[CLUE-Talk] Convince me, convince me!

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Just a thought, but am I the Linux person who gets annoyed trying to
"justify" a perfectly solid, FREE in all senses of the word, OS? The
only one who gets tired of being asked to "convince" people that they
should move away from products sold by a company that has repeatedly
used illegal and underhanded tactics to lock in users to an overpriced,
insecure system? 

The Windows user base has to be the largest instance of Stockholm
Syndrome in modern history. 

On the one hand, the Linux community is constantly working against huge
obstacles to "just make things work" without the cooperation of vendors
and OEMs... on the other hand, the new users come in wanting everything
to "just work" and instead of writing to the vendors and OEMs and saying
"hey, we might like to use something other than MS, so why don't you
help out a little and spend some development money on Linux and other
OSes," they criticize "Linux" for not being perfect. 

I'd like to know -- if you've ever posted something about the failings
of Linux to a Linux list, have you taken the same amount of time to
write the hardware manufacturer to tell them you want support for Linux?
Instead of asking to be "convinced" that you should use SOMETHING YOU
CAN GET FOR FREE, FROM PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTEER THEIR WORK, did you write
the company you spent money with and demand that they support OSes other
than Microsoft? I'm curious to know what the ratio is of people who
complain to the volunteers vs. the people who have complained to the
vendors that they spent money with... and if you haven't written your
modem vendor or PDA vendor or whatever and complained, why not?

And have any of you ever written a developer or project to thank them
for the work they've done to make these things work? Given the Linux
community a few slaps on the back when they manage to jump through the
hoops and make undocumented or under-documented or non-standard hardware
work? Or should the F/OSS developers just resign themselves to the idea
that they're mostly going to be criticized for shortcomings that are
largely the result of uncooperative vendors? 

Just curious...

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
http://www.dissociatedpress.net
http://www.corante.com/openmind