Just to make sure the audience does not get the wrong impression from my first rant, settles down for a merry round of Linux / GPL roasting, and gets surprised when the temperature under their seats rises sharply: My scorn will be dished out indiscriminately between the Linux and the Windows camp - or, rather, between the Open Source and the Corporate camp, lest we forget Microsoft’s cuddly bedmate, Apple.

After all, the software force-fed to the more unfortunate computer users who can’t figure out the digital torture chamber that is Linux, isn’t any better than the Open Source creations. And to add insult to injury, they are charging those poor people for that crap, then charge them again when they want the upgrade in hopes it holds what the previous version promised. (Ha!).

We might not have the proper words for it, but it will surely make several well-off managers from the business enjoy a rather well-heated afterlife.

I grant you that Open Source software comes for free, as in free beer. That is, if you do not count in the hours it took to get it to work, and the years you will die earlier for the experience you went through. If the GPL evangelists had left it at “for free”, I might actually grant them the moral high ground they claim so complacently. But once they started that FLOSS rain dance about “free as in free speech”, things started to go rapidly downhill for what might have been the user’s last hope of a better tomorrow. (Note to self, don’t get sidetracked, that is for a later post…)

Today, we (meaning you and me, the poor sods having to use these boxen) are stuck smack in the middle between the ‘Corps who are out for profit maximization, and the evangelists of the Church of GNU who tell you that every single professional programmer in the world is a social problem.

You don’t believe the social problem thing? Just you wait for my next post, I have proof. ¹⁾