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Linux Spreads its Wings
securitas writes "Businessweek's 'Linux Spreads its Wings' Special Report discusses the growing use of Linux in a wide range of products that include mobile phones, cars, telecom gear and consumer electronics; Linux in China; an analysis of the SCO litigation; a look at how Novell's Linux strategy may bring the struggling, former technology high-flyer back from the dead, as well as other articles and interviews related to the growth and spread of Linux as a viable platform for both enterprise and consumer technology."
It sounds too much like a maxi pad commercial. "New OS, with wings. For those heavier data flow days..."
That's it! I'm fed up with the popular media misunderstanding linux and the free software movement. It is quite obvious if you've had the time to do any research that penguins swim and don't fly.
Penguins can't fly, you insensitive clod.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
SCO's stock seems to be taking a beating this morning. Any ideas as to why?
Soon, i'll beable to put linux on my toaster.
-Pizentios
PH balanced for a wind0ze luser
Because MS is not competing with an operating system, they are competing with a paradigm. MS may have a market cap of half a trillion dollars, but the US economy puts out 12 trillion per year alone. If push comes to shove, it won't matter how big MS is - they will get squished like a bug. I renember when IBM spent billions back in the 80's to push the PS/2 (not playstation) on the market place to try and squeese out the x86's already out there. It didn't matter how big they were either, they got hammered.
Unfortunately, my old laptop attempted this & the result was not pretty.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, KIDS!
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
This is the same old TYPE of article we have been reading for the past three years. A status article.
I now LOATHE Slashdot everytime I see an article about Linux either 'spreading it wings' or an article with the gist 'linux is dying'.
These STATUS articles are unbearable.
If I want to know the Linux, Windows or OS X market share I will look it up!
This is a random rant so feel free to mod mod mod.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
What I'm wondering is if the Linux coders feel like real schmoes right about now because lots and lots of companies and people are making fortunes off of their work, and all they get is maybe one line in a hidden readme file that nobody will read? I know this'll get modded down, but I'm really curious. I know that if I did some work, then it was taken and used by lots of people to make lots of money, and I didn't even get a "thanks", I know I'd be pretty pissed off. Of course, they knew this going in, so why exactly do OSS people do this? It makes no sense.
The growth may be attributed to the ease of installing Linux from a CD-ROM based install script. I certainly have found it the easiest and fastest way to install a linux distro - and now with apt-get, installing applications onto Linux has been made easier as well.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
It runs on (almost) all hardware architectures and supports a huge open-source application library which can be recompiled for all hardware architectures.
Mindshare, application library and number of users will continue to increase in all computing, yes even on the desktop.
News at 11:
Most older women _are_ technically incompetant.
You, as a slashdot poster, are obviously not. Nor is my mother.
If you had to pseudocode the role of women in that generation, it would be something like:
do
cook
clean kitchen
breed
repeat until dead
There is nothing in there about gaining technical competency. Most older women are not technically competant because its never been a part of their lives.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
"red weed situation"?
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Using Linux in embeded products is one of the strong points of Linux: no directly messing with the Kernel by the user (no compiling, no inserting modules, no figuring out what exact chipset your sound card is, etc.) This makes Linux easy to use by anyone. Of course being custom fit to the device by the manufacturer helps a lot.
However, I don't see any mention of any Desktop Linux breakthroughs. Why? As far as I can tell there are two general types of computer users: those who want the computer to set itself up as much as possible and those who want total control over their computer and don't mind learning more than they ever set out to know about their computer.
If a decent Desktop Linux Distro ever comes out that is loved by the first group I can see the second group griping about how much it takes control away from the user. But wouldn't taking control away from the user be the goal of such a distro?
But that's what I think. I could be wrong.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
This came to my head instantly...
Don't get me wrong, I like the penguins... it's just funny... Oh well, there goes my karma....
Of course if it's like many things on the internet, the original poster is really a man pretending to be a woman.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
Anyway, penguins DO have wings (not fins) and they fly through water (not air). We call it swimming since it takes place in the water, but from a physical viewpoint, the bird is flying.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I just want to throw in my 2 cents and say that the Linux deals Novell has made in the past year are real head-slappers.
You know, "Dang! why didn't I think of that?"
For years, Novell has been looking at the Windows as an internet application server platform and for a while, they wanted Netware to compete. Finally, they found a way to make it happen - big time. They also bring to Linux all their years of experience with Netware, Groupwise and file and user security and directory services, so I even expect other projects like Samba and Filesystem ACLs will benefit too.
Dust off the red markers, boys, the 'N' is back in town.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
But wouldn't taking control away from the user be the goal of such a distro?
...."
;-)
Maybe, maybe not. I'm reminded of an observation I've read about the early days of unix. At the time (early 70's), it was common practice in the computer biz to have special-purpose install/config tools for every package, and their data was usually in a secret binary format. Every package had its own install/config tool, and if anything went wrong, you often couldn't fix it (because the config tool died while reading the files). One of the major technical advances of unix was that nearly everything was configured with files that could be edited with any editor. A major point was that the config data was also readable by humans. This made the system usable without long months or years of classes or apprenticeship. It also meant that, if the software shot itself in the foot, you could get in and fix the problem without a major reinstall.
If a linux distro takes care of all the configuration with a nice GUI, and puts all that data into plain-text files that can be read and edited, then control isn't taken away from the users. You just need to also tell them "To tell this app to reread its config files, type
For example, the netscape/mozilla browsers have always had a fancy GUI tool (the browser) to do all their configuration. But I've occasionally edited the bookmarks.html file and added or deleted things by hand, mostly to copy bookmarks from another machine. When I save the file, after a minute or three a little popup pops up telling me that "Bookmarks have changed on the disk" and do I want to reread them? I hit the obvious button, and the browser's bookmarks are changed. (It's easy; try it.
This is how it should be done. Novices can use the GUI; an expert can edit the configuration directly. So if you do it that way, you can be nice and friendly to the novices, while allowing the experts to do things their own way.
Another nice example is the apache web server. It comes pre-configured on a lot of distros. On this Mac, the web server was installed very nicely during initial setup. But you can also edit httpd.conf (and apache comes with full docs for this). Then you run "apachectl restart", and your changes are loaded into all the running httpd processes. It's very nice for both novices and expert webmasters.
I've written a lot of apps that do this sort of thing. It's not at all difficult to program. And it's not some sort of sophisticated, radical approach. It has been part of the unix design philosophy from the start.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If a decent Desktop Linux Distro ever comes out that is loved by the first group I can see the second group griping about how much it takes control away from the user.
I'm not sure the two are mutually exclusive. There have been several times where I WISHED something would just "work" without having to dork with dependencies, the odd compilation error, or somesuch. Even so, just because you have a layer that provides all the sugar coating, it's just that - sugar coating. As long as I as scrape as little or as much of it off as I want, I don't have a problem with a user-friendly desktop. That in my opinion, is the essence of a powerful OS.
A few years back, I witnessed an amazing sight. That's right, I saw penguins fly.
After attending a conference in San Diego, I snagged a Southwest Airlines flight home to Sacramento. The flight attendants, as usual, were perky and excited; but they also let me know as I boarded the plane that a surprise was in store.
(get your mind out of the gutter!)
After takeoff, the announcement came over the loudspeaker:
"We are very pleased to have some special passengers with us on Southwest today! Two penguins on their way from Sea World in San Diego to Marine World, Africa, USA in Vallejo have joined us. Their handlers have graciously allowed us to meet them."
And so it was, two penguins waddled down the center aisle of that 737. Flying. Across California.
No kidding.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
You're missing the point (or I'm not making myself clear enough, which is always possible).
Forking is only a problem IF you can't take the code in the new fork and put it back into the original project. I can give you two really good examples of projects which have been forked and the fork can't be merged back.
Emacs vs XEmacs split a long time ago. Code from XEmacs where the authors can't be contacted can't be integrated into Emacs. Ergo, a lot of the XEmacs development branch code is off-limits to the GNU Emacs tree. Now we have two similar but slightly incompatible versions arising from the same original tree which are stuck as a permanent fork.
Wine vs WineX. Transgaming forked the original Wine tree (which was under a BSD license), added some stuff and sold it, claiming that they would add code back to Wine at some point in the future (which they have to some extent). The Wine developers realised that they were losing out and decided to relicense the Wine tree to LGPL. Now Transgaming can't take the new Wine code into Transgaming.
Relicensing can result in a fork becoming a permanent, seperate entity. Compare that with the Linux kernel, which forks so fast you hardly know how many variants there are at any one time. Not that it matters - the GPL licensing keeps all those forks available all the time for any of the forks to consider. So while the kernel forks, none of the forks hurt the long-term picture - in fact they help it by providing experimental playgrounds for new ideas. BSD-style licensing would leave any or all of those forks vulnerable to a change of licensing that makes that fork off-limits to the other coding groups.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.