IRREVERENT Magazine - Features

Writing for this excuse to turn Wisconsin into a Superfund^® site involves three things: never explain, always complain, and for god's sake never apologize. This month I'm going to break one of those rules. You see my conscience has been troubled because I've been embracing the Open Source^© revolution. So, to all those workers in Redmond, WA who used to work for Microsoft in technical -- we'll call it support -- jobs, I would like to say that I'm sorry. Your work would never have been outsourced if I, and people like me, had realized how vulnerable your position was and not bucked the MS dominion over software.

Here's the problem. Back in the day, and in this case I mean just six months ago, I wrote a column about why upgrading your computing system every six months was a sleazy scam. What I didn't write about was my feeling that the need to upgrade computer systems was being driven by an axis of evil running through the Microsoft campus in Redmond and the Intel campus in Santa Clara, CA. That kind of thinking and reporting is really best left to One Who Knows, but I was brought to this conclusion by a good Linux distribution that restored to usefulness an older machines that, in a completely MS dominated world, I would simply have tossed in the landfill to wait away the millenia until they, like the rest of the solar system, are blasted into oblivion by the expanding, dying Sun. I naively thought that getting every last drop of use out of old machines was a good, green position, "Let's keep as many RA Enterprises computers out of landfills as we can!" were my instructions at the time to Vaclav Herçek, my IT guy. I admit he did yeoman service running those P2 processors with Suse Linux. Still, I felt something was wrong. It wasn't until I started feeling the pain of workers whose jobs had been outsourced that I understood the exact problem.

Coming to the understanding that Open Source^© was leading to no end of problems for the economy was a long process. You see as a business enterprise, I still have to buy a license to use software like Open Office, AVG, Zone Alarm, and Mozilla so it took me awhile to realize that you, the average home user, can use them for free. And it took me longer still to understand that this meant Redmond and the vast Wintel economy it serves wasn't making enough money to be competitive. Fortunately, and boy does this take a lot of steely resolve, the Presidential Election^TM and particularly the party on the Left (which may be becoming a party on the Right) has shown me the light to all things good and proper: Microsoft's stranglehold on computer software is good for the country. Go ahead and read that again, I'm as stunned as you are, but it's true. Microsoft, multinational software provider to the world, needs your help.

With all of these threats, you have to wonder how much longer the entire world of Wintel can keep themselves in business.OK, so it's not Microsoft as such. Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, can go fuck themselves, but surely you care about all of those Microsofties that suddenly found that their tech support jobs had been farmed out to New Delhi don't you? Surely you don't want them to go without the health care insurance their positions provided do you? Let's face it, the more people like you and I discover and embrace the Open Source^© revolution the less tech support these 'softies will have to do. The truly tragic bit is that having hitched their wagon to the Microsoft star they are woefully under qualified to take the bazillion or so tech support jobs that such a quirky, geeky OS like Linux is going to require.

It's not Microsoft standing alone however. The Open Source^© gaming community has yet to really catch fire since game designers, like whores around a crack pipe, can't break themselves from DirectX. God love those Luddite bastards, fighting a brave rear guard action to ensure that the world still needs some kind of Microsoft OS on the hard drive. Although gamers from way back must find it ironic that Windows, an OS which in previous incarnations was completely incompatible with gaming (hold up your boot disks here, you grizzled veterans), now owes it's existence not to business applications like Office, but to fucking Doom 3, a game that originally operated inside the Windows DOS shell if you were lucky. Fortunately for the beleaguered tech support community there are still enough people out there having a hard time configuring Unreal Tournament that a few folks can still pull down the dollars they were promised when they first sought their A+ certification.

In addition to the gamers, there's a whole slew of "productivity" software suppliers with too much buy-in to the Windows OS. Names like Adobe, with Photoshop and the multi-platform Acrobat reader, also have a stake in Softies success. Not that they aren't vulnerable. A little company called Serif Software has a Photoshop killer that they can sell you for $9.95. Maybe some of it's edge tolerances aren't as exact as our Adobe friends, but Serif's PhotoPlus software can use Photoshop plug-ins and, in case I stupidly forgot to mention it, it's $9.95. And the nasty hobbitses at Sun have included a PDF creator for their Open Office Suite just in case you don't feel the need to shell out tons o' dosh for Acrobat Pro. Oh and remember those dumb fuckers at Netscape who thought that charging for a browser was a good idea? Guess what Chuckles, they've morphed into the fun-loving, pop up blocking tabable browser known as Mozilla Firefox. Oh, and they are free again.

With all of these threats, you have to wonder how much longer the entire world of Wintel can keep themselves in business. I already feel badly that such a puny multinational needs to offshore hundreds of jobs to stay competitive and then, when I read that no less a black hat than Wal-Mart is offering Linux based computers for under $300 smackers I begin to get downright depressed. I don't want hundreds of former Gates dependents suddenly thrown below the poverty line because I want stable, cheap, software and operating systems. Hell no, I want to pay as much money as I can in order to keep the entire Northwest from plunging into recession. It's my hope that you would like to do so as well. If you do, please immediately upgrade to Window's XP Pro and then purchase Microsoft Office. Ignore the pleas of Open Source^© publishers, and demand your right to pay full price for virus scanners, firewalls, image editors, and spreadsheets. Only you can prevent unemployment in the tech sector, don't you think it's time you did?