Okay here is another good Linux writing...
quote:
For the love of Linux
By Polly Sprenger
There may have been other announcements at the Informix Worldwide User Conference in Seattle this week, but none inspired as much wild-eyed hyperbole as the company's announcement that its scaled-down database Informix SE would now support Linux.
"Informix on Linux is the single-most important event for computing in 1998," said Tim Schaefer, chairman of the Informix International User Group's Committee for Informix on Linux. "It simply changes everything."
The committee and its pals in freeware land say that Informix's announcement legitimizes the use of Linux for enterprise applications.
The group of Linux enthusiasts that gathered in the back of the hall for this impromptu soap-boxing all nodded in agreement as Schaefer and Jon "Mad Dog" Hall, Esq., executive director of Linux International, spoke about why Linux hasn't been taken seriously.
"I don't think the mainstream press understands Linux enough to articulate what happened here today," Schaefer said.
Mad Dog agreed, saying that even though large publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today covered the OS, they couldn't get past the strangeness of its offering. "All they see is that it was invented by a graduate student at the University of Helsinki in the middle of winter, and that it's offered free on the Internet," he said.
And there are other weird things too. Like the fact that instead of the requisite dorky key chains or ball point pens, the Linux crowd's marketing material consisted of lick-and-rub fake tattoos with a little penguin riding a snowboard and proclaiming, "Extreme Linux--it's hot and it's cool." The penguin is wearing ski goggles.
If you need one, I have 20 or so. This is a very enthusiastic group of developers.
In fact, I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running Linux.
And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and God handed down a client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola.
Four desktops can co-exist as one in Linux land: one that looks like a Mac, one that looks like Windows, one that looks like Unix, and one that is so magical and different we don't even have a brand name for it yet. I watched as application after application hit the screen: first a graphic design program, now a development tool, now a suite of workgroup apps! And did this PC choke? Did it stutter? Did it, even once, say that this program has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down?
No. And this is just on the client.
So if the Linux developers seem a little excitable, a little frantic, and a little, well, over the top, listen anyway. Developers become IS managers, and someday we may all think of Linux as just the way things are.
