On Saturday 15 March 2003 18:36, Leon Brooks wrote: > On Friday 14 March 2003 03:56 am, Francisco Alcaraz Ariza wrote: > > 1) I don't think that American people that would buy Mandrake won't buy > > it now, because all the American not Windows user were antipatriotic > > before. If you are a good American, you must use windows, musn't you?
This was basically my point, but I've been thinking about it. Many idiots of that type _do_ buy linux. In fact, I've been in the position of advocating linux to corporate management, and I don't know how I forgot this.... So, Jean-Michel Dault's original posting is relevant; people in the position of trying to sell Mandrake to management need to find answers to, "Let's go with Redhat, because it's made in the good ol' US of A." On another subject: > No. It's a risk to national security. > > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,5264,00.asp >From the article, Microsoft plans to withhold one protocol and a few APIs because of security issues, and: > The protocol, which is part of Message Queuing, contains a coding mistake > that would threaten the security of enterprise systems using it if it were > disclosed, Allchin said. This was almost a year ago; more than enough time for some cracker to reverse engineer the protocol, discover the vulnerability, write an exploit kit, and distribute it to millions of codezkidz. So either the exploit wasn't easily usable, or, in this case, obscurity bought Microsoft just enough time to get a fix out before the vulnerability was found. Either way, they got away with it this time; I don't think this proves that using Windows is unpatriotic. Also, pushing the argument that the US government shouldn't be using any OS that could have security issues would be a bad idea for linux. IIRC, the government commissioned a thorough security audit of OpenBSD, and a large share of the funding for OpenBSD's security R&D comes from DARPA, USAF, and NSA--so if they're going to go with a different OS because of security issues, it's not going to be Mandrake.
