I post here about using Microsoft products fairly often. I thought I should mention that have not personally purchased a Microsoft Product since, well. Never. The subject says over 10 years. I say that because 14 years ago my father purchased a 486-33Mhz 4MB Desktop computer for the family at my prodding. It case with MSDOS 5.0. It was paid for. Since then (at least since age 18) I’ve always had a job which purchased software for me. I also started using Linux somewhere around age 17 or 18. When Windows XP came out, I won a free version of the Professional Edition in some web drawing contest. So I started using Microsoft operating systems again. I didn’t realize that what I was using had a $300 street value. Its $199 for the upgrade version, $299 for the full version for Windows XP Pro.
That ridiculously high price is exactly the reason I’m a fan of opens. At work, I love using Visual Studio.NET. I even use the Enterprise Architect edition (I have no idea what that means) from an MSDN Subscription. This brings up the absolutely importance of Mono, MonoDevelop, and the tools on which the Mono team are working.
http://www.theserverside.net/cartoons/TalesFromTheServerSide.tss
What is so great about VSTSE w/PS? I cannot imagine. I can imagine that MS is scared right now. The open source community has such a strong community with excellent collaboration tools that Microsoft can understand how to get that level of productivity out of their developers. What is more, as a tools provider, Microsoft can’t figure out how to get their customers that level of productivity either. $10,939 for a single copy of some developer software? Think about that for a second. $10k per person? (Assuming I understand the license agreement.) As a professional programmer I just have to think, where does that $10k come from? Its $10k that my employer is spending on me, which I will never see. As an open source advocate I simply don’t understand why my company needs to spend $10k on me to enable me to do at work, what I do at home for free when I write open source code. It almost makes me angry. It almost makes me think that Microsoft doesn’t care about its developers, regardless of the propaganda coming from Scoble and places like Dot Net Rocks.
Ohio Linux Fest was a great event. I awoke at 4:50am on Saturday morning. Chris stopped by at 5:10 and we were on the road by 5:20. We arived at the Convention Center in Columbus at about 8:30. We were damned hungry. We got some food at the food court where I somehow recognized Joe Gasiorek from behind. No, not that behind, from the back of his head. He was sitting down with his powerbook. After some small talk and catching up, Jorge Castro, Brian Clark, Aaron Thul, and some other guys showed up. It was good to run into them so early in the day. The openning keynote was… Well… not to belittle the sponsor, but I think it was a little out of place given the audience. It is true that IBM’s POWER architecture is great, but this was not a typical corporate Linux conference. It was Ohio Linux Fest. Where were the jugglers and mimes that I’ve come to expect from a festival? The presentations through out the morning were great. Although I have to admit by noon I was bored of presentations and really decided to focus on the more social aspects of the event. I started to just mingle and see who I could talk to. I had an interesting conversation with a couple of guys outside. One guy had come upon an IBM mainframe and was looking to get rid of it. Sounds like he got a hell of a deal. The other guy worked in Fort Wayne and knew people from TriState University in Angola, IN. That is near the birthplace of my parents and I have lots of family in that area. My father and uncle are both graduates of TriState’s Engineering school. It was interesting to hear the state of the schools Computer and Network systems. It was also interesting to talk to the LinuxBox people. I’ve walked by the LinuxBox countless times in Ann Arbor and it took me a trip to Columbus to ever talk to anyone from there. We closed out the night with Dinner and returned for the Reception. Jorge drank a lot. We left early to drive home and be in bed by 2am. It was a very long, 21hr day.
Thanks to all the organizers for inviting us all. Its good to see Sean Harsy and those Ohio folks serious about Linux and community.