ESR Says Linux Followers Should Compromise

jpheasant writes "Eric Raymond argues time is running out to win over the iPod generation. To get there, he says the Linux community will need to make 'compromises.' For starters: 'Linux believers will have to reach out beyond self-absorbed geeks who learns Klingon and attends science fiction conventions in his spare time.'" From the article: "I mean that we need to be prepared to go to the rights holders for these proprietary codecs and say, we'll give you money, give us a license; and this is something that the Linux community has a huge antipathy to doing because we've got all this idealism about open source. And in the long run, I think that's true, I view comprising with the proprietary codec vendors as a tactical move designed to get us larger end user market shares, so that in the end we can push more things to the open."

Comments

Re:again, he's right

[ElleyKitten]

Wireless is all about having the right card. I used to have this cheap-ass unsupported Belkin crap and trying to get it to work under linux was a nightmare. NDISwrapper, install this tool, that tool, blah. So I went to the wiki for my distro (Ubuntu) found the list of supported cards, bought one, and yay autodetection. No more wires under the door for me! :)

Every camera and music player I've ever used has automatically mounted as an external drive. Have I been abnormally lucky?

Picasa (Google's photo manager) is available on Linux, along with a number of open source photo managers. I think we're doing pretty good on the photo managing front.