Applications for FC4

[Temlakos]

On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 20:36 -0800, Per Bjornsson wrote:

> Some of us avoid AOL like the plague. What exactly does an AOL client do
> that a browser doesn't?

Mostly when you load it, you're in, and have direct access to AOL mail,
buddies, and keywords.

Last time I checked, as many people (more than a million) use AOL as use
Linux, and the two groups do not overlap, just because of the issue of
not having a native client. That's an awful lot of people to write off
just because most of us have undisguised contempt for the AOL network
interface.

Ironically, AOL itself uses Linux to run all their servers. But they
won't develop any client packages of their own because they're afraid
they'd have to develop--and support--a client package for every single
distro. Of course, they probably would just have to develop a very
limited set of packages:

1. Binary and source RPM's for all RPM-based distros (including Fedora)
2. Debian-compatible binary and source packages
3. A Gentoo-compatible source package
4. A tarball

But part of the problem with a large corporation is that nobody listens
to an outsider--and an insider is afraid he'd get fired for recommending
a project that turned into a big money-loser.

So why should the open-source community care? For the same reason that
OpenOffice, for example, is portable to every platform, open-source and
closed-: Because we're in the marketplace of ideas.

Temlakos