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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 :)"
I'll bet he had his glasses on while interviewing. If he didn't, his responses probably would have been "GAH!!" "OH DEAR LORD SHUT OFF THE LIGHT!" "TOO BRIGHT! CAN'T CODE!"
Much apologies to Userfriendly.
JoeLinux
See other Alan Cox interviews here and here.
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.
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.
Nathan Brazil?
Check out this weirdness in the interview:
"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. It's no different if you take GPL (GNU Public Licence) 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."
Was this a bad cut and paste job or other bad editing or what?
For the first part of the question it's almost like they asked him about that recent askslashdot
where the guy was asking about his company's dodgy "interpretation" of the gpl, abusing it
for pleasure and profit.
In the last half of his answer, he appears to be on topic, but just take the question and the first
sentence of the reply and it makes Alan Cox look like some kind of idiot...
graspee
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?
...he seems to think Internet applications are going to be big with consumers... I can't really see it...
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. This is just standard progress, and the devices that are based on the technology will just get simpler and simpler to use.
I was particularly enamoured by Alan's example of the Black and Decker equipment, "So I could see in a few years' time owning a home PC becomes kind of like the Black & Decker DIY kit -- it's something people have because they enjoy that kind of thing, not something people have because they want to get on with certain specific tasks."
That one man's views are given too much credit and immense powers of knowledge and foresight attributed to him automatically?
Yeah, I respect Alan and I'd say that was the case here.
Terrific bloke, but we're all human.
(regarding the first Linux Summit)
The official part of it was actually very non-productive. The amount of work that got done over beer and at three in the morning cannot possibly be underestimated.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers.
Hotmail
eBay
Amazon
IMDB
...
>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!
No the point is that you never know when a law as stupid as the DMCA is gonna get you put in jail or involved in some legal nonsense. That's the point.. don't be stupid if you are this upset lobby against the DMCA instead of getting angry at a guy who won't post security fixes because of it.
Here's two: Office and the Bloomberg service...
Just a couple of the critical apps we need. If I can't even coax an OS X version of Bloomberg out of them, how can I persuade them to do a Linux port (even though it'd be easy, since they do/did a Solaris version).
And we still *need* Office. OpenOffice (which I burn CDs of for employees' home use, after they get sticker shock at the cost of Office) isn't a sufficient replacement. (hopefully this is just a -yet-)
We need apps. Big ones. How do we get there?
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
I found it interesting that he would prefer not to visit the US because of current copyright issues. I wonder what people in other countries think of our copyright schemes, I know each country has its own intellectuall property protection problems, but our (US) system seems generally more basterdized then most.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
I think we are going to see a shift in thought about what computers are, and what they can do for us. As Alan stated, users want services, if their computer messes up, they want to hit the power button, and have it all come back like it was. Users don't want to have to deal with hardware issues, they want their computer to work like their phone. Plug it in, and it works - it just works.
Perhaps what Alan was unconsciously advocating was the promotion of terminal services like those being developed by LTSP and perhaps companies offering terminal/computer services to employees, and perhaps in a broader sense, 'computer utilities' who would offer computer service to residential and small business customers.
Compared to Microsoft, which requires 3 (count them, 3) licences for one user on one thin client to connect to one terminal server (one for the terminal server OS, one for the client OS, and one for the Client Access Licence), Linux can provide better functionality at a fraction of the cost. Linux opens this market, where Microsoft has sufficiently stifled its growth by making it more difficult than it should be to enter that market.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
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 don't know about you guys, but I've seen users get completely lost when installing software, or looking for that .doc file he saved somewhere, or even trying to add a music to a winamp playlist.
Well, I'm an experienced user and would say "you dumb***, drag that outta the floppy's window to the playlist and it's done" but hey... they have no clue about how the GUI works!
Say what you want, but for users who only touch the comp. once a week or less, and can't even program that video they have for years already... ALL the options we have as OS (Yeah, I know MacOSX) suck. Bad.
When are we doing to put a level of abstraction between that lousy filesystem design (in the user's point of view) so we can really add INFORMATION where we want? Can I add a note to my DivX;-) file? Nope. File design doesn't allow it. What if I wanted an email attached to an MP3? Nope. Can't.
If we learned something with Apple's iTunes, iPhoto, iWhatever, we'd see they KEEP THE USER FAR AWAY FROM THE FS, while not completely locking the user away from it. Beautiful, huh? So why are we still insisting in making a WINDOWS CLONE out of our GUIs???
I know this reply floats around a bunch of topics, but they all end up in the same question: DOES THE SOFTWARE SERVES US WELL, EASILY? CAN IT DO WHAT I WANT/NEED???
"Hack that directory tree!!!"
--Drake 2c
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.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
What, the inability to recognize humorous intent, even when the poster beats you about the face and neck with a smiley?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
My point is, in 10 years, everyone is going to want to use a computer, use the internet, and use them both together, seamlessly, all the time. On everything, from comptuers to PDAs to the fridge. We'll have computers that'll blow your mind and enough bandwidth (well, maybe not enough) to do just about anything. Linux and windows won't have anything to do with this. Get over it. The only thing will matter is the user interface. The computer won't matter, because they'll be extremely powerful, and the OS won't matter, because most people won't even be able to say what "OS" stands for. The only way to get consistent interfaces across multiple platforms that are internet ready is to just have them be IAs and have it all run off a central server. The dumb terminal will have its revenge.
If you have a fast local network, it's not difficult to play a DVD on one machine and watch the decoded picture on another.
Yes it is. The DVD CCA would never allow digital output of a CSS decoder, and now that the WIPO Copyright Treaty is going/has gone into effect, the whole world can sing it with me: "It's fun to violate D-M-C-A, it's fun to violate D-M-C-A!"
Will I retire or break 10K?
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."
What I don't understand is why AOL created their own (proprietary I might add) protocol for their network (or at least why they continue to use one...). TCP/IP can easily do everything their network does, coupled with a decent web browser and a search domain, typing the "keyword" into your AOL program (standard web browser) will bring up pornfreaks.keywords.aol.com or something that could point to a well coded DHTML or Flash or whatever site. Why do all these people that create proprietary stuff when there are open standards that do the same thing make money? Utilize existing technology to do something new, I'm sure they could make alot more money that way anyways, more userbase is good isn't it. Totally away from the point of this post, but isn't the consumer market migrating away from services like AOL anyhow, everything is availiable on the general internet now, and with broadband becoming the norm, why bother with badly coded software? I work at a (normal) ISP, and whenever someone installs the AOL sofware, it fubars the Windows TCP/IP stack. And if my guess is correct, AOL doesn't have a huge market share, though they have by far the biggest market share. In other words, maybe 10% of Internet users use AOL, the other 90% are spread across local ISP and such (these numbers are arbitrary). When will these monopolistic companies get the picture that people don't like being pushed around (at least people who know anything...)
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.
Linux has already won all of my desktops. It has been ages since I booted The Evil OS for anything--even multimedia-related apps. In fact, I couldn't completely switch back to Windows even if I wanted to and was some kind of l33t warez d00d. I have become dependant on the greater flexibility afforded me by all the wonderful OSS out there. 'Critical mass' can't be far away now. My eye is on K and Open Office for bringing about the turning point for the non-tech population.
I can't imagine how someone can tell me I can't give something that I made away for free, but that I can sell it.
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!
--SuperBug
People are usually amazed when I show them this movie, especially when I say that, yes, you don't have to install any software, you just build it and plug it to the working network. People are used to situation where when you want to add 20 new computers to your office, it's a work for few days, not to mention licensing for the software plus the price of the hardware.
I use this movie in my LTSP propaganda.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
You don't see it? How can you not?
I look at my laptop. Aside from programming I do with it (for my job).. what do I have running:
Several instances of IE
Trillian (irc/msn/icq/ym/aim)
a stock ticker
Email
These are things I use the computer for probably 90% of the time. And all of them are basically online services.
(It doesn't matter to me if they are run locally or not)
Or to put it differently, they are of no use to me without the network.
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.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
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.
he seems to think Internet applications are going to be big with consumers... I can't really see it
Wow! You can't see it. Unfortunately I am not able to read the second part of the interview, but going by what is commented, here is my take.
For the past several years, personal computer systems are reorganizing themselves around internet. Most of the people I know use their computers for internet applications only. Then why you can not see that internet applications are going to be big with customers?
yAthum UrE yAvarum kELir All the places are our place, everybody is our kin. (A Tamil Poet - 2000 years ago)
haha. Yeah, 'powerful' is one word for it mate...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
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.
GNU Enteprise
Here's an overview; "GNU Enterprise (GNUe) is a suite of tools and applications for solving the needs of the enterprise. From human resources, accounting, customer relationship management and project management to supply chain or e-commerce, GNUe can handle the needs of any business, large or small. If you are looking for a full-function ERP, GNUe is the package for you.
Details: Written in Python (for easy application creation) and C (for speed), GNUe is under constant and heavy development. If you want to write custom applications for it, it's ready. Pre-packaged applications are on the back burner as the development team works on making the core modules more complete and compliant with varying standards. My personal estimate from following the project is that the first complete applications will show up in about 6 months, and then rapidly accelerate as more app developers learn about GNUe and get interested.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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".
-- the most controversial site on the Web
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
Tom.
Oh arse