Seconded.

LibreOffice instead makes me think of the French revolution, which was a grand idea in very obscure times, just as open source software is.

I have no problem doing it, even on a linux machine with files generated on windows.

>> You have no reason to plead fealty to power, but you choose to do it out of sheer cowardice and apathy. Apparently your civil liberties will have to be entirely destroyed before you value them again.

>Today, I feel that you're exactly correct. The biggest problem we have here in the US is that the majority of people don't give a damn about >anything, so long as they get a pay check, can put food on the table, and can drive to work in the morning

Well, it is a major concern when you have a family. But I would add another reason for this apathy : it's the staggering amount of propaganda by all possible means, in favour of the so-called superiority of liberalism.

See for instance the financial sector, that pushed so hard for deregulation for decades, then arranged the 2008 bailout. That took a lot of favourable opinions dispersed in every possible way to influence the legislative process; for relatively little money I might add, considering what they took home.

In computing, I witnessed as a developer the accomplishments of free software, which are absolutely astounding, with *no* management. Over the past few years, I have noticed a marked increase in what is commonly referred to as 'FUD' (for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), messages posted in forums that are meant to present free software in a negative light. I thought until recently that these attempts were futile, and would be easily dismissed; now I am not so sure, because it seems these efforts have been stepped up. I guess it's easier to pay a for a few writers of FUD than to actually do good products.

So, I would say skull gouging, as we call it were I write from, is a major factor. No wonder the reaction is so violent whenever someone speaks the unedulcorated truth.

>Direct action movements have been building on and fine-tuning these ideas since the '70s...

Indeed. As a software developer, I can vouch for the incredible success that is open source software, where performance meets pleasure of use, all for free.

When you see those results, you really start wondering just what is the need for all those corporate hierarchical layers that exist in the proprietary world.

It doesn't take that many dollars to use some kind of virtualization tool, and run your windows application inside a virtual machine.

I work daily with PostgreSQL with great pleasure.

I would add to your list the excellent SQLite : serverless, zero configuration. It's used as storage engine by Thunderbird, among others.

http://www.sqlite.org/index.html

Strangely, Oracle is one of the consortium members.

Is that so? I never heard of it before, even though I have been doing my daily work with various linux systems (including Ubuntu) since 2005. And I'm a software developper, so I pay attention to these things.

That's not proof of anything, but I'm not sure *why* you are so adamant about raising this issue... I call FUD.

>A quarter of a million hits to Ubutntu blank screen

I'm curious to know where that figure comes from?

Anyhow, according to google's group search (which still sports the page count), it seems that the windows blank screen is a much more common occurrence :

http://groups.google.fr/groups/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=windows+blank+screen&sitesearch=&scoring=d

>Considering that the latest workstation distributions are still plagued by basic install issues

Hu? I have done half a dozen installations of Debian this year alone on different kind of hardware (standard desktop box, dedibox, eeepc, fit-pc2, you name it), and *all* of them where quicker than any install of windows I've ever done.

In fact, it's amazingly easy and fast to have a completely operational Desktop with Linux, Office suite included. Sure you have to know a few things, but you also do for Windows, and the only reason it's considered easy is because it comes pre-installed.

> It is going on other things.

A rapidly growing portion is used to pay the interest on existing debt. And these interests accumulate in accounts that are very well shielded from taxes, which of course will in turn increase the deficits.

Agreed.

I host a small web site and, from my experience, 90% of the cost is bandwidth.

why people can't simply use *two* browsers :

-IE6 for those apps that depend on it

-anyone of the usual suspects (Mozilla, Chrome, Opera...) for a pleasant navigation and the new applications coming on line.

Compared to a forced upgrade of the legacy applications, would it be so hard to teach even to very computer illiterate users? That would at least allow some progress.

It has happened in banking for ever, and the only intervention from governments was to give bankers the means to _continue_ doing it, which they have done with a revenge.

uh? from the ubuntu site :
Commercially sponsored Debian-derived Linux distribution that focuses on ...
It's based on Debian, so if you strip down Ubuntu, you'll get Debian.
I don't see the point of stripping down Ubuntu, though? I find it easier to start with a streamed down system, and just add whatever I need, using for instance this :
http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
It works great, and preserves your other previously installed operating system(s)