My collation of several rambles that bear thought .

[Oren Beck]

Linux is our chunk of Open Source " Sandbox" and my primary goal too.
I wish most passionately to see Closed Source as a concept vaporise .
The sort of  conceptual Banishing currently accorded to Marxism .

But YAFUD-YetAnotherFearUncertaintyDoubt articles being swapped around ?
Show me some Success stories I can keep pumping at the captives of 
Closed Source .
Hokey though it sounds part of our landscape is hearts and minds .

I have been bashing my brains against getting keychain based distros to 
fly . with humbling result .
Failures do not gain converts. Successes do. Attention spans in our 
society are amazingly microscopic .
witness the attempt of a certain distro that had a card game to play 
while the installer ran .
Dasn't prove "geeeWowLookitHowPowerful this critter is" Proves instead 
that attention spans plainly suck .
I easily have given 300 copies of Knoppix to "Prequalified"  folks who 
expressed curiouosity . That curiousity often raised by seeing Tux on 
the cash register at the campground . And of the folks who called me 
with comments  the most common non-operational comment was how it 
subjectively seemed longer to boot than windows  even when they   timed 
it . So the Pendrive projects assume  new importance . Sam's club has 
256 MB jumpdrives for $35 .
Gifting a decision maker with a pendrive distro may help us win another 
office to our side .

Having a mirror site that hosts a "save to pendrive , reboot and you're 
running Linux " image will advance our goals .

MY soapbox stance is that we can come to a truce between the extremes of 
position . It's still my goal to have every application possible wide 
Open for every reason WE know and need to teach the rest of the world of 
those reasons . While agreeing that limited applications could be kept 
not cost free but still open sourced -by license for limited time frames 
- wasn't that called Limited Copyright ???  Voluntarily sharing our 
works of non-material form can only enrich us ALL in a larger picture. 
If you spend $300 a year less on software you are more likely to spend 
it on material things . Which can profit the creators of non-material 
things by improving the overall economy .

Recover your investment of Blood , Sweat and Tears guiltlessly and 
unashamedly profiting by renumeration for that's the right of creation 
to be so compensated . Temper that with a larger reality that our worth 
expands by sharing the non-material that by ubiquity becomes 
immeasurably more valued .
If every desktop has a common tool that the free version is on  an 
enhanced version will have an increased chance of success by familiarity 
plus mindshare Acrobat comes to mind here .Distribution of paid for 
software by encrypting compression tools with watermarking might 
protect producers of copyrighted works while not castrating utility with 
dongles or registrations overly complex .

Activation schemes seem to me only existing as paranoids spending more 
to prevent a loss that costs them less then their prevention schemes do 
 Or more ominously link GUID files to a traceable identity  for 
political revenges .

Someone having on their Resume  MS experience -at this moment - commands 
a higher salary than someone lacking that experience but comfortable in 
Open Source applications .  When can we reverse that ?

I sincerely feel that Metadata bombs in MS formats can destabilize 
mundane lives . When someone sends a document they likely would never 
suspect that every revision of that doc or even unrelated docs gets sent 
embedded in the doc .
SO those folks who hit Control N thinking they are opening a clean copy 
may be in deep yogurt someday .
Draw your own conclusions as to why hidden files are good or bad . Do 
tell me how hidden is good and open is bad ?

When we can spend a workday using only Open Source products that will 
mark a cross over point .

I still unshakably hold that Closed Vs Open becomes oxymoronic very 
quickly . Closed source is the bastion of repression . Open source is 
not of the same zero sum game slaver mindset .  As I said above , 
copywriting an application to recover your investments should not be 
incompatible with that same copyrighted application publishing it's 
source code .  Sure- the locked down model of repressive DRM with hard 
controls may on paper seem to secure rewards for an industry but we ALL 
lose on that path . The only winners are the Oligarchies holding our 
balls in DRM .

Make the copyrights and lefts free market driven  so  instead of getting 
a low singledigit percent of  under $ 20 per copy one might consider 
getting millions of  $ 1 payments . Generating thousands of jobs for 
support Geeks not the Closed Source way of obfuscation but by simple 
honest skills applied to simple honest programs that simply WORK .

The Registry FUDwar has barely gotten a claw thru it's eggshell yet and 
already threatens to become divisive .
Not Invented Here is a debate tool ill becoming us in displacing Closed 
Source mindsets .
I quite humbly defer to the giants who make such things incarnate but 
still am made nervous .
One perceived robustness of  .Nixes to me is  minimal uncompartmented 
failure points beyond the kernel itself .
Dunno how to reconcile the reality that central configuration tools can 
be good with the back story of corruptions  in
such architectures causing havoc often destroying data.

To tie all my back burner simmered rants together now - A * STABLE* 
viable desktop running on an os securable to the appropriate degree for 
it's location and functionally usable in a free version is my only hope 
to slay Closed Source.

If the software install is free the user has more money for people . And 
the people are
  why we do this beyond our self interests that is .

Flog me though you will for some blasphemous concepts I am invoking can 
you offer efforts more sincerely constructive?

Oren Beck

www.campdownunder.com

" Conservative -my definition of the breed is that they tend to be 
petty, mean spirited, repressives, hateful and often desiring the 
complete destruction of civil rights for all excepting themselves . And 
that's listing only their good points "