LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <Alan.Kennington@dsto.defence.gov.au>
  To  : ara@newave.net.au
  Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:28:47 +1030 (CST)

Re: To the LINUX Advocates/Evangelists among us...

To [name unknown]:

There's a much simpler way forward than has been discussed here.
Just wait for 13 months, and see what happens.
13 months is not a long time, and linux is still not
quite ready to take over the world.
I'm sure that we can all be pretty certain that linux OS and
applications and virtually all of the GNU stuff will suffer nothing
at all from the year 2000 turnover.

It's better for a modest competitor to stay modest, and just prove
itself by deeds. If/when there are dire consequences for other
OSs (and probably most problems that do occur will _not_ be in
PC software, but rather in large business databases, online systems,
mainframes etc.), linux will just come out unscathed, without
having to make a single claim.
Better to be understated than overstated.

In the meantime, we have 13 months to keep improving linux software,
while many other people are wasting their energies fretting over a crunch
that won't really happen until about the year 2038, January 18, at
about half past 3 in the afternoon UTC.

Conclusion:
Linux is better for the hacker even if the rest of the world
does not convert to it.
There's no benefit to linux users in giving a guarantee.
It might even be better if the world does _not_ convert to linux.
Then it would become standardised by standardisation bodies,
regulated by governments, and boring and conventional.
And then we could have to invent a new rebel OS.
[I can imagine the fighters for open source turning around and
demanding the right to private source!]

Conclusion of the conclusion:
One should not give any guarantees about y2k at all.
Let's just keep our heads down until it fizzes like the
so-called meteor shower of the century.
[I could have been writing good software that night!]

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
Check out the LinuxSA web pages at http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject