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OSDL Announces Desktop Initiative
rhetoric writes "Earlier today at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York, nonprofit Open Source Development Labs announced the creation of a "Desktop Linux Working Group initiative focused on greater use of Linux on desktops throughout the enterprise." A press release is available on OSDL's website, in addition to this Register article." It's all part of their non-secret plan.
We all know how good committees are at deciding things. Compromise usually leads to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want a Linux desktop that's designed by a committee? Isn't that against the whole spirit of free software?
We are talking about industry standards. Outside of the software industry, they work very well. The software industry is still in it's immature stages - like the engineering industry was before there were standard sizes for nuts and bolts - manufacturers actually deliberately made their nuts and bolts incompatible because it gave them lock-in, just as the software industry does now. Incompatible nuts and bolts seems crazy now, closed/incompatible file formats will seem crazy in the future.
Yes, the engineering world has discovered that it's far more profitable to standardize bolts but proliferate drive types.
The consumer never feels they're locked in, but has to buy mulitple sets of tools, if only to remove the patented head bolt and replace it with a standard one. Very profitable for the patent holder.
The software industry seems to be learning this trick.
Witness XML, a standard for creating standards. You can claim XML compliance and yet extend it in propriatary ways. It is plain text, but the file sizes are truly gargantuan, so you need to compress them, for which you can use your own propriatary compression method. Certain outfits are now even starting to create propriatary XML parsers.
The bolts are all standard, but you still have to buy the tool.
There's one essential difference between file formats and bolt design though. Bolts aren't given extraordinary protection by the DMCA.
KFG
constant tweaking and installation of new hardware and software is not using a computer productively. using a computer productively means that the computer is operational, in the sense that it doesn't actually -need- anything further to be done to it in order to function as intended. it just works.
It is classic Linux-advocate style to redefine the user's problem to fit Linux's needs rather than the other way around. Some people like to get a new digital camera once a year. Some people like to install a new game once a month. Some people like to buy the latest and greatest MP3 players, video cards, wi-fi devices, photo printers, hand-held devices and all of it comes with software.
People want the capabilities of their computer to expand as the industry expands and new things are invented. It's a very closed mindset that says the "computer has a use and once it is set up it is static." My uses for the computer change every day (especially as a I am a progrmmer). Why should my less technical sister be restricted from a similarly expansive view of computing? If I call her up and tell her BitTorrent or iPod is the shit, it should be easy for her to install BitTorrent or an Ipod.
I'm not saying that Linux is intrinsically worse that windows at supporting dynamically changing systems: but for the average user today it is worse because of the driver and software support. That isn't Linux's "fault" but it is Linux's "problem". Not the user's problem. If you make it the user's problem they will stick with Windows and (frighteningly!) think of it as a more free and open system than the vision of Linux you are pushing.