Stategy - Battle vs War

A month ago I had to convince my wife regarding a hair shampoo (imagine a geek discussing shampoo). So, the problem was that my wife was suffering from an acute hair loss ; she consulted the doctors, changed her eating habits, applied a herbal conditioner, and did all sorts of stuff ,but, all in vain. One thing that she did not do was "changing her shampoo". It struck me, and I discussed this with her. But she had been using the same shampoo for several years, hence she was in no mood to change .

I tried to switch her to shampoos that are known to help hair loss. I even forced her to aisle containing shampoos and showed her 'X shampoo stops hair fall'. I made it a point to make her notice the shampoo ads, whenever we watched TV . But everything went down the drain. She was "My shampoo is the best and nothing else matters".

So I had to rethink my strategy, I had to try something different; something that will force her to change her shampoo. After thinking a lot, I figured out that when I was persuading her for a different shampoo, I was pointing here to a shampoo that was of my choice. That might be the reason for her not switching. So I changed my strategy and asked her to just try any other shampoo except for the one she is currently using.Though there was a risk that "just any other shampoo" might make the hair loss worse; but I was ready to take the risk.

On our next trip to the grocery store, she picked up a different shampoo, and things were never same again. The new shampoo reduced the hair loss and she concluded that her long time favorite was actually causing the problem.

So what can we derive from this experience?

I am a long time BSD fan and can take the flame wars to any extent. On the other hand, I really really hate M$. I am fed up with their monopoly and their disregard for standards. I want people to jump off the M$ brand wagon and try open source software. Thus, if someone comes to me asking for Linux help I will provide all the aid I can, just to make sure that s/he converts.

I have seen a lot of flame wars, a characteristic of open source; forking different project because of zeal/ego of developers. The mergers also actually happen, but they are rare. There are distro zealots who go to any extent proving that their distro is the best and nothing else comes even close to it. To some extent I agree, different distros were made with different visions and there is no such thing as "One size fits all". And recently there has been a lot of distro bashing for distributions who joined M$ patent agreement.

But amid all this, the open source community should stand united against M$. It should make sure that people leave M$ bandwagon and join the open source revolution. Whether it is Freespire or SuSE , it should not matter. The community should be focusing its efforts to spread awareness amongst people.

To all the purist who say that distributions that made agreements with M$ betrayed them, I would like to ask them about GNU/Linux. Everybody knows that linux is just the kernel, and there are other kernels as welll; solaris, bsd, hurd etc. In making a distribution a lot more than a kernel is required, and that "lot more" is actually what GNU has provided. Even the compiler used for building the kernel is provided by GNU. Linux cant exist in isolation, it requires GNU support. Then why is it that Linux is named in isolation; why don't we accept "GNU/Linux" as suggested by RMS and supported by Debian. Don't you feel that Linux betrayed GNU by not putting their name?

It is most important that we "the community" should stand united in our war against M$ . Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and OpenSuSE are the top three listed at distrowatch, but I have my own criticism for each of them. The criticism is so extreme that I literally hate them. But that does not matter, if they are able to pull people out of M$ bandwagon.