Allow me to start with Politics.

Politicians have too much power. This has led to several problems:

• Lobbyists and the corporations that back them have incentive to win the favor–and vote–of representatives and senators. In a climate where this sort of thing is possible, it leads to a competitive atmosphere where it becomes necessary to have lobbyists in Washington in order to remain on equal footing with other corporations.
• Career politicians and the power of pull. Rather that being merely equals amongst Americans, congressmen have power, money, prestige, and distinction. All that political positions should entail is taking care of the minutia of government that the vast majority of the populace lacks the time to attend.

A country of entitlements. Every productive citizen in the country is pulling the weight of unproductive citizens. We–Americans!–exist in a culture of wasting the energies of our best and brightest to drag along the least and laziest. In any system where there are handouts to be had, there are bums who will put their hands out rather than put forth effort or ingenuity to produce goods or services that render them useful to the society upon which they instead feed, like parasites.

The waiting-with-hands-out parasites aren’t even the worst of us. Is it worse for there to be people who are willing to find excuses to subsist on the sweat of others, or for the ones who toil and produce useful goods and services to be the very instruments of their undoing? That is, we who work and create have instituted the very structures that feed the parasites. It is as though we were jungle travelers who actively, avidly sought leeches, ticks, fleas, and tapeworms in order to affix them to our bodies.

Of course, that is not how it began. In the beginning, it all sounded marvelous: the Great Society, eliminating hardship and poverty for all generations to come. As it turns out, there is still poverty–only now we pay must exert even greater effort in the workplace to achieve reduced output at poorer quality. A significant portion of every business and individual effort is excised from a positive productive output in order to be redirected to maintaining a ghastly overgrown government and an increasingly burdensome body of the entitled.

Ah, yes…that does the trick.

It is not at all surprising that the comparisons drawn by Microsoft favor Microsoft. Red Hat’s own site contains or points to anti-Microsoft articles and op-ed pieces.

The white papers on Group Policy versus SELinux and User Account Control versus sudo are both, in my opinion, ineffective at the comparisons they are attempting to draw, because they fail to make the paradigm shift between the entirely different methods of security between Windows and Linux.

The case studies are very limited in information and in all cases do not provide a complete description of the process that the municipalities went through to make their decision. For example, Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Justice migrated 15,000 users to Windows, but Lower Saxony’s tax authority migrated 12,000 workstations to SuSE Linux in the same year. In both cases, it was due primarily to the technology already in use (Windows in the MoJ, Solaris in the tax authority) rather than any qualitative differences between the two operating systems and network technologies.

In most cases, the choice to move to a new operating system and network technology must consider the existing infrastructure. Telling, then, is Munich, Germany’s decision to forgo its existing Windows infrastructure for SuSE (and later, Debian) Linux, beginning in 2003 (scheduled to complete next year).

According to the cost study carried out by the Munich administration[1], training and migration are two of the biggest costs involved in migrating to Linux and open source applications, while the personnel, hardware, licences and operating costs were relatively low.[2]

So, TCO (total cost of ownership) was a pivotal consideration—a point often repeated by Microsoft in its marketing campaign against Linux—in spite of the migration effort, time, and cost necessary:

…the arduous process that led to the decision to migrate to Linux was actually based on Microsoft’s policies on Windows NT, and a subsequent study to determine the best course of action pursuant to the unexpectedly short life support cycle for NT.
Microsoft announced an end-of-life support plan for NT that would prevent the operating system from surviving through the life cycle than the IT officials in Munich had anticipated.[3]

For the country of Germany as recently as 2006:

The German public sector has embraced open source enthusiastically. Nine out of every 10 German local authorities are using open source software, according to the MERIT survey, and OpenOffice.org is being run on more than 50,000 PCs in the German public sector, according to Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager at Sun.

A number of German cities are using, or planning to use, open source software, including Schwäbisch Hall, Mannheim, Treuchtlingen, Leonberg and Isernhagen. Schwäbisch Hall switched to Linux on more than 400 workstations and Mannheim plans to deploy Linux on 110 servers and 3,700 desktops.[4]

Also, Microsoft downplays Linux’s effectiveness when that Linux sold by Red Hat, but explicitly endorses it when it is sold by another vendor (Novell/SuSE)[5]. (For the record, I’m not a big fan of Red Hat, either. Haven’t been for many years.)

In closing, I am a huge fan of Linux. I enjoy its longevity for any given installation, its licensing, and the culture of innovation and camaraderie that permeates its user base. I feel like I can get more work done in Linux, because I’m more comfortable with it. I also see great benefit in mixed environments that include both Windows and Linux servers and desktops.

[1] http://www.muenchen.de/vip8/prod2/mde/_de/rubriken/Rathaus/40_dir/limux/publikationen/clientstudie_kurz.pdf (in German)
[2] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39171380,00.htm
[3] http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id%3B2120885092%3Bfp%3B4%3Bfpid%3B4
[4] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39274196,00.htm
[5] http://www.moreinterop.com/

I read somewhere–was it V?–who said something to the effect that bad writers create a blog so that they can pretend that they’re working on their writing. Good for them.

By the way, I’m a bad writer. Pleased to meet you.

So why am I here? Well, because I have something to say. Not right now, mind you, but in general, I do. I think the world is a messed up place, and not for (all of) the same reasons that everyone else seems to think it is.

More importantly, I need a place to collect my thoughts because I keep losing the slips of paper. No, that’s only partially true. I don’t usually lose the scraps: I either forget about them or find them while sifting through old junk but the pencil lines are difficult to read. This way, at least, I have a semi-permanent place to keep all my stuff so I can search it without getting dust up my nose.

Okay, seal’s broken. Next post might be more meaningful.