or
head-start with developers.

Even though my experience was much different I would concede that OS/2
was technically superior in some areas. But worse in others. For
instance driver support. You could blame that on third parties or
whatever, but that doesn't do anything to help the end user. All they
know is they can get a decent driver for stuff like very common
printers. That's a technical deficiency.

Finally, the attitude toward Microsoft by
a lot of developers and consumers has changed since the early 90's. A
lot of people are switching to Linux more because they are pissed off
at Microsoft than for purely technical reasons. So the lack of as
many apps as on the Windows platform does not necessarily deter them.

I largely agree with this.

That's true in my case, for example. I know I don't need all the apps
on Windows - I just need the ones I need and I really hate Windows 98
for the unreliable crap it is. If I was using Windows 2000 or XP,
which are more stable, I'd still hate Microsoft and want to get out
from under. Not to mention the money issue.

Being a user of both Linux and Windows, I really can't say that I hate
any of the OS's. I see significant deficiencies and advantages on
both sides. At this point what would have the most change (and a
fairly likely one) to drive me to primarily a Linux user would be ever
increasing crap like Product Activation and DRM being put into
Windows.

Well, what is "magnitude" and who is advertising it? That's a
subjective perception. We just agreed on that. Hundreds versus ten
is still at least an order of magnitude difference - objectively.

Well, you were advertising it for one. I was using the word magnitude
in the context of size, not in the context of in the order of 10. If
one were to tell you that Windows had 10x the number of malware than
Linux and the actual numbers were 1 versus 10 it would be much less
alarming than if it were 100 versus 1000. You were initially
suggesting that the difference was something like 20 versus 40,000+
when the more realistic numbers are more like 10 versus 600. That's a
BIG difference.

Recent articles in the last couple weeks indicate the "Big Boys" are
planning a major push to put Linux on corporate desktops over the next
couple years. Added to the groundswell against Microsoft in many
foreign countries, this could eventually lead to proving that Linux is
as good a desktop as Windows is. I think the next five years will be
pivotal for Linux in that regard. And the news is going to be all bad
for Microsoft.

Well, I hope that Linux does make inroads to the desktop, but IMO,
unless there are some improvements done to usability, it will be a
hard road. We have a difference of opinion here and could go back and
forth ad infinitum but my intentions are not to bash Linux, but to
provide constructive criticism in hopes that it would improve.
Unfortunately in my experience, no matter how hard I try I'm almost
always interpreted as a basher.

 

[Kevin Davis³]

Here you go (long, may wrap - if they move it or something, just
Google for "Dan Kusnetzky International Herald Tribune" and it'll come
up):


http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=70026

Thanks. I would have hoped for something a little more recent. That
article appears to be almost a year and a half old.

 

[Kevin Davis³]

The GUIs for Linux seem perfectly usable to me. There may be
inconsistencies between desktops like GNOME and KDE, and they may be a
little more highly configurable than I need, but that's generally a
good thing. Also, I think that while command lines have their place
(to enable scripts to work easily, mostly), I think most things should
be run from a GUI - and nowadays most things can be on Linux.

Being able to run something in a GUI is just a start. Making the GUI
usable/user friendly/intuitive is quite another. I have found most of
the GUI's I've used in Linux can get the job done but many are not
very intuitive and even inconsistent in behavior within the same
desktop.

Well, if you're talking about the average end user, most of them can't
effectively use Windows either. For them, the Mac is the only OS that
seems to be usable - and I have my doubts about the Mac, too.

I don't completely disagree, however it really depends on what the
user wants or is expected to do. The least inconsistent behavior can
be bad. Also for a couple examples -

One - installing programs. 90+% of Windows programs when installed
will create an easily located icon on the desktop or the menuing
system. In my experience with Linux it's almost the opposite.
Install an rpm and there is no evidence of that program from the
desktop/menu. Then one has to go on a jolly search to see where the
rpm located the executable and create one's own icon of the location
of one's choosing. And oh, yeah, that's about the best one can hope
for. There is a distinct possibility that the rpm or whatever package
(deb, etc) does not exist and you will have to compile the source and
then locate the executable, etc. This does not cut it. Not even
close.

Second - updating programs. Even with apt/synaptic (which would have
to be installed manually, AFAIK) which is a great improvement, it's
still not quite there yet. This process is not nearly as painless as
Windows update yet. Certainly there is valid criticism against
Windows update, but lack of ease of use really is not one of them.

These two issues are really very critical ones.

Well, where I see significant improvement as well, I don't see a
massive shortfall. And there is intense work being done by both the
KDE and GNOME people as well as numerous lighter-weight windows
manager developers to iron out inconsistencies and add capabilitiy.
So the big boost is coming, especially since the "Big Boys" have
decided that Linux is or will soon be ready for the desktop.

Except for a Big Boy called Red Hat who recently said if you want a
desktop system, use Windows for now. I largely agree. I want Linux
to succeed but because it is as good or better than Windows, not
simply because it is not Windows.

I think that's a general symptom of humans and not limited to OS
advocates. You get religious wars over programming languages, CPUs,
and god knows what else. It's not Linux or even Windows specific.

That's largely true and there are exceptions in virtually all
generalizations. However after years and years of observation in
newsgroups and other forums, I see a common element in the minority OS
advocate which is severe defensiveness and often alarming zealotry.
Most people who I would consider "pro Windows" are not like that. 5
minutes of objective reading on slashdot posts would go a long ways to
prove that. I don't think it has anything to do with
Linux/Windows/Mac/OS2 but rather that the dominant OS will have it's
majority of users who just want to use their computer and get on with
life whereas the minority group will have a more disproportionate
number of people on a personal mission to "evangelize" their cause.
Again my point is not to bash, it is to point out something that is a
negative effect in the OS gaining popularity so that it might be
recognized and possibly improve. But this has never worked. I must
have read dozens of articles written by well meaning people mentioning
many of the same things I have. And almost invariably the feedback
which dominates is that of intense denial and often ad-hominem
responses which unknowingly only go to prove the author's points.

Me, too - but Gates doesn't see it that way which is why we have one
monopoly OS and one low-cost competitor (and one formerly
closed-source which is now trying to catch up, ie. Mac).

To criticize Bill Gates for wanting his OS to be the hugely dominate
one, is a bit silly. Anyone with a business trying to make a living
wants their business to dominate in their market. Do you really think
that if some magic leprechaun materialized on Steve Job's desk
offering him 90% market share, he would turn it down because down in
his altruistic heart he knew that having 3 OS's with equal market
share would create a much better world? Do you think that if that
same leprechaun appeared in front of the developers of Mandrake or
Debian, they would turn him down in the same way?

Now, being critical of some of the methods Bill Gates used to get that
market share is a totally different story and, IMO is perfectly valid.

You're probably right. In fact, the biggest boost they have going for
them now is the fact that their OS is now a variant of UNIX and
porting of Linux/BSD open-source stuff is going to be easier. If
anything saves the Mac, it will be Linux - or more precisely Linux
spinoff.

I agree.