[ale] Business Case Was Riddle me this

[JD]

I think the NSA should be the Geek-Squad for other government agencies, nothing
more.  Clearly the Commerce Department could use the help removing viruses
instead of destroying perfectly fine hardware.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-commerce-dept-false-alarm-on-cyberattack-cost-almost-3-million/2013/07/13/11b92690-ea41-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html

Yep - Govt-Geek-Squad.gov would be a start.

Then, if the CIA and/or FBI want to engage the NSA for specific, limited, legal,
needs, fine.


On 07/15/2013 10:10 AM, Jay Lozier wrote:
> John Dvorak on pcmag.com has a post were he argues the MS-NSA joint venture
> should make countries and companies rethink their reliance on proprietary
> software especially OSes. Apparently Windows has had numerous backdoors and
> slowly fixed zero-exploits so the NSA could "monitor" users. His comment was the
> US Department of Commerce should be very upset over the NSA scandal. He did come
> out and directly say switch to Linux or BSD but if you are not use a proprietary
> OS what are your options? Particularly since some industries have legal
> responsibilities to their clients not to share this information without express
> approval of the client or a valid court order.
> 
> On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:50:12 -0400, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:
> 
>> Netflix and 86-Linux support isn't a technical issue.
>> It is a cost-of-support, business decision, and perhaps contractual issue.
>>
>> Linux on the desktop has never taken off with the numbers desired to have a
>> thriving business profit center for Adobe.  It is hard to justify spending
>> thousands of hours creating, distributing and supporting a platform where there
>> doesn't appear to be a future payback.  iOS/Apple's decision to end Flash
>> support was the initial nail in the coffin. The fact that Android is Linux is
>> the other, though a business case could be made to sell support for the 200M
>> Android devices.  I think internally, Adobe management wants Flash to die.
>>
>> Then there are the contracts around commercial media offerings.  There are a few
>> Linux-based devices that support Netflix, but these have DRM built-into the
>> chip.  Look at the "WD-TV Live HD Plus" as a start. I suspect Roku does too.
>>
>> Heck, Netflix servers are all Linux-based, so I'm fairly positive that the
>> Netflix engineers WANT to support Linux desktops, but again, it is a business
>> decision.
>>
>> I can't blame any business for believing that the Linux market is small.  We are
>> a noisy group, but not in the normal ways.  We don't advertise like Apple or
>> Microsoft. 90% of the world has never seen or heard "Linux" before.  Until that
>> changes, support for Linux will really be limited to niche users, fed-up
>> businesses and servers.
>>
>> I've been thinking of an easy way to let people know how many Linux users and
>> machines running Linux there are in the world .... perhaps the ALE group can be
>> the starting point?  I'll make another post about this idea soon to let all of
>> ALE see it better - not buried in another thread.  Basically, it is an
>> email-footer with a count of machines/devices running Linux.  It needs to be
>> simple, short, to the point.  I've had this footer for about 5 yrs myself:
>>
> 
>