I hadn’t heard of Free and Open Source Software. I had used Free and Open Source Software (Audacity for example) without being aware, and without giving much thought to who had gone to the bother of making it or why they would then allow you to have it for free.Īnd there’s the rub. Previously, I had no knowledge of any of it. I have gone on to learn a lot more about Linux, Open Source Software, The Free Software Movement and the GNU project. WUBI is the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer that first allowed me to see that the Free and Open Source Community wasn’t a bunch of amateurs cobbling something together that would most likely break my machine. If I didn’t like it then I could just uninstall it like any other Windows program. What’s more, if I wanted to try out this alternative I could use what was called a WUBI installer to give it a go. I had been plodding away on Windows Vista for a good few years before I became aware that there was an alternative available that didn’t involve paying almost half of what my laptop cost in the first place. These things tend to be learned as you go along. It would not be unreasonable to suspect that most people do not start using a computer for the first time in their lives with a full awareness of the differences between a Proprietary System, a Freedom-Enabled System or an Open-Source System. When Does Anyone Become Aware of Alternatives to Proprietary Software? If you don’t like their particular graphical user interface then there are plenty of alternatives that can be tried instead.Īs for the 12.10 release, I like to think of it as the stumbling drunken uncle version that will hopefully sober up in a month or two. It’s open source (so you know it’s not up to anything surreptitious or else you’d have many angry technically knowledgeable Linuxists shouting about it), it’s very capable and provides an easy stepping stone for someone coming from a proprietary system and looking for an alternative. But celebrate the calm and wise 12.04 Ubuntu. Until all these problems with regards to the ‘online search’ are looked at properly, I intend to think of Ubuntu as that nice 12.04 flavour and ignore the clumsy bustle of 12.10 in the corner, who keeps shouting about how great ‘Web Apps’ and ‘Integrated Online Searches’ are. What seems to be getting lost in all of this is that Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ (the Long Term Support release that will be supported until 2017) has none of the hoohah that their most recent (until April 2013) ‘Quantal Quetzal’ 12.10 release has brought along with it, and should be doing the world of good in promoting Free and Open Source Software as a fully functioning and very capable alternative to other proprietary and closed-source operating systems. There have been grumblings about ‘ adware‘, talk of ‘ spyware‘ and usually someone chipping in and saying ‘Ubuntu is rubbish. Ubuntu has come under a decent amount of flack over the past few months, particularly over their decision to use the ‘Dash Search’ to return results from Amazon by default in their most recent release.
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