ESR's Desktop Linux 2008 Deadline

jesboat noted Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley's essay about what the Linux community must do to achieve dominance entitled "World Domination 201". It says "Idealism about open formats will not solve our multimedia problem in time; in fact, getting stuck on either belief in the technical superiority of open source or free-software purism guarantees we will lose. The remaining problems aren't technical ones, and none of the interesting patents will expire before the end of 2008. We've got to ship something that works now. If we let this be a blocking issue preventing overall Linux adoption during the transition window, we won't have the userbase to demand changes in the laws to untangle the screwed up patent system, or even prevent it from getting worse. It's a chicken and egg problem, demanding a workaround until a permanent solution can be achieved. We can't set the standards until after we take over the world."

Comments

So this is what ESR has been doing!

[Slithe]

He has not posted anything in his blog for six months!

Re:H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because H.264 is a codec while OGM is an unofficial hack of the ogg container format. You encode video with a codec then you put that video along with audio tracks and subtitles into a container so it's one file and not a mess of many. So to answer your question H.264 is immensely better for encoding video as opposed to OGM because you can't encode video with OGM you put encoded video into an OGM container.

Re:The only real problem of Linux is

[BobKagy]

But if you read the article, getting OEMs on board is not enough.

Currently, multimedia support is considered an essential part of the desktop. However, it is illegal for an OEM to include various bits (DeCSS, MP3, codecs) without license agreements, and there isn't one person an OEM can pay for this license. Redhat doesn't even offer the option of paying them for this support.

So until the multimedia problem is solved, the pre-installation problem for the general public will wait. There are and will be niche places to get a PC with Linux pre-installed, but they won't be fit for the general public.

Re:Any Fact Checking?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're certainly right that they're short on facts but some of your own facts are a little questionable. Microsoft has $35B in cash alone - more in "net tangible" assets in the formal sense of the term. And while revenue and profit figures are impressive they are not as important in buyouts as market cap - Home Depot has a market cap of ~$80B while Microsoft has a market cap of ~$290B.

So yeah, Microsoft would win that cagefight but they couldn't just buy Home Depot outright with cash in ESR's anarcho-libertarian utopia. No big deal - it's not like you published a call-to-arms paper for general consumption.

Re:Just remove the 'Open'?

[buddyglass]

Did you read the whole thing? The crux of his argument is that Linux would only need to compomise in the short term. Once it gained a large enough userbase, it would be able to pressure companies to release open source drivers. At least, that's how I read it.

Re:H.264

[mad.frog]

Why did Adobe use H.264 for Flash's codec,

It doesn't.

Flash 6 introduced the Sorenson Spark codec that was essentially a variant of H.263 (not H.264).

Flash 8 added support for On2 VP6, a proprietary codec.

H.264 is not presently supported by Flash.

Re:World Domination 201?

[simeonbeta2]

RTFA! From the first paragraph:

In the 1990s Linus Torvalds used to give a talk called World Domination 101 on the early steps he believed Linux would need to take to achieve "world domination -- fast" [1]. We've made a lot of progress since then...

Suffice it to say that capping on ESR w/o reading the (lengthy, well cited and well written) article is what strikes me as sophomoric...