New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Cheers, archuser. I hear what you mean, and to a degree I agree. I have no vested interest in "converting" people to open source, but in the particular case in this article, it was ostensibly part of the job: find IT solutions that made financial sense. The problem was by "financial sense", they preferred illegal use to legal options. This was not a crusade, and it is sad to me that people's willingness to learn new things often outweighs the danger of them failing, and I'm concerned that leaders in a community are sending that message, by example, to students.
Thanks for reading!
At best, I hope that the 'adoption' of open source in large companies will hint to people who are otherwise dedicated to closed source solutions that open source is a viable model. But I have a feeling that all it will do is reenforce the falsehood that in order for open source to be taken seriously, it must be 'blessed' by a 'real company'.
Anyway, the press-at-large gushing over it as if it was an apple and microsoft innovation notwithstanding, more open source is not a bad thing.