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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 :)"
but he's Alan Cox, so he must know :)"
...and there, ladies and gentleman, is one of the main problems with the open source movement, the computer industry, and society in general
It's sneaking in via devices like the Tivo. Here's a solid, reliable utterly useful device with a great interface. Think of it as proof of concept that Linux can be used to make a computer for your Mom.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Like many geeks ... er programmers without any notion
of business, Mr. Cox misses the ball on the proliferation
of Linux into the consumer market. Linux will continue to
be a niche product on the desktop until the day that AOL and
the other major Internet-service providers (ISPs) provide
an Internet client that runs on Linux. Why? The #1 consumer
application -- the killer application, if you will -- is
Internet connectivity.
When will AOL provide an Internet client that allows me to dial into AOL?
Shouldn't User Friendly be apologizing to you for subjecting you to bad art and no humor? The Penny Arcade guys were right. "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day."
Internet applications bug me.
Yes, the code may be running on my machine, but given that I'm *required* to have a net connection the entire time, it seems a little too risky - how do I know that the only thing going across the wire is the app? How do I know that my data isn't being sent back? And most importantly - can I save to my local system and not some ASP's computers. The ASPs may say that it allieviates the need for backups, but all it really does is take total control of your data from your hands and places it in somebody else's.
_knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
>I find it hard to believe that Cox believes that he's going to be arrested
>in the US for posting security fixes
And I don't think Dmitry Sklyarov believed he would be arrested in the US for writing software which ought to be under the "Accessibility" option in a Windows install.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers.
Well, that's one point of view; the Allan Cox and, dare I say it, Microsoft point of view. At the other end of the spectrum is the Apple 'digital hub' point of view, with iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iToilet, iEtc. That kind of intense processing can't be done by a web app.
Personally, I'm more inclined to the digital hub theory, because if all consumers wanted was web and email, WebTV would be a big hit by now. I guess time will tell.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers. I don't see why they wouldn't. They don't require installation, they don't crash, they don't take space on the harddrive and they're easier to use. This can be good to Linux. The more PHP or Zope apps we create, the better.
Let's suppose you are right, they don't/won't crash (I don't think that is true, but for the sake of arguement). Ok, great. It doesn't crash. What about when the network goes down at work or you temporarily lose your service with your ISP at home. Internet applications won't be doing much in that case. I'm not sure trading one for the other would even be worth it. At least with a crash you can get the program up and running, usually, in a small amount of time. Who knows how long the network will be down.
puck
Most of the people I know who have personal email addresses - use hotmail. It's the worlds biggest internet app.
I have used Yahoo Calendar as my organising tool before. It's another internet app.
They're easy to use, simple to start, accessible from almost anywhere.
They aren't the future, they're the present.
My Journal
Home apps are:
Internet connection
Low end Ethernet NIC to broadband
Wireless to broadband
Low end office apps for personal/school
Personal bookkeeping/money
Geneology and similar specialized apps
Multimedia
CD operations including stripping and burning
CD burning for data backup
Games
Internet games
IM
Color scanning
Color printing
Sharable file formats
Trackball/optical mouse support
Joystick game controller support
Quick boot
Resilient recovery from hard power off
I picked up on weirdness there too, but it was mostly the part where the edited final text of the interview says
How militant are you about which licences people use for their software, and how they use them?
People who are not following the (free software) licence are pirates, it's as simple as that.
Sounds like a silly thing for ac to say, right? Well, this implies that the original, unedited response (to whatever question was _really_ asked) was
People who are not following the licence are pirates, it's as simple as that.
Which makes perfect sense, as he goes on to say
It's no different if you take GPL code and don't give people the source code, or if you make copies of movies and sell them to people, it's the same thing. In terms of other software, it really depends on the people who write it. I don't think you have a right to dictate how somebody controls their own work, apart from the very, very basic standard you'd expect.
Read: follow the bloody licence or yer a pirate. I mean, it's pretty clear what he's saying. I'd like to say that Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity") applies here; this is rather difficult, because if it's stupidity, what about the relative cluefulness of the interviewer in the rest of the interview? If it's malice, why stop there? Why bother?
I can think of some answers for a few of these questions, I suppose, but none make it too much clearer.
Maybe I should clarify my drunken rambling...my point was just that computers in 10 or 20 years will be off the wall. I'm personally tired of people speculating about the future of computers. Noone knows for sure its all just people wagging their egos. Even Alan just has his head up his ass, so focused on coding. In 20 years computers won't even resemble anything remotely close to what we have now. We'll be using DNA grafted into our skin or something I don't know. And in 30 years....Jesus, I doubt the term "OS" or "Application" will even have any meaning. Programming probally won't even exist as we know it know.
M$ owns the desktop until there a robust
Office clone... My perfect anti-trust settlement
would force M$ and all other companies to
use standardized file formats and submit their
extensions to a standards body.
With MS file formats can be imported but never exported. OpenOffice comes close with most file
formats but there are still companies that would
never leave MS office because the have locked
themselves into Excel macros and actually want
to send *.exe files in Outlook, etc.
Until very large companies see he benefits and
just say no to proprietary formats owning THEIR
data ten M$ will continue to reate new formats
for media, e-commerce, distributed computing...
We the people should at least own the right to
2 or more vendors for a given application type.
That's the intent of anti-trust law... Competition
actually works to increase innovation and lower costs.
Of course, free software produces dramatic costs
decreases but it does limit the exchange of value
that creates a robust market. I see Eric Ramond's
Bazaar as a swap meet type of model... Great for
bargains that only the buyer truly values but most
cannot or will ot speculate in... To risky.
Of course, big projects that support consulting
models show some promise to establish some kind of
professional market but it wold ot be the technolog marketplace we have today... and it's hard to tell
the impacts of these models on the economy in the large. As Mel Brook's loved to say as the world's oldest man... "It's a nice living."
You clearly have never worked in a computer support position before. Very few "grown ups" view a computer as just another appliance. They see a spooky device with a dark cloud over it, just waiting for them to touch the keyboard so it fail. Most of the calls I can get people could probably figure out if they would just stop and think for a few seconds, but as soon as they encounter anything remotely close to a hurdle, their fingers tap the memorized number of the Help Desk faster than you can say "no, I said right click. Yeah, properties. No, left click this time."
And I'm sorry, although it might be critical to ONE sector, I hardly call it a critical app on the same level as Office/Outlook or Lotus Notes or something.
Also, since it takes a fair amount work to make a stateless web browser maintain a state (using server software - jsps, servlets, etc.), these applications would have to be integrated to the consumer in a completely new way. The software to do this is not on any person's computer. If this integration could ever take place, it would take extensive reeducation of the user. It took forever just to get people to be able to browse web pages effectively (many people still don't know how), so think about how long it would take to get people to understand that their favorite program isn't on their local hard drive and their credit card number is stored on a server 2000 miles away for their convenience.
So peope have to install the software so they can connect to AOL. They don't want people on AOL without being ON AOL.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers. I don't see why they wouldn't. They don't require installation, they don't crash, they don't take space on the harddrive and they're easier to use.
Let's see:
IOW, Internet applications may become big, but I fear demand is more driven by IT departments (who but into the "no installation hassle" advantage) than by consumers.
I've been working for a company that created a complex application for storage and manipulation of images. They had a Windows version and a Web-based version. The Web-based version was less functional, looked like shit and was bloody annoying because of the download times.
Webapplicaions in their current form are not only limited by the bandwidth available, but also by the web-model of loading pages. Every time you click a button in the application your browser has to fetch and render a complete page, even though only a few lines on the page may have changed. This severely limits the interaction that can be provided. You could of course get around this by using JavaScript or Flash or whatever, but all those techniques integrate poorly with the server-sided part of the application.
I can see it, and here is why: As technology spreads throughout the world, the devices are going to become easier and easier to come by. Soon they will just be a part of life for everyone. Look at how televisions are in every household now, and a radio in every car.
People are generally not expected to maintain their own television sets, radios, washing machines, cars, etc.
But oddly people don't make a big fuss about Windows expecting end users to carry out maintance tasks. Whilst they do about unix type systems having separation between these two. Even though it's Windows, rather than unix, which is at odds with just about every other piece of technology...
It's more basic than that.
..
Look out for linux clients for
Quicktime
Realplayer
Macrovision
....
Too many people use their PCs to access the 'Net for entertainment and expect to be able to access the same mediums regardless of what OS they have on their machines. Without being able to use the likes of the above they will stick with windows (IMHO).
Why oh why can Linux users not understand that Linux is too hard to use for normal people.
Actually in many ways if is no harder to use that Windows. Indeed quite a few things are easier for the user since they are explicitally prevented from doing the kind of mainatinance tasks which they should never have been expected to do in the first place. But which often with Windows they can find themselves obliged to do.
By posting source code or a patch to fix security holes he is effectively describing a way to circumvent a security measure. That is to say, while his intent may be to promote the security of the system, by doing so it is also describing a way to exploit the system. And according to the DMCA, it's how it's used that determines whether the developer goes to jail.
In the language of the DMCA, he is offering to the public, providing, or trafficking a technology that circumvents a technological measure that controls access to a work protected under copyright. This is described in Section 1201(a)(2) and it's subsections.
Now wait a second, you're saying, the DMCA covers copyright control mechanisms, not computer security systems. But due to the broad nature of the DMCA, it can also be construed to cover technological measures that protect the integrity and security of computers, computer systems, or computer networks. In fact, some of the authors state this in their committee report in the joint explanatory statement section.
So they adopted section 1201(j) (the so called "good faith" clause) in an attempt to resolve this issue. This section creates an exception for "security testing." But 1201(j) is overly restrictive in it's allowances of exceptions. Section 1201(j)(4) allows an individual to produce the technological means for the sole purpose of security testing. But there are several big problems. For one, they define security testing so that the authorization of the owner or operator of the computer system must be obtained first. It's not clear whether this is the copyright owner of the software, or the person who is operating the system (the "user"). Either way, consent must be granted. A second issue is in section 1201(j)(3), factors determining whether a person qualifies for exemption. One factor is that the information derived from testing was used solely to improve security of the system. A distributor of security solutions cannot guarantee this, it's impossible. I rarely use words like impossible, but when I'm faced with a word like solely, I think it's justified.
Sigh, I think I need to wrap it all up. Ironically Sklyarov is offered more protections in the DMCA than Alan Cox. Under the encryption research section 1201(g), one of the factors for exception is whether the person is engaged in a legitimate course of study, is employed, or is appropiately trained or experienced, in the field of encryption technology. Sklyarov is a PhD student researching cryptanalysis at Moscow University and he's employed in the field of encryption technology. In addition, the information he derived from his research he was disseminating to the broader crypto community, satisfying 1201(g)(3)(A). The fact that the FBI arrested him right after this act is no doubt another example of the sense of humor the universe has.
The analogy given in the committee report in regards to security testing is that of testing of a simple door lock. Well, it's permissible to publish documents on lock picking, yet they just made it illegal to do the same for electronic systems. Source code muddles the line between expression or idea, and product.
And I didn't even get to the good shit. The parts requiring analog device manufacturers to contain copy control technology (1201(k)(1)(A)). Or the part exempting broadcasters or cable systems (or their feeds) from the laws regarding removal or alteration of copyright management information, if it would cause them "undue financial hardship." (1202(e)(1)(A))
It's a complex issue, perhaps what is needed is a simple law.
Josh