Re: Future of IT in Lebanon

Joseph,

I am going to re-arrange the reply starting from the bottom to emphasize the relevence to Lebanon.

Joseph Mouhanna wrote:

> I'm responding to a current theme of yours on SCL, which is actually
> relevant: that Lebanon's best chances are by going Linux and Open
> Source to develop an IT industry.

No Joseph, that is not exactly my point. My point is that *both* Open Source software and commercial software are needed in Lebanon. The options presented today to Lebanese are commercial vs pirated. That's a false choice. The choice should be commercial for those who can afford it and open source for those who can't. Piracy should not be an option because it is very detrimental to an IT industry in Lebanon specifically and Lebanon in general.

> I'm presenting some counter
> arguments, mainly that Lebanon should not have religion about any of
> these issues,

I don't disagree.

> and while it's in the process of building a software
> industry, it cannot affors to experiment,

Define experiment.  Linux is older than windows NT on which XP is based.

> and needs to focus on the
> platform that guarantees it the largest number of potential seats.
> Linux is not it,

I disagree. Taking Linux off the table is a very costly proposition. You are not going to be able to get Lebanon piracy users to start paying for an OS they can't afford.

> it's Windows, Apple, and Java development.

Java is on a different layer.. You still need the JVM to run somewhere.

> Open
> Source is something I am not convinced would be to Lebanon's benefit
> at this point, especially if the focus is on secondary applications
> (to avoid getting squished by the big boys).

We have a fundamental disagreement here.. why is open source ok elsewhere but bad for Lebanon? Why do you propose to deprive Lebanon of the fruits of Open Source? I don't understand.

Off topic quickies:

>>>To flat out say that Linux progammers were made and the mold was
>>>broken, would fall into the realm of religion.
>>
>>Agreed, which idiot is saying this?

[..]

I disagree with your premise. The hardware can be a Turing Machine.. how you program it makes the difference between men and boys :-)


And I disagree with your disagreement :-) as I'm not talking about the art of programming, I'm talking about the general architecture of the OS/Kernel (whatever you want to name it) that makes it vulnerable, and there are certain degrees of vulnerability.

Now, do you want to remind me about the statement you made earlier in regards to progammers skills, vis-a-vis your statement here about sepration of the men from the boys :-)

How do the statements above relate? One disagrees with the notion of Linux programmers being somehow unique and the other suggests that there is a separation between the hardware and the software (at least in theory). So how are the two quotes related? I quoted them for your convenience.

Call it whatever you like. It remains true. Does the Linux community have any evidence pointing to exhaustive testing in the field, with millions of deployed *end user* units, and hundreds of thousands of applications? No.

The devil is in the definition.. I suspect that by application you only qualify commercial applications. What is an application? Is it measured by size (the more bloated the more it's an application?) Is it measured by cost (the more costly the more it's an application)?

You'd have to be a bit more specific. The term WYSIWYG was coined by a small Seattle company called Aldus, it was bought out years later by Adobe. I don't understand what you mean by entering content without worrying about formatting.

Wasting time with paragraph headers when all you need is a tag that identifies something as a header (possibly nested) and choice of overall format for a document and let the software do everything else. Numbered lists is another example. Table of contents is poor, you have to manually refresh it. You have to tell the TOC not to include subtitles in the TOC. Page numbers need to be manually refreshed.. how many times have you seen a Word document with page 19 of 1? In the eighties I didn't have to manually format these. In Word I still do.

How was it leaps and bounds ahead of Excel, and which Quattro? DOS? Windows? Version 1? Version 5? Version 6?

Quattro for Windows... feature for feature comparison at the time.. Today in Excel to program macros, you have to learn Microsoft's programming environment, an external environment. In Quattro as in Lotus 123 before, Macros were just a sequence of statements between curly brackets in adjacent cell in the same spreadsheet.

Really now? :-) how's that lawsuit going BTW? I don't hear about it too much any more, but I did see a bunch of links on the Linux advocay site.

There is nothing to it except intimadation and opportunism that a court venue will rule on someday.. in the mean time allegation are mere allegations until proven.

Sure, let the lawyers argue that. In any case, I did not say that Linus is a replica, what I said was that it's a branch from the same *tree* (not another tree).

This arbor analogy is not precise.. what does "same *tree*" means? Same architecture tree, same source code tree, same peach tree?

If it was a clear cut, then why are lawyers still arguing over it? 

That's what lawyers do in life :-)

Are you changing your position on the funding? :-)

You are mixing labor and funding. There is a lot of free labor that goes into open source and little funding.

Incidently, Sun yesterday opened its Ultrasparc T1 chip :-)

Java is not yet a standard and won't be until Sun opens it up.


Sorry, but this is not the way the market sees it. We may split hairs in here, but in reality, developers our there are writing for Java (and a few for Microsoft's .net).

Right now both are owned by monopolies.. programers write for both environments because they are the only game in town. This does not make them standards. Sun can change the java spec at will. Developments of the java spec are weighed by Sun's bottom line. Sun's bottom line is paramount. Ditto for .net.

So, back to the main question: If open source is OK for people to use outside Lebanon then why is it not OK to use in Lebanon?

bassem
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Future of IT in Lebanon
    ... > Source software and commercial software are needed in Lebanon. ... > and open source for those who can't. ... Linux is older than windows NT on which XP is based. ... you agree that it's foolish to claim that programmers for a particular ...
    (soc.culture.lebanon)
  • Re: Future of IT in Lebanon
    ... >> particular market demographics. ... >for software consumption in Lebanon. ... >> personally a user and future contributor to Open Source, ... >Another thing that is becoming in vogue is to build a bootable Linux ...
    (soc.culture.lebanon)
  • Re: Future of IT in Lebanon
    ... In order to create a market for software production in Lebanon, you need a market for software consumption in Lebanon. ... I'm being practical, although I'm personally a user and future contributor to Open Source, but my company is not based in Lebanon. ... The point is that you build today's software for today's hardware and not for tomorrow's hardware. ...
    (soc.culture.lebanon)