Posted by : Anonymous on Feb 04, 2004 - 01:50 PM General

For the past several years, Microsoft has been watching, and reacting, as open-source advocates around the world have encouraged the adoption of the Linux operating system.Now the uprising has officially reached the company's back yard.Not one but two new Linux user groups have sprung up on the Eastside, not far from Microsoft's Redmond campus, scheduling regular meetings to learn and talk about the software that the company has identified as a serious threat to its Windows operating system.
Eleven people gathered last week for the first meeting of the Seattle Linux User Group Eastside, or SLUGE, in a second-floor conference room at Northwest College in Kirkland. They listened to a presentation on the emergence of Linux in different parts of the world before engaging in a spirited discussion about the technical aspects of the operating system.

Of course, this being a revolution, there were also organizational details to work out: What time of day should they meet? Whom should they invite to speak? What types of volunteer work should they do?

And how should they pronounce the group's acronym? Slooj? Slug-ee? Sloo-jay? Should they change the words around and say e-slug?

"Maybe we could have gang symbols," joked Alec Taylor, a solutions manager at PWI Technologies in Kirkland. "It would be like, 'Hey, they're in that open-source gang -- they're mean, but they're free.' "

In addition to SLUGE, the newly formed Bellevue Linux Users Group plans to hold its first meeting Feb. 10 in downtown Bellevue. (Its organizers are calling it BELUG.)

Groups already established in the region include the Greater Seattle Linux Users Group, or GSLUG, which was founded more than 10 years ago, when Linux was in its infancy, and the Tacoma Linux Users Group, or TACLUG, founded in 1998.

Open-source software such as Linux is produced by communities of developers who make the underlying code available for free use. It has been steadily gaining momentum around the world, especially among governments and businesses.

The level of computer expertise in the room at the first SLUGE meeting last week reflected the fact that Linux is much more common today on corporate computer servers than it is on personal computers used by non-technical people in their homes. The people attending included systems administrators, networking specialists, security designers and users with technical backgrounds interested in learning more about Linux.

But the open-source trend is headed more in the direction of the traditional home user, said David Thompson, SLUGE's founder. He noted that his father, who is not a computer expert, recently asked him to install Linux on his computer.

"When I first started with Linux it was a nightmare to install.

Took me two weeks to do my first install," Thompson said. "But now you get a CD and you can put it in your computer and have it installed very easily. Any typical end user or person can have it on their desktop."




Yet the very computer Thompson used to make his presentation to the group showed how far Linux has to go on the desktop. Borrowed for the evening from Northwest College, it was running Windows XP, and Thompson was forced to use Microsoft PowerPoint to display his slides. He had, at least, used OpenOffice, an open-source program, to create the slides in the first place.

Linux user groups are by no means a new phenomenon, with more than 270 of them in the United States alone, according to Linux Online Inc. But Thompson acknowledged a certain irony in the fact that SLUGE has been established so close to Microsoft's home base.

"It is pretty funny when you think about it," he said.

Thompson is president of Kirkland-based Provoix Corp., a small Web design and consulting business. The company's computer systems run completely on open-source programs, including Apache software on its Web servers, Red Hat Linux on its corporate servers, and a version of Mandrake Linux on its desktop computers.

He said Provoix decided to go open source to save money and to avoid the administrative hassles of proprietary software licensing. But he acknowledged that the decision for other companies might not be as simple as it was for his.

"There are costs regardless of where you go. It would be dangerous not to assume that," he said, citing such factors as service and employee training for companies that switch to Linux. "It really depends on where you're at. If you're a large corporation that has invested heavily in a platform and a technology, then you really are going to have to spend a lot more money than myself, who started from ground zero."

On the whole, however, Thompson said, most companies will save "a whole lot of money" in the long run by going open source.

There were no Microsoft employees at the first SLUGE meeting -- at least none who admitted it -- but Thompson said they would be welcome to join the group.

"There's no vendetta against Microsoft," Thompson said. "It would be great to have their input and to hear how they perceive Linux."

To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.