Open source software activity usually bumps up quite a lot before and during Christmas. This time around I am waiting for:
What are your waiting for this year?
There is a lot of noise going about these news:
The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications.
That’s good. Both the noise and the news. But it’s not the first time that we hear about this or that government office moving to Linux desktops. It happened before. What I am more interested in hearing is the “after” life. Something along the lines of “Look, we moved to Linux desktops one year ago and we are doing better than ever. We are happier and we also spend less money”. How many of those moved roll back to what they had before? Why did they roll back? How many stay? How many of those who stay are more satisfied? How much cheaper it is for them?
That’s what I’d like to hear.
The other day Bloggin Pro posted a question “Would You Pay for WordPress and How Much?“. Of course, I’ve already mentioned that I have no problem paying for WordPress. How much? Well, I think that around $50 per installation is a fair price. But that is not for me to decide.
I thing I keep thinking about though. A big part of what WordPress is, is it’s freedom. Anyone can get it. Anyone can use it for whatever they want. Anyone can modify it. And a lot of people do. If WordPress will ever become commercial software, it will greatly decrease the amount of people who use it, test it, and develop for it. And with that, the value of WordPress will stop growing as it is now. Once the value of it will stop growing as it is now, a lot of people will reconsider their answer to the question “Are you prepared to pay for WordPress?”.
Gladly, Matt and the rest of the Automattic gang seem to clearly understand that.
I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9. Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else. Two technologies in particular – KDE 4 and Firefox 3 – were the center of my focus. Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.
The upgrade itself went fast and easy. But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release. While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start. While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.
The login screen. It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much. Logging in. Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so. Logout. Switch into long awaited KDE 4. From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes. Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all – even more fun so.
Continue reading Fedora 9 : before and after
Quoting comment in Slashdot discussion:
The truth is both a blessing and a curse. It takes a lot of work to realize the truth and most people will not challenge themselves. Once you learn the truth, however, you are cursed with trying to explain it to others.
This clearly explains the high density of Open Source advocates, as well as many experiences of my own.
By the way -Â happy birthday, Open Source!