I will be RSVP'ing after I get approval from my boss this morning. On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Trent Shipley wrote: > 1) The County is in violation of State and County regulations. > Specifically, Microsoft is a a convicted monopolist. The County can't do > business with monopolists. > > (NOTE WELL: to carry the case you better have lawyers there. The county will No offense Trent, I'm new here, but I don't see you in my recent archives (and my DSL is acting flakey, so I can't check the PLUG site). Are you from Microsoft? Please forgive me if I'm off base, but this sounds like a troll to me. First off, I think the law only states that the county has the option of refusing to deal with convicted abusive monopolies. Second, twisting arms into compliance is almost never the right idea, and is extremely dangerous if you are not sure how much power you wield (which in this case, I feel we do not) - only a person in a position of significant power, who doesn't mind damaging the relationship, should rely on adversarial tactics. IMNERHO, the right thing to do at this stage with the legal issue is to hint at it and let them consider it on their own. Taking a hard-line adversarial sounds pretty unpleasant to me. They will be far more receptive to us if we are collaborators/supporters. We should be looking for a way to help our community leaders solve a problem. Furrow our brows and express our sympathy about a major vendor, who provides a product that our government has become dependant on, who is an abusive monopoly and is charging extortionate fees. County has the very same concerns, but feel that there is no way out. They will ask, "OK, so we know this is a problem. But PLUG, what are you suggesting?" Then we say, "Linux can be part of the solution. We're here to help, friend. We believe in this community and we believe in you. Together, we can solve this problem. Let us show you the way out." (hmm, did Microsoft patent "the way out"? haha) (hrm, moment of clarity - I bet that *is* why they trademarked "the way out" - because it works so well for our side ) They will then bring up some Microsoft FUD. We must not lose our cool at that point. We have to answer their questions calmly, rationally, and simply - such that there is no denying that we have a point. EG: "Bill says opening source causes terrorists to attack your networks" - we respond that open source has a better security track record, and Microsoft has just announced that they will open the core of their new security product, "Palladium." At the end, they will probably look for a commitment from us to "be there for them." We should tell them about PLUG-discuss, and agree to do everything we can to help make the transition easier. If at the end they say, "OK, we gave you your fifteen minutes. Now get the hell out of our office." Then we think about adversarial tactics - but I find that extremely unlikely. They're just people like us, trying to do their jobs well. Next year, we ask them the same question again. Ask what we can do to help our community leaders escape from the abusive monopoly. They know what the problem is; they just don't believe that there is any alternative. Get them to share our desire to escape from Microsoft, to feel like we're on the same team, then provide them with the information, tools, and assistance to start the migration. After all - these are politicians we are talking about. Playing politics is not my way - I'm a hacker, I prefer to state the undeniable facts; that should be enough. Unfortunately, if a typical human doesn't share your desire to see the truth, it doesn't matter how true it is. > How much is *retraining* going to cost. > > I've used Linux and Windows and Windows is *much* easier to work with. > Linux and its tools also tend to have a lot more anoying bugs that the > comercial stuff. The saving grace seems to be that the *nix architecture > tends to keep my OS up and running--provided that the user knows the tricks > to take advantage of that fact. > > Even so, I wind up restarting Xfree pretty often. Look, friend, if you're new to Linux, we're here to help you too. It sounds like you've got some bugs in your system. Is it an old distro? Are you using really old or really new hardware? Are you running a lot of alpha and beta software? What you're describing sounds like a severely malfunctioning system - a bunch of things must have gone wrong, but we can help you straighten it out. > The fact that I don't have > to reboot the machine is pretty irrelevant--restarting the X windowing system > is the moral equivalent of rebooting the work station. ??? Well, we can help you learn more about the architecture of computing systems too if you want. EG: The GUI is the tiny little layer on top of all the important stuff. As standardized in the MVC model, the visual representation of a system is only one small component of the system as a whole.