Here is an interesting story from Bruce Perens regarding 2 lawsuits regarding patents and Open Source Software.

Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers

Last November, when my wife and I moved to Mexico, we packed our Honda Civic with some basic necessities: clothing, a digital camera, multiple Spanish dictionaries, books, a laptop, etc. Space was our limiting factor, so we decided that we’d only pack things that we truly thought we’d need for our 6 month stay. Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to my computer lab, consisting of a few Linux desktops and a few Windows XP desktops. Not only that, I had to go back to sharing a computer. One of many sacrifices we had to make for the experience of living in a foreign country for half a year.

Fast forward to the present…

Sharing a computer with my wife, who is also a programmer and an avid internet research junky, was not much fun. Therefore, we have since purchased another laptop to ease our time sharing problem.
However, things are far from perfect.

I have been developing websites, internet applications, and software for the past 15 years. Most of that time has been programming on Unix and Linux machines. There were a few months, here and there, where I developed Windows applications, using Visual C++. However, I’ve always felt much more productive developing software in a *nix environment.

My Dell laptop is currently running Windows XP. It functions fine for web surfing, watching movies, photo and video editing, and keeping track of our ever dwindling finances. However, I just can’t seem to be very productive as a software developer on it. It feels like I only spend 40% of my time being productive. I’m not exactly sure what all of my issues are, but a few off the top of my head:

• Rebooting after installing or removing software. Why is this still necessary?
• Lack of a robust command prompt. Considering Windows is cut-and-paste friendly in most of their apps, why is it so difficult to add this functionality to the command prompt? Why does the copy feature (Mark) select a box region, and not work like every other cut-and-paste app? Why can’t I resize the app like every other app out there?
• Starting and stopping services. I hate digging through the control panel to find the service admin tool. There’s probably a command line way of doing this, but I haven’t discovered it yet.
• No virtual desktops. In a normal day, I’m probably switching between 7-10 active applications. Finding the one I want using Alt-tab or the taskbar repeatedly eats away my valuable time.

Yes, I know there are many add-on applications I can install to fix some of these issues, but the ones I’ve tried all seem kludgy.

For instance, I installed cygwin. Cygwin’s default terminal uses the command prompt, so I still can’t cut-and-paste. I assume I could set up xterm to do this, but after a few months, I still haven’t gone through the effort to find out how. Due to cygwin’s psuedo-paths and real Windows paths, setting up applications and scripts is a nightmare. All in all, cygwin has probably introduced as many problems as it has solved.

There are probably some real solutions out there, if I chose to find them. However, going out and finding them contributes to my 60% of unproductive time.

I’m just waiting for my next trip back to Chicago (in August), when I’ll retrieve one of my Linux desktops and end this misery.