For the last year I have been hanging out on a local Windows user group mailing list just to see how the other half lives. I have been on the local Linux user group mailing list for at least 12 years. The difference is night and day. The Windows user group mailing list has invites to various free lunches paid for by vendors who want to you to buy their stuff and the occasional chatter about some problem with SQL Server or IIS or something. When someone complains about Windows a rep from Microsoft shows up on the list to handle the situation. The Linux group is full of passionate discussion and debate about all manner of technical and political issues plus the usual advice giving and newbie helping. The Linux people are clearly in it for the love of it and the Windows users just seem to be there for a paycheck. Just look at the times people post to the lists. The local Linux folk are posting day and night and weekends. The Windows people are mostly 9 to 5'ers Monday through Friday. The Windows group meets at the local Microsoft office and watch a vendor presentation and then go home. The Linux group meets at a local school, put on their own presentation from 7 to 9 pm every second Thursday and then a dozen or so of them go to an after-meeting meeting at a nearby Denny's restaurant for conversation until midnight. If any of you are in the San Diego area check out http://kernel-panic.org/

And on top of it all, tonight I hacked a new feature into Kudzu (detecting AoE disks so that Anaconda can install RedHat/CentOS onto them which is something I *really* need) made possible by Free Software and some help from my LUG friends so I'm pretty darn happy with the GNU/Linux community right now. I'll be sending that code to RedHat for sure because that's how I give back and we as a community keep improving our Free Software.