hi, caveat - this is a long Girish-style post full of my personal opinions, so if you continue reading it, do not blame me - you have been warned ;-)
First, some background: some years back I attended a foss promotion meeting attended by big shots from IBM, Sun, HP etc. The HP guy was most vehement in supporting open source and attacking Microsoft. I asked why all his ads say 'Compaq recommends Microsoft Windows'. He said that Microsoft pays a big subsidy to any company that puts in that sentence in their ads, so the marketing people put it in. Also Microsoft will not pay if some models come with Linux and the word 'linux' is prominent. If the word is there, it should be in the smallest possible type. At times Acer (and some other companies) release models - usually flagship models - that ship with linux. The rule laid down by Microsoft is that this should be mentioned in small type and the recommendation of Windows in a very prominent position. In short, Microsoft does it's best to see that the term Linux does not get prominence anywhere. So what else is new - we all know this. What we all do not realise is that a lot of companies that produce linux distros - and a lot of people who use the said distros are also helping Microsoft to play down the term Linux. If one looks at the sites of redhat, fedora, suse, debian, mandriva, one finds plentiful mention of the word linux. But the word is missing in the sites of two 'popular' distros - android and ubuntu. If you ask most Linux users what OS they use, they will say 'Linux' (or GNU/Linux). But if you ask people using distros like Ubuntu or android, they will say 'Ubuntu' or 'android'. Similarly hardware companies that ship machines with linux are persuaded to use terms like 'we ship with ubuntu' or 'we ship with android' rather than say 'we ship with linux'. I will not go into how the distros that disown Linux also fail to contribute back to the community ... this is too well known. So let us promote - and encourage others to promote - Linux (or, if you so desire GNU/Linux. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc