Note to FSF: Nobody cares…

The Free Software Foundation is running a campaign highlighting the “evils” of Windows 7. They highlight 7 deadly sins (of course) and they really make a compelling case against Windows 7. It’s a major shift for the FSF–they usually don’t get all political at this level.

Here’s the bad news: nobody cares.

Corporations that have adopted Windows and Office aren’t about to jump ship to Linux or the ever-elusive “GNU Operating System”. Too much has been invested in infrastructure and training. License fees have been paid. Sys admins have been hired and trained. That ship has sailed.

Small business may switch, but not based on this political action. That decision will be based on one thing and one thing only: impact to the bottom line. Any small business owner that makes this kind of decision without considering the bottom line isn’t going to be in business long.

I am a firm advocate and supporter of Linux. I use Linux every day in my job, both on the desktop and on servers. I have Windows machines, and I own a copy of Office. Why? Because it’s what my clients want. No matter how much OpenOffice touts itself as “Office compatible” it’s not 100% compatible. The differences may be minor and subtle, but when I create a report for a client and the formatting is messy because of the differences, it reflects badly on me. Not on OpenOffice. My client doesn’t care how I create the document. They only care that they can open the document in Word.

When a client asks for full functionality in Outlook, I can’t just tell them they should be using Thunderbird and Lightning. They’ve made a decision at the desktop level to use Outlook and I have to respect that. Now that they’ve made that decision, what’s the best way to give them the infrastructure to support it? Exchange must be considered because, while it may not be the cheapest or easiest answer, it is still arguably the best way to provide full functionality to the Outlook client. Linux based “free” alternatives to Exchange are still largely a variety of different services that have been integrated into a unified platform. If you can get them tweaked out properly, they work and work well. But they require a support infrastructure that’s often foreign to folks like my clients.

It could be argued that situations like the one above support the FSF’s contention that Microsoft locks users in and violates standards. They’re right, of course, but again the decision to go down that road has been made and altering course is often challenging and not cost effective.

I admire and respect the work of the Free Software Foundation (except for the whole GNU/Linux thing, but that’s a different rant). I wish them luck in changing the world, but trying to alter the course of ocean liners isn’t the easiest thing to do and may not be the best way to spend resources.

Vietnamese Hospitality…

Today, I got caught in a terrible rainstorm. I’ve been lucky so far in that I’ve only been caught in mild rain (relatively speaking). Today’s storm was bad. Lots of people flooded out their bike engines. Water was over the foot pegs on my bike. Even with a poncho on, I got completely soaked thanks to cars that didn’t bother slowing down. Waves of water would assault me from the side, often shooting up under my poncho. I was as wet as I could be, and it wasn’t pleasant.

On the way home, I had to stop at the Sufat dealer where I’d purchased my bike. There was some paperwork to finalize. The manager took one look at me and immediately dragged me to the back room, where he made me take off my soaking wet shirt and gave me one of his own to wear. He then made me hot tea and sat me down so I could warm up. We finished the paperwork issues (still have to go back one more time–the Vietnamese do love their paperwork) and I went on my way in a clean, dry shirt. 10 minutes later I was at home.

The rain finally slowed down. Our neighborhood was not as hard hit as the center of the city, where I started out. Still, it was a hard rain. As wet as I got, I still had fun.

“I thought you said ‘goat’…”

I tried goat for the very first time tonight at a BBQ place in Hai Phong. There were two types of meat served: one predominantly meat and one predominantly fat. I didn’t care much for the fat, but the meat was very, very good. There was a wonderful dipping sauce that was spicy, but not quite too spicy. There was also the usual assortment of vegetables and seasoning, including mint and bay leaves.

One of the specialties of the restaurant we were in is a soup made with the brains of the goat. We all passed on that…

Ha Long Bay

I’m travelling for work this weekend and had the opportunity to spend an evening in Ha Long. This shot is of the bay from the beach. Ha Long Bay is really very beautiful. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I’m hoping to spend more time here, and soon. I would like the chance to take a boat and explore the islands.

One of the interesting parts of the visit to Ha Long was the trip to the market. I picked up some souvenirs. Unlike a lot of markets I’ve been in here, this was very low key and relaxing. Maybe it’s because we were there in the early evening, but none of the vendors yelled at us or grabbed us or tried to force us to buy their wares. I quite like it and probably bought more than I otherwise would’ve…

More whacky Internet stuff…

FPT, my Internet provider, is done pretty much country-wide at this point. They’ve been down since last night.

It’s not unusual for Internet at the house to be down. We’re in a relatively new neighborhood and the connection can be spotty. When I lose the connection to the house, I just dash off to a cafe to get some work done.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of the cafes use FPT. This outage is particularly bad because I can’t fall back to a cafe without doing a lot of searching. I can still post updates from my phone, and I’m now working on getting my phone tethered to my laptop in case this happens again.

Isn’t the Internet fun?

Ho Chi Minh City in miniature…

This is an absolutely amazing video:

Stunning. It’s also fun to note how much of it I recognize….

Balance…

H1N1 is causing a minor uproar here in Vietnam. Last week, I got laid up by the flu. Not just any flu, though—angry flu. The worst flu I’ve had in quite a while. So bad, I went to the doctor. I was. as is wise in this case, checked for H1N1 and found to be clean. It was just a normal, nasty flu bug. So that’s good.

The balance part? While sick, I was laid up, sleeping a lot. Client queries and missives continued to ping on my attention. I had to tell the ones with active projects that I was sick and put them on the back burner. I could have kept running to keep up, but that would only have laid me up longer, I think. I had to balance. It’s not always easy to do, especially as a freelancer. But even freelancers are human. So are your clients. Everybody understands, generally.

Keep the balance. Don’t get overwhelmed or everything suffers.