How Open Source Might Finally Become Mainstream 231
geegel writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on how autocracies are now embracing open source, while at the same promoting national based IT services. The author, Evgeny Morozov, paints a bleak future of the future World Wide Web."
Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
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Open source code is generally considered tighter and superior than closed source. But alas, how do you know when the source code is closed? What's your point of reference, or are you just using FUD as an astroturfer for one of those close source companies?
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I'm trying to decide whether you've never used Windows at all, or whether you've used it for so long you're entirely delusional.
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As far as I am concerned--I see open source everywhere, I use it everywhere--it is mainstream.
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I read the article. It is ridiculous, and on every level.
His underlying premise is that unless you use commercial closed source software you are not a nationalist/patriot and you are opening the gates to allow foreign companies and governments gain such large valuation (I guess because they would be saving money by not buying commercial software thus reducing America's commercial value while at it) that they can use those saved funds to hedge their bets in order to buy American and European companies such
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
No offense, man, but it looks like you didn't actually read the article—you just skimmed it for something to disagree with. He doesn't say that at all. What he says is that it's likely that national governments, including the U.S. government, will resist purchasing and using software written by companies in other countries. And it's also likely that the U.S. government's attempts to get Silicon Valley companies to put back doors in all their software will feed into this trend.
The bit about open source isn't even the point of the article—it's just the lead-in. He doesn't actually draw any conclusions about open source other than that it may play some role in the balkanization of software on a national level, because it provides a jumping-off point for national versions of software. Frankly, it's a damned good article; the slashdot summary doesn't do it justice.
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I read through the whole article. You need to read the whole article.
It's amazing you can't see that he's claiming that American capitalism looses due to open source because it permits other countries to spend differently and that lack of spending on US goods inhibits Silicon Valley's to compete. He's saying that by giving foreign countries money (because they aren't spending on US products) they get to spend in other countries such as Africa, Russia, Brazil (all of which he mentions in his article) thus
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One big and growing problem the article highlights is that governments are becoming more directly involved in what goes into the software, not least of which backdoors for their own spying. But then the US has brought this to a head due to the FBI a
Thanks for the compliment (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks...
Here are some opening lines from previous Wall Street Journal articles:
- At the end of 2010, the "global financial" traders, who tend to be morally crippled and calloused egomaniacs...
- At the end of 2010, the "journalistic reporting" newspapers, whose employees tend to be hypocritical parasites and star-struck airheads...
- At the end of 2010, the "United States", whose elected representatives tend to be greedy lawyers and ignorant blowhards...
How fun!
Re:Thanks for the compliment (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how he mentioned computer geeks and academics, but not Google, Red Hat, IBM or hundreds of other examples of open source in mainstream life.
Like most of the WSJ this article is full of FUD and written to agree with their readers pre-conceived notions.
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Neither Google nor IBM are particulary open source activists, tough some of their employees might be. The whole activism part really is entirely a geek thing, much like caring about DRM still is (unfortunately).
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He did not have to mention activists, he could have mentioned users instead. This article is written this way on purpose. It is because it fits the pre-conceived notions of WSJ readers. The WSJ has become just another part of the Murdoch echo chamber.
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And your citation in support of this is where exactly? What study did you perform? Are you just repeating what you've heard on sites such as digg.com or microsoft's get the facts?
If you really knew you'd know better than to even attempt such fiction here at slashdot.
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It doesn't matter what he said about activists. He's demonstrating utter incompetence in his article, from beginning to end. Seriously, he's lost when it comes to understanding open source and those that support it. He seems to imply that open source is *only* sold through activists efforts. The opening paragraph shows his incompetent ire. His following thesis shames everyone everywhere.
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It's utterly ludicrous to make such a bullshit statement about open source supporters. He's just showing how big of an idiot he is.
Re:Thanks for the compliment (Score:4, Insightful)
Mangers and Executives via "Corporate Visions" of course, those other folks just do that trivial crap called actual work.
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Hmm. You think WSJ articles are written by a bot?
And what's with open-source being in "scare quotes"?
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FUD as in FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not doubt that governments may try to control the internet and other information access. But if they try to "take over" the software, then it is no longer Open Source, by definition.
I think muddling the issues of control and Open Source together will lead to little but confusion.
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Until they outlaw compilers.... 8^)
Seriously, I think this analysis is a pretty overt attempt to sully FOSS' reputation by characterising it as a tool of autocrats, yet ignoring the very characteristics that make it resistant to abuse. The unspoken comparison here is that com
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I expected it to read that way. But for me, it didn't:
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And it will still be Open Source. Just as we have always been at war with Eurasia. Authoritarian regimes tell you what words mean, and what reality is.
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Re:FUD as in FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a pretty clear definition of Open Source, and it does not mean software that your government (or anybody else) locks you into using.
The definition of open source is orthogonal to being required to use the software. If your government (or anyone else, such as your employer) says "you will use Linux," you're locked in; it has no effect on the open-source-ness of Linux itself. OSS has the advantage of being less prone to vendor lock-in than proprietary software does, but that's a separate issue.
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The definition of Open Source is as malleable as any other definition to the authoritarian/fascist state.
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BTW, if you haven't read 1984 you may not have fully understood my comment.
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There is a pretty clear definition of Open Source...
Yes and that definition is that the "Source" is "Open" for anyone to examine. Open Source does not mean free, or that the source can be modified, or that it can even be distributed. Open Source simply means that the source is open for examination. It is possibly to have proprietary open source. A person or company can create a completely proprietary solution covered by the usual restrictive intellectual property rights yet still reveal the source. Just because the source is revealed it doesn't mean you
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If you modify it and distribute your changes, then (in almost all cases), you are required to distribute the source as well.
Wrong. Only a very small subset (GPL and its derivatives) of the Open Source licenses actually require you to share your source with your binaries. Most (BSD, MIT, Apache, MPL, zlib) don't.
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You're arguing about a grain of sand and missing the larger point.
A government takes something like Linux or Apache, a piece of open-source software. They're using open-source software. They have programmers that make a few changes to it, and send it out to wherever it's going. You can argue all you want that the software is no longer considered "Open Source Software", in capital letters and everything. And yeah, don't worry, they're not going to abide by the licensing terms so they aren't going to be c
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And yeah, don't worry, they're not going to abide by the licensing terms so they aren't going to be considered a part of your community anyway.
You're missing a point here, actually. To use the GPL as an example, those who modify the code are not required to make those changes public unless they're distributing the code outside their organization. For large government entities, well, those are very large organizations. It doesn't mean they're violating the terms of the license at all.
Additionally, I've been a direct observer of code produced within a government agency being contributed back upstream. You're probably going to want to split hairs by
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With a name like AmicusNYCL, you should know that Open Source software, just like proprietary software, comes with legal obligations. If a government can do what you say, i.e., usurp the rights behind a piece of Open Source software (many of which have the clout of large corporations behind them), then they can do that to proprietary software just as easily. At which point whether it is Open Source or not becomes completely irrelevant to the issue, which w
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Wrong. Only a very small subset (GPL and its derivatives) of the Open Source licenses actually require you to share your source with your binaries. Most (BSD, MIT, Apache, MPL, zlib) don't.
That's a very misleading statement. While there are tons of OSI-approved licenses [opensource.org], and many others that haven't been subjected to any formal review criteria, I'd love to see statistics on how many projects use licenses that require code sharing versus those that don't. Given the enormous growth in popularity of the GPL alone over the last decade alone, and my personal memory of over 20 years of open source and free software, I strongly suspect the number of projects that require sharing code will dwarf the
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It already is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Open Source is already mainstream. Android has made Linux mainstream
2011 the year of Linux on the cellphone.
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Try 2010.
Heck, between RIM switching to something based on QNX, iPhone, Android and webOS the only one not running a grown up OS is WP7.
Re:It already is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Answer: They will laugh their ass off. (Score:5, Funny)
FTA: How will officials in Washington react when China's Tencent (with a market capitalization of $42 billion, almost twice that of Yahoo) or Russia's Yandex makes a bid for AOL?
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It's okay. I had enough coasters saved up in the 90's to last me till Doomsday.
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Most likely it would be Russian Online Federated Link (ROFL).
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Most likely it would be Russian Online Federated Link (ROFL).
Russian Online Federated Link Moscow Access Office (ROFLMAO)
Peer-to-Peer? (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is very well composed, but does not mention peer-to-peer solutions, which avoid the big-brother problem. Projects like Diaspora [joindiaspora.com] are working on systems that implement this kind of P2P-based web using web-of-trust [wikipedia.org]. I assume that Diaspora apps will be able to facilitate various services, hopefully including things like communication.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corporation (Fox News), which is probably why it didn't mention things like MySpace being owned by Murdock's political powerhouse, which is clearly along a similar (if not identical) line. Free Software best combats this with the Affero General Public License [wikipedia.org], which closes the "ASP loophole" by marking an implementation of the software as the same as its distribution (thus modifications must be made public). Examples include Diaspora (social media), Gitorious [wikipedia.org] (software forge), and Identi.ca [wikipedia.org] (micro-blogging) among others [wikipedia.org].
AGPL (Score:2)
With an authoritarian regime, license does not matter. GLP/APL violations. It doesn't matter, all governments have sovereign immunity. You can sue them only if they allow it.
Ignoring the law, it might create some stigma when a violator is looking for community support, especially when that community includes an allied nation. Exposing massive teams of developers to something like a F/OSS project will also expose them to its origins (since scrubbing that information would be too harmful to be worthwhile), which might make for some appreciation for the idea, even if it takes a generation or two to sink in ... though don't forget the intense parallels between socialism and Free S
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Diaspora is not peer to peer. It's a federated service like smtp or xmpp/jabber. The identity model is also that of the web which may not be rich enough to do a fine grained web-of-trust or get around despotic governments in its current form.
I'm skeptical of your assessment given its primary focus is decentralization, though Diaspora has such a small amount of documentation that I could be mistaken. If it does use an intermediary before it goes direct between the parties involved, that opens up a vector for a man-in-the-middle attack by Big Brother or whomever else. I'm sure that would be deemed unacceptable, so I am confident that Diaspora won't have this problem (assuming it even gets off the ground).
"Finally?" (Score:4, Informative)
Open Source might "finally" become mainstream? It hasn't been mainstream for quite some time? What strange alternate universe is this?
Re:"Finally?" (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless. Who's ever heard of those? No, it's when foreign governments start using open source software that people will pay attention ;)
This is about non-cloud software and systems (Score:3)
Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless.
This article is mostly about desktop software rather than web services. The WSJ author doesn't look at web apps and phone apps and the fact that they're going to obsolete the entire desktop software industry. Instead, the story focuses on servers and applications in general (think of Stuxnet's impact on Iran [slashdot.org]'s nuclear reactor program and Skype's supposed back-doors [slashdot.org]). The cloud is another issue altogether and (outside of the protections afforded by the AGPL [wikipedia.org]) tangential, in a longer-term scope of the probl
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Clearly the fact that Google and Facebook are built largely on open source software is meaningless. Who's ever heard of those? No, it's when foreign governments start using open source software that people will pay attention ;)
So because Google and Facebook are mainstream everything they touch is by extension? Pass some of that over here please.
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No, its not mainstream. It's the popular alternative, like that Radio station that plays a lot of Nirvana and Foo Fighters.
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like that Radio station that plays a lot of Nirvana and Foo Fighters.
Thanks for that analogy grandpa. Do you know any bands from this millennium?
Open source is a good thing all around (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm encouraged to hear that major organizations are finally seeing the light.
To use a (yet another, sorry) car analogy: Open source is like being able to buy a service manual and replacement parts at your local auto shop, and then doing the work yourself -- or paying a mechanic of your choice to do it for you. Closed source is more like buying the car with the hood welded shut, and any attempt to modify or service it yourself not only voids the warranty, but is actually criminal in some situations and jurisdictions. Moreover, the manufacturer is under no obligation to disclose or repair defects or "undocumented features" -- such as logging your travels and selling it to the highest bidder.
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Actually that reminds me, on the subject of autocratic regimes and welded-shut hoods.
I recently did some work on a Ford that was having acceleration issues. It turns out, the problem was simple: the air flow sensor needed cleaning. Unfortunately, the air flow sensor is held in place by two "tamper-proof" Torx(TM) screws.
Now, as every self-respecting geek should know, there is really no such thing as a tamper-proof screw. In this case, it's actually just a "really expensive to remove" screw, because the s
BIND, Apache, Firefox.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Consider the source. This is the WSJ. They know tech savvy like your grandma knows Katy Perry tunes. Which is, not fucking much. They can't see the "This is Open Source, you frickin' dolts" when they use their Android phone to get a Google search.
Reminds me of the jackasses who say they've never used Unix... Which I beat them down with; you've never picked up a phone? Every central office ESS5 switch is running Unix, and now the phones themselves are running Linuxy kernels to prop up the silly GUIs. T
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So by your logic someone who uses a website that is hosted on a Win server is a Windows user even if they access it from a Linux box? No wonder people have a hard time understanding where you're coming from.
If you telnet into a Unix box and run a program there, would you say you are not a Unix user? Does the protocol make that much difference?
Logic fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh really? And how exactly is that going to work, given that open source is by definition not secret?
(I get that in a complex code base it may be possible to insert malicious code. But this is true of any code base, hardly a defining characteristic of open source.)
Missed the big point (Score:2)
How will officials in Washington or Brussels react when China's Tencent (with a market capitalization of $42 billion, almost twice that of Yahoo) or Russia's Yandex makes a bid for AOL or Skype?
What will happen once Russian or Chinese firms seek to purchase a stake in companies like Google (a contractor to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) or Amazon (which caters to nearly 20 U.S. government agencies through its Web hosting services)?
The real problem here is not software, it's money.
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In deed, while blaming open source the real culprits of this problem are being hidden.
They are the big bonus grabbing traitors that outsourced or jobs and have been enabling the economies of dictatorships.
But the press is scared to death of that group, that is why open source is being blamed.
too bad democratic politicians aren't as nervous (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just too bad that democratic politicians aren't also nervous about wasting tax payer dollars on proprietary software, becoming dependent on the capricious whims of software companies, and become concerned about backdoors in their software.
Perhaps this difference in nervousness can be explained by the fact that democratic politicians are more susceptible to the financial and political pressures of corporations, while autocrats don't have to give a damn?
In any case, the whole article sounds like a smear campaign, trying to associate open source software with communism and "autocrats"; in fact, a number of democracies have also seen the light on open source software and also mandated its use there.
Translation (Score:2)
They could start to use something that they could check that don't have any of our backdoors.
The article is a bit one sided...THEY could spy communications, THEY could plant backdoors, etc, etc... seems that US wants the monopoly on that topic too.
Distribution (Score:2)
The GPL says you only have to distribute source if you're distributing binaries outside your own organization. It uses the term "third party" to define when distribution has taken place. But "here in Evilstan, all of our citizens are one big happy family. We reject your American notions of individuals. We are all one organization."
Of course, the problem is moot because the Evilstan courts are constrolled by Evilstan's dictator.
Tool (Score:2)
Exhibit A [newamerica.net].
Exhibit B [newamerica.net].
And here is how his employers describe his career [newamerica.net], in particular:
Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.
This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.
Exporting freedom is good. Covert action is bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
The most astonishing thing about this atrocious article is that not only does it not question whether it's legitimate for US institutions to undermine and manipulate the political and economic institutions of the world, it actually, openly proposes that openness is a threat, because it inhibits covert action.
The point of free and open source software is freedom. That is not the point of US power blocs and their covert operations.
levels (Score:3)
First, aren't these people right in distrusting commercial US-developed software? It's not exactly as if backdoors, or US secret services influencing commercial entities, or the combination of both were an unfathomable, never-seen-before idea. On the contrary, if I were leader of a country even just friendly with someone who once knew someone who is related to someone who is currently on the US shitlist, I'd consider that a healthy dose of caution.
Two, isn't that what the concepts behind Internet technology were designed to do? Provide everyone with the same protocols, so they can have their own implementation of them? As long as my mail server is speaking SMTP, I can write it myself.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
xIn Capitalist America, government works for big business.
Wait, that's still not a joke.
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Ironically, Government works for Big Labor too!
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, are shareholders not people now?
Sure they are but legally they are only entitled to one vote per person, not ten thousand times the political influence of the average voter by virtue of being a major shareholder in a corporation that "owns" a bunch of politicians.
And have we revoked the right of people to associate as they see fit, which implies the right to form corporations to pursue common business interests?
Well, you are free to hang out with anyone you want to but maybe it's time to return the corporation to its roots, when the purpose of a corporation wasn't "maximize profit for the shareholders regardless of legal or ethical implications" but rather to provide a product or service that would be beneficial to the community.
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Finally! Proof that open source is a Communist front! Where's McCarthy when you need him?
Thankfully dead.
Microsoft is the shining light that will lead us out of this abyss!
And right into another deeper, moar horrible MS branded one!
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How does open source help fight security in the short term? wouldn't open source make it easier? ... Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
Easy. They can inspect the code and and see if any backdoors have been written in and take them out.
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How does open source help fight security in the short term?
Fight security? Did you mean improve security or fight vulnerabilities? In the short term it allows them to audit and improve the code, especially if they believe (as many do) that there are backdoors built into commercial, closed source OS's and applications.
Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
It sounds to me like both. Also, open source allows them to move development to their own country and build up a strategic reserve of programming talent versed in the software the government uses and able to make security improvements and fixes, rather
Re:Stallman Would Be So Proud! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's sadly true. The technology for implementing fascism is getting better every day, and the US is sadly headed very rapidly in that direction.
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The technology for implementing fascism was available to Mussolini, many decades ago. What is your point?
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Let's see...buying a controlling interest in GM...check...attempting to take over health care...check...proposals for universal Government provided ID's for Internet use...check.
He's quite lefty enough, and he's taken great strides towards that end.
It's ironic how China and US are both moving towards becoming corporate fascist states from opposite directions.
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"Let's see...buying a controlling interest in GM...check...attempting to take over health care...check...proposals for universal Government provided ID's for Internet use...check."
Wow, you're turning into France!
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The political spectrum traditionally has fascism on the right and socialism on the left. You seem to have this backwards.
But if your point was that Obama is pretty centrist, I'd agree.
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Nazism stand for National Socialism.
Fascism seems to be mostly a far right thing, but can occasionally be on the left of the political spectrum... The original Italian fascism promoted a corporatist economy. And it's not "a modern form" of communism, as it is far from modern and has nothing to do with "communism or not". It just happened that you can have both fascism and communism at the same time. If you're confused by the distinction, please don't write bullshit.
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Those damn C pointers will get you everytime...
**futureWorldWideWeb = bleak;
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There is also no linux version.
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It is indeed no cost. That has nothing to do with this topic though.
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.. on the Year of the Linux!
It's been the year of the Linux for a generation now just not year of Linux on the desktop.
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