KDE Forum Klassroom Kourse 1 is in progress! This kourse is being led by msoeken & the topic for this is “Fixing KSnapshot bugs”. The Kourse started with 5 bugs as aim. Students would be required to fix them and will be guided by msoeken while doing so.
Linux Mint is a bit of a dark horse when compared with the big distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat or Gentoo. Don’t overlook it - it provides a great deal of polish that the Linux world has been looking for for a long time. I just put it my old desktop system, so here’s my impression.
So, here you go, TomTom. Get your PR department out of the Service department, and start thinking of where you get your money. Do you REALLY want to forego the income you could make by supporting the very operating system that you use?
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TomTom uses Linux. But TomTom doesn’t want to acknowledge that, and therefore ignores potential customers. Or, perhaps it’s more than ignoring potential customers. For example, there is the publically demonstrated behavior of Microsoft. Microsoft is noted for its anti-competative contracts with companies, its “buying off” companies, organizations and even political entities, and its subversion of even standards organizations. (Oh, don’t believe me. Go see for yourself. Search for the lawsuit by the DOJ [such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft] and the record of what happened at ISO with their “Office Open XML”, or their behavior in third world countries with the advent of the XO computer.) Such behavior in an individual would be considered unethical at best and criminal at worst. But because Microsoft has money they manage to get away with it. If some combination of the above is the reason that TomTom has so ignored Linux as an operating system then their shame is complete, and they deserve to be known as “that navigation company that USED to be a contender in the market”.
It also isn’t a speed demon, but so far with web browsing and using OpenOffice, I haven’t found myself waiting for anything. One thing to note is that I requested a Linux version of the netbook. It runs “Linpus Lite Linux”, a customized version of Fedora with a very useful dashboard for everyday applications.
The figure of less than 60% for Internet Explorer is certainly impressive, given the fact that it held close to 100% of the market a few years ago. One question is: what is the breakthrough point for Firefox? The current 30%? 50%? Something else? For me, an important psychological moment will be when Internet Explorer dips below 50%, and Firefox above 40%. At that point, both will be in the 40-50% range, and it will be clear that they are essentially on a par.
Comments
Jan Stedehouder
2008-12-29 20:17:03
http://www.tomtom.com/page.php?Page=gpl
In 2004 this was already settled in a case with GPL Violations:
http://gpl-violations.org/news/20041024-linux-tomtom.html
It's desktop software is Windows- and Mac-only, which is a shame actually.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-12-29 20:20:00