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ESR's Desktop Linux 2008 Deadline

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the might-be-a-couple-years-late dept.

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."

4 of 535 comments (clear)

  1. So this is what ESR has been doing! by Slithe · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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  2. Re:Just remove the 'Open'? by buddyglass · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:H.264 by mad.frog · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:World Domination 201? by simeonbeta2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...

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