[BALUG-Talk] Linux references in an essay

[Bill Kendrick]

Adding to Rick's comments...

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 04:32:20PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> A data point:  Anyone who's seen or played with a TiVo has encountered
> Linux -- as TiVos run on nothing _but_ Linux.  

Ditto for the Roku Netflix player.  (*heart*)
Ditto for numerous kinds of network attached storage devices (NASes),
a number of routers, many netbooks, etc. :)

One problem with calling something 'Linux' is -- do you mean it literally,
as in 'based on a Linux kernel'?  Or do you mean a user-facing desktop
environment running on Linux.  (e.g., GNOME, KDE, etc.)  Aka "Desktop Linux".


<snip>
> It donates back its work to the open source community in many cases
> (including but very much not limited to the Summer of Code program),

And SOC is a multi-million-dollar-a-year kind of thing.  In 2008, they
had 1125 students.  Assuming each was alloted $5000 ($4500 for them, $500
for their mentor(ing organization)), that's over $5.5m.  NOT counting all
the other related expenses (e.g., the mentor summit, in which most of ~200
people were put in hotels, and many of them were flown to Calif, quite a
few from outside the US).

And all we have to do is code & mentor. :)


See also:  http://code.google.com/  for a lot of open source from 
Google itself.  (Android, OpenSocial, etc.)  They also host projects,
similar to what SourceForge.net does.

-- 
-bill!
"Tux Paint" - free children's drawing software for Windows / Mac OS X / Linux!
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