Teleidoscope

Sat, Nov 04, 2006

Betrayals of Principles

Posted at 4:29 pm MST to Current Events

Two cases of betrayal of principles are holding my attention today.

One is the Haggard case, which is mostly amusing (especially since I am 2000 miles from Colorado Springs Conservatives). I liked John Scalzi's followup entry "In other words, he didn't inhale. Either time." and some of the discussion on that blog entry is very amusing, too.

I am also looking forward to Mr. Scalzi's comments on the election. His blog is one of my favorites, lately. (But I am embarrassed to admit that I am one of those who who found his excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident.) I haven't tried making a schadenfreude pie because I don't do pies even when I have an adequate kitchen (which the one in this corp-housing apartment isn't) but I may try talking my friend Nanette into attempting one.

The second case of betrayals of principles is the announcement on thursday by Novell that they are allying with Microsoft and will be paying them royalties. Don't these people pay attention to history? I don't mean world history, I mean industry history, the kind that is covered by trade papers like Infoworld and Computerworld. Anyone who shakes hands with Microsoft draws back a bloody stump... it just sometimes takes them a while to notice that they are bleeding out. alliance. And making vague claims of IP infractions in Linux while violating the spirit (if possibly not the strict letter) of the GPL has done real well for SCO. Groklaw in general seems to be doing a good job of following this mess, while the outrage of the free software community is reverberating across the web.

One effect of this is that I spent several hours today trying to decide which non-Novell Linux version will replace SuSE 10.0 on the laptop where I am writing this. I'd been reluctant to upgrade to 10.1 or beyond (10.2 is almost out and I want some of the newer packages) because I didn't like reports of some of the technical directions they were taking. Now I have an added incentive to go another direction entirely.

It will probably be Kubuntu because Ubuntu is an officially supported host platform for VMWare. Kubuntu instead of vanilla Ubuntu because I strongly prefer KDE to Gnome for my desktop (the main reason I was driven away from Red Hat/Fedora, which I used for several years).

I'll start the backups before I go to bed, and plan to make the OS switch tomorrow.

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