[SATLUG] A Break Through for Linux

[Doug White]

quote
:
: RH has probably done what they have done to attract a larger audience of
: users. No harm in that. On the flip-side, they should probably better
: evaluate the services that are turned on by default, and tailor them for
: the average user. That might help.
:
: </quote>

What RH is doing is to try to bring Linux into the mainstream and make it
appeal to a much wider audience, especially those who have no other experience
than windows, and windows applications.   They have recognized that not every
Linux user must be command-line competent, and that there is room for the
drag-n-drop type customers.  At least that is the market they are now
targeting, and they have some company there as well.

With the SCO fear and uncertainty initiative faltering, there well may be a
much larger market out there for Linux and its derivatives.  Certainly
Microsoft has been fairly targeted for this initiative.

The UNIX crowd by default gave up years ago when the chief complaint of
computer users was compatibility, that is I want applications that will run on
my computer without dependence on the underlying operating system.  Microsoft
rightly targeted this audience and the rest is history.  Through morphing, they
greedily tightly integrated applications with the operating system while Linux
is still mostly a modular collection of applets.  What Linux presently does, it
seems to do well.   On the other hand Microsoft, partly because of its
dominance in the marketplace, and their attempts to be an all in one solution
for everything, they failed to properly account for miscreants who would start
taking advantage of its integration and start working on exploits, one after
another.

I can remember how Sendmail on Linux came into disfavor mainly because the most
common installation packages set it to be an open relay by default, thus
supporting the rise of spam.  The newer versions no longer do this, but not
everyone has upgraded, and there are still some sendmail configurations that
are open relays for spammers to use as they see fit.  Of course there are
Windows mail server applications that followed suit inadvertently adding to the
problem of spam.  Then as admins and programmers got wise (got educated) and
started plugging these holes, the spammer technology moved to worm and virus
infections to create a whole new database of open relays for the spammers to
use.  Since Microsoft was the leader in the marketplace, of course that is the
OS that is most targeted.  It is not just a weakness in Microsoft, gee, try
putting in a weak password on a Linux installation and see just how quick your
system gets rooted.  Folks, it still happens today. Our defense is mainly
education, education.    The easier a computer is to brought into productivity
when purchased or built, the bigger the chance that the naive will be operating
them.

Computer and network security being on the front burner is still somewhat a new
concept, and has created opportunities for administrators as well as for the
miscreants.  Only recently have a few Universities taken on the granting of
courses of study in this specialty, UTSA being one of the few, mainly because
of their closeness to the security leaders at Lackland AFB.

As we gain experience it behooves all of us to try to educate the new users as
to the importance of not misusing all the capacity they are buying and building
for such low cost, so as to co-exist with the rest of the computing
neighborhood.

Kudos for RH and others that have finally decided to market to the masses and
become real competition to Microsoft.

My 0.02

Doug