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Open Source Spreads Beyond Software
B'Trey writes "Britain's Prospect Magazine is running an article entitled 'The Microsoft Killers.' The article covers the success of Open Source software in particular but also looks at how the methods and practices of Open Source are moving outside the software environment."
prices COULD be a lot lower since advertisement would be word-of-mouth not multi-million $currency campaigns.
the only thing that might prevent this is Opencoke having higher operating costs due to small-scale production.
The GPL is based on using copyright as a shield against those who would use copyright as a weapon. The underlying situation is one that is often reflected in the physical world and often noted in literature: the knife cuts both ways.
The Creative Commons licenses could eventually have an even greater impact on the world than the GPL although the latter's impacts have only begun to be felt.
You're very right in that details comment. Honestly too, I think many people CAN get around having problems with inconsistent UIs. After all, there's millions of people swapping between office PCs, their home PCs, and they're not necessarily exactly the same. I don't think it takes a great deal of smarts to work out there's a difference between how 2 apps work, it's more on the level of small annoyance.
What frustrates many people with Linux is in details like... Joe Average buys a digital cam, hooks it up to his linux box. It has a USB port, he has the right cable, he has a supported cam, he has the right software and everything setup to work. However when it's plugged in... what then?
A linux loving friend of mine who's not short on smarts (but perhaps a little behind on cluefulness when it comes to anyone but pure geeks) would say "It takes three seconds to mount the camera as a drive. duh". For Joe Average, finding out HOW to do that in 3 seconds can be 2 days of frustrated chasing information on how the OS works on a device level around the net.
Now thats just one example, but there's so many little things like that with linux that still pop up. They're TINY things, MINISCULE things, but for a user who has no tech knowledge apart from operating a gui, it's the difference between 'hey linux is a neat replacement for windows!" and "this linux OS is a heap of shit, there's so much fucking around".
That being said, it IS getting better. piece by piece...
Word of mouth will always be the best advertizing method. IF the advertizing is good, of course. When people spread the word about something they really believe to be of benefit to themselves, it naturally brings in new customers. And it doesn't matter what the "thing" is either. It could be religion, cars, long-distance, restaurants, or whatever. And since this kind of advertizing costs nothing to the company, they can try maintain lower production costs.
It's not really news, you know. People have been brewing beer at home for thousands of years; the same with making tools and clothes and so on. But I guess it's easy to forget these things if you're used to buying everything from a supermarket.
If people could put up with the crappiness of DOS and Win 3.x (the infancy of MS operating systems), why is Linux being bashed constantly during its infancy for stuff MS got away with? Because Liux is being continuosly compared to Windows.. When DOS and 3.1 were around, there was nothing to compare them to. People did not have any expectations, so whatever Microsoft did was sen as a giant leap forward Linux has to catch up to Microsoft becuase that is what people expect from their computers. Once that is done, it can go past. But you have to have the little stuff working first....
When DOS and 3.1 were around, there was nothing to compare them to.
Ehem. Apple Macintoshes. They had nice friendly GUI's, but more people bought PC's with the "cryptic" DOS and the "inconsistent" Windows 3.x.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
You might be abe to run this sort of thing in the model of the CAMRA 'Real Ale' or Micro-Brew campaigns. Kind of a local coke micro-brew.
But I still find it a bit ironic that the folk wittering on about open source can then segue instantly into complaints about lack of jobs, outsourcing and such. This morning a guy contacted me saying he was unemployed and wanted some advice on starting an open source project that might establish his reputation.
Well what happens if everyone does that?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"Oracle's dominance in databases is coming under attack from MySQL..."
Please. Oracle's supposed dominance in databases is under far more threat from Microsoft and IBM than it is from MySQL **at this point in time.** IBM earns more database revenue than Oracle, so it's not even fair to say that Oracle dominates.
Yup, Mac's were great, but beacuse they were in locked down proprietary mode, while IBM PC's were being assmbled by eveyone and his dog, they got left wayy behind...
Stop buying hardware which is not supported properly on the system of your choice. That way you'll fix two things: 1. your hardware will work 100 %, 2. the manufacturers will start supporting non-Windows computers more, since they're losing money to a competitor perhaps.
Report to Mandrake about the Camera, They cant possibly try every single camera about there. PLease visit The bug report page about it. You can also try the latest beta of Mandrake to see it if it works out of the box. If it dosent, then report a bug. Part of the Open Source movmenment is that EVERYBODY needs to take part. If you dont report bugs and problems, then dont complain about them!
found here
LALL!. the hardware worked fine in the end. It works perfectly.
You have things typically backwards. I have a computer and wish to try Linux. I try a good linux distro on it and there's some very frustrating parts to getting simple things done. You come along and say I should buy better supported hardware. As Joe Average, I say to you "Oh well, It works on windows" and boot back into windows, and continue getting work done.
THOSE are the little differences that make the difference between averageman considering an OS as a useful tool, and considering it a liability. Making excuses for the OS deficiencies by saying it's a hardware problem when another OS works just fine with it is passing the buck
Yup, Mac's were great, but beacuse they were in locked down proprietary mode, while IBM PC's were being assmbled by eveyone and his dog, they got left wayy behind...
And yet curiously it does not work the same way with software. Now, it is Windows that is locked down in proprietary mode, with expensive and draconian licenses. Linux distros can be assembled by everyone and his dog, but yet, it is still a mostly a niche OS on the desktop.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
communism in it's (purest?) best form.
Life is not for the lazy.
Uhh, MacOS, GEM, GeOS, AmigaOS. Need I continue?
DOS/3.1 "won" because it had the right apps and came at the right price.
This is the exact same reason why Linux will be 90% of the market in 10 years. Assuming it survives SCO.
Not only is it premature, it's STUPID. Why do people keep associating OSS with anti-Microsoft? As I said yesterday, OSS is about choices, not about putting MS out of business. No matter how much any of us dislikes or even hates MS, that should not be what OSS is about. That is anything but a noble cause.
A noble cause is providing free choice to people. That's what OSS is and should be about and someone needs to get this message to the media. MS should rise or fall based on their own merits, even if those merits are questionable or at odds with the OSS community. If Microsoft falls because of OSS, so be it, but if that's the cause, and Microsoft falls, then OSS no longer has a cause. The cause to provide choice will always be there.
Forget Soviet Union and all the evil that lived there. Learn about the original ideas of communism.
Read Stanislaw Lem's "Magellan Cloud" (or something like this, I don't know how they translated the title) - it depicts a world in which people were responsible enough for communism to succeed - a world in which one likes to live. No propaganda, slogans, terror, stiff norms. Just "open source" in all domains of life.
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This isn't like any executive summary I've read, because at least half the article focuses on things that I wouldn't consider part of the official open source movement (if there is such a thing). Things like OpenCola, the Human Genome Project, open educational materials (a movement which--according to my credit card statement--isn't going nearly quickly enough).
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
become some sort of revolutionary act?
I always thought of it as the standard model.
Even when it comes to making Cola that secret has been out of the bag for over 100 years and thousands of little bottling plants around the world churn out psuedo "Coke" by the billions of gallons. If you think there's really some deep dark secret to it you've been reading marketing as nonfiction.
It's flavored sugar water. You play around with the flavorings until you get it right. When you make your own you even get to use real sugar in your sugar water.
You don't really think that KFC's spices are a secret, do you? You can taste them. Any decent cook could figure them out if he really wanted to. In fact, here's a list. Make your own:
KFC's "Secret" recipe
When commercial entities and large sums of money are at stake comapanies even employ chemists to analyze ingredients of competitors products. You can't hide physical reality. It isn't like code, and even code can be reverse engineered as soon as you know what it does.
I'm all for open distribution of knowledge, but to claim that Open Source invented it is a bit daft. The libraries are full of the stuff.
Ok, let the monogram bashing begin.
KFG
Oracle's dominance in databases is coming under threat from MySQL, whose software was downloaded over the internet around 10m times last year.
The only people who can afford Oracle aren't going to jump to MS Sql, Postgres or MySql. The biggest threat Mysql has is on Microsoft Sql Server. The reason is because the price point of SqlServer. Oracle, DB2 and Sybase are very expensive. People buy expensive database servers for proven scalability and reliability. Microsoft Sql Server has neither, therefore they are the ones who are going to get his the worse.
Put it another way, Oracle and DB2 are moving towards grid databases, which not only will open source provide a good option to MS Sql Server, the big boys are now directly hammering Microsoft. By Microsoft's own account, their clustering doesn't work right and is only applicable in limited situations. Sql Server is still about 10 yrs behind Oracle and Db2 when it comes to clustering, grid, shared memory and real-time sync.
Real programmers do both and see the pros/cons. Slowly OSS will gain more momentum, but lets get real. MySql and Postgres will not scale like Oracle or DB2. Even with ObjectWeb's CJDBC driver, having an reliable and robust clustering solution is not easy to achieve.
To be somewhat on topic, the OpenCola idea is great and I'd like to buy a case and pass it around to give a little shove to folks who don't get what open source is and what it isn't.
My sig (if you have sigs off);
Specifically: Open source is mainly a plan not a good. Closed source is mainly a good not a plan. That said, give me a good plan -- or a well planned good (closed or open) -- and I'll take it.
From that: Linux does not matter, GCC does not matter, Windows does not matter, Office -- Open or MS -- do not matter. Who is interested -- who is motivated -- is the only thing that matters.
People are motivated when they are interested. Motivated interest that comes from personal interest -- not externally imposed by mild or excessive force -- tends to be most effective over time since the person is not running away from the motivator but is cheerfully compelled to act.
In general, open source and closed source -- commercially driven or not -- have different built-in motivators. None of these are absolutes, though they do pull people in different directions;
Open source motivators;
Transparency (corillary: Look if you want)
Process over products (corillary: harder to 'buy')
'Natural' growth;
Closed source motivators;
Secret formula (corillary: Joe Isuzu "Trust me!")
Products not projects (soft goods)
Action imposed by past or likely sales;
I don't care if you use open souce, though the built-in motivators alone are what make it strong. The goods -- the soft-wares -- are entirely secondary.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The revolutionary thing isn't that it's open, but that it's willfully open.
I bet there are 10 small businesses in your town who'd love to install linux for you for a minimal fee and would support you afterwards.
You only have to hang out at newsgroups if you are anti-social and don't have friends with similar interests.
War is necrophilia.
It has been many, many years since since Martin Luther nailed his challange to the church door. Before that time were others who promoted free and open exchange of information.
No, it isn't the people who seek to willfully distribute open knowledge who are the revolutionaries. It is the people who seek to hold it private.
KFG
Not a valid comparison. Mac achieves this by 'monopoly' control of the hardware. This isn't an option for Windows and even less so for OS's such as Linux or NetBSD, designed to support as many architectures as possible.
I agree it's about the customer but not with your implicit assumption about them. Macs are the superior solution for a delimited subset of users, those too busy, unwilling, or incapable of tinkering with their machines, willing to live with the attendant limitations and pay the premium for ease of use. It supports them extremely well but by no means is the best solution for all purposes, as Apple's market share makes obvious.
GNU is open source. It's also free software. All free software is necessarily open source. (If the source isn't open, it isn't free.)
However, not all open source software is free software. For example, software which is "free for non-commercial use" may be open source but it doesn't meet the definition of "free software." It's free as in beer, but not free as in speech.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.