It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that Microsoft topped the list in our “Who Don’t You Trust” poll. That’s the poll, launched on May 27th and closed on June 20th, in which we asked the question, “What tech company would you least trust to manage a FOSS project?” 411 people took the poll, which might be characterized by it’s lack of surprising results. In fact, we have to go to nearly the bottom of the list to find some small surprises.
Posts published by “FOSS Force”
According to a story posted by Phillip Molnar at the Monterey County Herald, the U.S. Army is blocking access to parts of The Guardian, the UK based news website which broke the story about the NSA’s surreptitious data collection programs. When the Herald’s story was first posted last night, it was unknown how widespread the outage was or who was behind it, only that employees at the Presidio of Monterey, California were unable to connect with certain pages of the UK website:
The first of anything is usually the best. Not always, but usually.
The way we figure it, that includes the first time a person installs and uses GNU/Linux. Wasn’t that a special experience? We know it was for us.
Friday FOSS Week in Review
We may be paranoid but they are out to get us
In week three (or is it week four?) of the Spy vs. Spy scandal, the Obama folks keep saying things like “what’s the big deal?” while trying to convince us that the secret oversight court called FISA (we prefer “the Star Chamber”) has nothing but our constitutional rights in mind when it rubber stamps requests to secretly steal our privacy. Obama likes to talk about transparency. Indeed, he becomes more transparent by the moment; we’re beginning to see right through him. The 22nd amendment should now be seen as a face saver for Mr. Obama–as we would think no self respecting liberal or progressive would vote again for this man who once represented our best hope. Pity.
Last week’s FOSS Force poll was only up for a few hours before we had to take it down.
It dealt with the issue of community distros. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to take a gander at the article that accompanied the poll. Mainly, it sought to determine what you considered to be a community GNU/Linux distro. There had been quite a bit of discussion on the subject here on our site, so we decided to put it to you in a down and dirty poll, just to see if we could come to any kind of consensus.
Friday FOSS Week in Review
Looking at life through the prism of the NSA
We thought last week was the week for leaked government secrets on government spying. Nope. Last week was just the tip of the iceberg coming over the horizon, with the helmsman going into full reverse attempting to avoid a collision. This week the slow motion ship of state made contact with the iceberg. Damage assessment is being done now as we write these words.
According to our “Newbie” Distro Poll, someone considering moving from Windows or Mac to Linux should consider taking Linux Mint for a spin. The poll asked the question, “What Linux distro would you be most likely to recommend to a new Linux user?” Evidently this was a subject that interested many of you, because a whopping 1,339 votes were cast in this poll, making it the most number of votes one of our polls has ever received.
Editor’s note: At approximately 8:30 pm EDT on Monday, June 10, 2013 we decided to pull the plug on our Community Distro poll which is referenced in this article after we discovered that 90 votes were cast from the same IP address, evidently in Norway. All votes cast by this IP were for the same single distribution, evidently by an overeager fan of the distro wanting to improve its ranking as a community distro.
Due to issues of public trust, we have decided NOT to continue this poll with a manual count. We appreciate the time all of you took to participate, and we apologize for not being able to see this poll through to it’s completion.
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We love it when you make us think and last week you did just that.
On Monday, Christine Hall stirred-up the mud a little with her article Since When Was Ubuntu A Community Distro? The article was written as a tongue in cheek response to a post on another site, in which a writer had feigned surprise while lamenting the fact that Ubuntu was “no longer a community distro.”
Ms Hall feigned surprise right back, while asserting Ubuntu to never having been a community Linux distro, despite Mr. Shuttleworth and Canonical calling it so.
According to our Software Preference Poll, FOSS Force visitors will use commercially developed software, especially if it’s the best software for the job, but would prefer to use community developed, noncommercial software. Absolutely none of our visitors said they’d prefer commercial software.
The poll, which ran from May 13, 2013 through 12:21 am EDT on June 7, posed the question, “Do you prefer open source software that’s commercially or community developed and distributed?” Those taking the poll were given three answers from which to make one choice:
Well, that’s really not the question. Most of you probably don’t have a web server. If you do, you very well might be using something that’s not on our list. There are some great distros, known to make dependable and trouble-free servers, that aren’t listed here. The most glaring omission is probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), considered by some to be the Cadillac of server distros.