A friend linked me to one of the dumbest stories of the year. The fact that the year began just over 20 days ago doesn't make me feel better about this situation.
The story's from a blog, so there's no dateline. There's also no dateline because the nice people at HeliOS didn't want to out a complete fucking moron to the entire universe. A teacher in the Austin Independent School District saw a student giving a presentation on Linux. The teacher confiscated the discs, called a “conference” with the student (as we all surely remember, “conferences” with teachers in anything lower than university-level would be more accurately described as dressings-down). She found out about HeliOS and sent an email to Ken Starks who runs the HeliOS blog. Among the utter idiocy published in this email:
At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.
No software is free, is it? Hmm, that means I must have “stolen” my copies of Firefox, Opera, iSquint, Openoffice.org, Yahoo! Messenger!, TweetDeck, TwitterPod, VLC media player, iTunes (when I used Windows), Last.fm, AVG antivirus programme, iAntiVirus (for Mac), Google Earth, Handbrake, and Twitterrific. Damn, that's quite the list of charges, isn't it? I think if it weren't for Opera I'd be okay, but since I have Opera, it's a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison!
[…] if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.
What the hell do you think Linux is, lady? Is Linux the “L” in LSD? Linux isn't a drug, it's a fucking open-source software platform! I tried Linux on a trial version of Parallels once and guess what? The only problem was Parallels wouldn't let me connect to the fucking internet! I would consider using Linux if I didn't have a good thing going with OSX and if I could program things my damn self. The latter, by the way, isn't a deal-breaker. I'd figure it out on my own if I had to program.
[…] putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.
Now that's just fucking stupid. It's been approximately two years since Windows Shitsta came out and underwhelmed took a steaming shit on everybody who got it, and Linux is holding people back? I sincerely doubt learning to use a computer that works is going to disadvantage anybody. In fact, if more people were willing to try other operating systems, the so-called marketplace of ideas could stop being a capitalist's wet dream and become an actual way of determining what is good, what is bad, and what functions well enough for the time being.
This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."
Even the idiot arguing for Microsoft Supremacy acknowledges that to “actually be of service to those receiving” these computers, they would have to be equipped with older versions of Windows. Now, certainly, old-ass software on old-ass machines can be of service. Okay, I'm totally lying. I've worked jobs where I had to use Windows 98 as recently as the past two years, and if there was one thing those machines didn't do, it was SERVE me in any useful way. Certainly I got to smack something around in a way I couldn't do to anything else at the job, but as computers, old computers with old systems are worth doo-doo.
Now I'm not a Linux or Mac evangelist. Well, I tell Windows users they need to get a Mac, but I don't go out of my way for it. I tell them this only after they've complained about how shitty Windows is. I offer them an alternative, and usually I get the same response: “I can't afford a Mac.” Linux is, in fact, free, and is, in fact, better than Windows. Granted that doesn't say a lot but it's true. Thanks to this idiot, I'm going to start trying to educate people who ask about the two significantly better alternatives. Thank you, Karen Namewithheld, for being so stupid to inspire me to action yet again.
