Alan Cox: The Battle for the Desktop

richjones writes: "There's a new interview with Alan Cox up. I think he's right on the money with how Linux is going to spread into businesses, but he seems to think Internet applications are going to be big with consumers... I can't really see it... but he's Alan Cox, so he must know :)"

Comments

Alan Cox Interviews

[BrianGa]

See other Alan Cox interviews here and here.

Re:Hmm, is this right ?

[Faldgan]

Yes, Marcelo is the maintainer of the V2.4.X kernel series, but the Linux kernel is only a part of the software out there. open source software includes things like apache, and samba, and BSD, and mozilla, all sorts of totally cool things. Although I am a fan of Linux, even I must admit that it's not everything.

Re:What Linux needs to win on the consumer desktop

[CtrlPhreak]

There is the PengAol project where they have created a *working* client to access aol. the downside is that it's all in french and appears to only work in france (I've never gotten it to work). Maybe you can try your luck and/or donate some code to the project.

No..actually..it's the SUN point of view.

[SuperBug]

Sun tried to do all this type of stuff with thin clients about 8 years ago. The idea was, and still is, though SUN doesn't understand why they failed so long ago, that the internet will eventually be "My Network". So, Sun made this logo "The network is the computer."
Now that so many people are into "Grid computing" and the like, web-services are just the beginning. Sun had the right idea with their java stations so long ago, but they were trying to force the change, and be the ones to make the money, rather than just let it happen natrually, and be more of a benefactor/enabler.
You can say It's the MS way of thinking..but it's not..MS is just "embracing/extending" a way of thinking, probably so they can say they invented it too.
Before sun thought of it though..Larry Ellison, from Oracle corp was actually saying it first. SO it's really the Oracle way of thinking if you want to say who's thinking it is!

Re:No..actually..it's the SUN point of view.

[SideshowBob]

Before sun thought of it though..Larry Ellison, from Oracle corp was actually saying it first. SO it's really the Oracle way of thinking if you want to say who's thinking it is!

No, it's not the Larry Ellison way of thinking. It's the 1960's, mainframe terminals, IT pinhead way of thinking. Application servers are just a warmed over version of dumb terminals.

Bleh.

He's refering to a specific set of libraries

[Otis_INF]

f.e. the speechlibrary IIRC, or the windows CE code. Win32 plus a hell of a lot other libraries are not comming with such a license. So the remark AC made was correct in some way but very 'trollish' also because it reads like MS is shipping every lib they create with a license you can't create OSS with it. Which is of course bull.

What is it about clever people and dumb clients?

[streetlawyer]

If you ever meet a true genius, you will know him by this mark; he will have utterly stupid ideas about the future of "network computers". I don't know why this is true, but it is.

You can try to tell a Larry Ellison or an Alan Cox that people don't *need* a car any more powerful than a Yugo, but they *want* an SUV. You can pointedly ask how someone's going to edit their digital photographs via "Java over the web". You can ask why they're so keen on analogies to the game console market (a notorious graveyard of ambitions). But nothing seems to work.

I think it's called "intellectual arrogance".