"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."Intro
--Hemingway, Cicero, Voltaire, Mark Twain, or maybe T.S. Elliot
Open source computing appears to be at a veritable tipping point for mass adoption. Dell actively promotes machines with Ubuntu preinstalled, Wal-mart has a hot selling Linux-based desktop, the OLPC project is getting commodity laptops in the hands of the third-world and Asus is getting them to the rest. Though this mass adoption might very well be nothing more than a footnote in the minds of many open source aficionados I view it of utmost importance regarding the topic of file formats and true digital freedom. Unless formats like odf, ogg vorbis/theora and the like are actually used in the wild they will be ignored by the online services that we use daily.
How can we assist this mass adoption? Well, like many of my friends at FUDcon, I install Fedora on every machine whose owner will allow it and, at least in my case, there is a clear dual motive. On one hand, as stated previously, I desire open source to be adopted by the masses, on the other I want my family to have machines that meet their needs. Since they are family I would be their tech support regardless of what OS they choose to run. I merely urge them to let me install Fedora since that's what I use and it's the only way I can test things out for them.
Up Next
The first challenge: Remote administration
4 comments:
Ironically I write this as tax season is here and I find myself using TurboTax with an "unsupported" configuration. I dream of the day GnuCash will seamlessly integrate with the financial institutions I prefer. Though my wife and I were given the "Miracle of Life" DVD at the baby shower for our first born, last night we were forced to watch it online using RealPlayer on the NOVA website (quicktime was the only other format offered). Sadly, at least regarding issues of file formats and codecs many of the distros I mentioned before are taking the path of least resistance.
TurboTax has an online version that requires no local install (and thus no unsupportable O/S). ;-) It does work with Firefox, although I have heard one anecdote where a user had to install the "User Agent Switcher" extension to masquerade Firefox as IE6. A couple people in my LUG had used this method successfully last year for their 2006 taxes.
Brenton,
Thank you for posting on this. I'm a bit behind reading my posts, but when I saw it, I thought you might like my help, so I created this page.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraFamily/
Unfortunately, at the time, I couldn't remember your name so I am glad you posted.
Let me know how we can convince others to join and get started converting our family/friends to Fedora.
Cheers,
Clint
Thanks for creating the wiki page. That's definitely a better place to house ideas than my blog. As I think of things I'll add them there as well.
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