"...I gave an hour long presentation on open source, including its history, the principles of community development, licensing, business models, and a class discussion. Suggestions on how to improve my presentation for next term's class would be most welcome."
Perhaps you should identify what it is you hope to achieve with your talk, why you were asked to give the talk, and who your audience is?
It seems that your speech was an expository speech, and at the same time you wanted to make a speech to persuade. Or maybe that you wanted to speak to persuade, but felt the need to do a lot of exposition. Is that correct?
If so... you probably need to skip a lot of the exposition. Remember that your audience are fourth year engineering students. No one stays in engineering because of the fun factor. I know, I was one, I asked many others the same question. By the fourth year, they all want money otherwise they would have done an easier major. So appeal to their practicality. What will give them an advantage in their job or their own business over a proprietary solution?
So, in your speech, nail the key points about what FOSS is, very briefly. FOSS is software with a license that states that you may freely copy and distribute the source code, and modify it, subject to a few conditions. Mention GPL and BSD licenses. Mention a few major FOSS examples they might be familiar with. Linux, Apache, Postgresql, Firefox, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, to create a connection between the concepts and something they might be familiar.
Now, you sell. What's in it for them? In many cases, FOSS has the potential to cut costs and improve profit margins. It cuts costs because the only expense is often your time or limited support costs. This is especially valuable in a startup, where you are under capitalized by definition. And your ability to make more profit for a company always looks good to a manager, as that is what most are judged on themselves.
Mention Vendor lock-in. If your mission critical app is with FOSS and has a sizeable community, no worries! Worse case scenario, you hire in a coder to improve your app. You are never SOL.
The other side of the coin with FOSS is improved profit margins through being able to custom design software for the business, or to unlock additional capability without having to persuade management to buy you extra software you may not even use. That is useful whether your boss is a tightwad, or whether a recession means that everyone is being tight with their money.
Also mention that any noteworthy open source contributions of their own can often lead to good job offers.
To give them another example of how it could be useful _to them_, since they are engineers you should research a major FOSS example with relevance to each major field. Bonus points if you can mention how a major company has profited from FOSS.
To cap off, emphasize that if they do nothing else, make sure that they exhaust the FOSS solutions first before moving on to proprietary software. Start with sourceforge.
By the way, I would have answered the firefox question with noscript. Noscript kills a major attack vector of malware, and the best method of dealing with malware is prevention, not periodic reinstalls and bloaty, always on malware defense systems.
"Firefox is not really free its disguised in the price of a computer..."
A better argument that Firefox is not free, it has an income stream that is tied to Google and making your default search routed through Google (which can be changed of course). A certain percentage of users will stick with Google, giving Google more advertising revenue some of which is funneled back to Firefox.
But that's really besides the point. Someone can always fork the Firefox code and make a new Firefox that is identical, not tied to the big G, and also free. You can't do that with IE.
"I see nothing extremely superior about Ubuntu per se. Other distros have been "on top", have had some features which rivaled Windows of the day in terms of ease of use, etc."
I probably exaggerated saying that it was extremely polished _compared_ to other linux distros. There is not a lot of difference in usability between say, that and PCLinuxOS for example. But there was enough to notice. That last 10% of polish does take a lot more than 10% of the total work.
As you say, the difference is in the repos. Ubuntu has finally solved the "one click install" thing in a way that is not just as good as, but superior to the way XP does things. With XP, the process (for a lot of people) involves looking for something free first (freeware or pirated), praying that it is not infected with malware, then clicking setup.exe. With ubuntu the research process is very similar but there are no issues about malware and you know that if it's in the repos, it's free.
I think that due to network effect, other linux distros will have an increasingly tough time dislodging existing ubuntu users. It's also at the point where I feel very little frustration with things on a day to day level. This makes it tough to change - it means migrating all my data, applications and modifications to those applications. I'm essentially where I used to be with XP minus the frustration at all the malware issues.
"What makes linux 'work' is hardware support - that has improved, but this has almost nothing to do with particular distros."
True. I suppose another factor in the adoption of linux in general is that a person can comfortably run it with a fairly low end P4 - some 5 years old. By this time, that hardware is well and truly supported but the original XP installation is usually well and truly hosed with malware. That was a lot less true back in the Mandrake days. So I think Ubuntu has come along at the right time.
It also helps that openoffice is now usable, which has little to do with Ubuntu.
"This is why Ubuntu is more popular then other distributions, because Mark S. has associated Ubuntu with larger brands."
As someone who actually uses Ubuntu and has in the past used (trying some extensively, some still in use) such Linuxen as PCLinuxOS, puppy, DSL, SUSE, CentOS, Mepis, and probably a few others I forget, I think I'm qualified to say that the difference is not just in the branding. I've also developed nothing in Ubuntu nor hold any financial interest in its success. I have used it solely for about 6 months and the last time I booted my XP HDD for any reason was at least 4 months ago. And I really didn't want to like it because of the ugly default shit brown theme, the name and icon seemed like something more appropriate to a Michael Jackson music video than an operating system, and just because it was too popular already. But in the end I succumbed.
Ubuntu succeeds because it is amazingly polished and stable compared to other linux distributions, with a focus on the newbie and a shockingly vast array of software in the repositories that Just Works. No one uses an OS to use an OS, they use an OS for their favorite applications.
If you want help, you are more likely to find success through googling ubuntuforums.org or posting there yourself. This is because the forums are moderated in a specifically newbie friendly fashion where RTFM is banned.
And now network effect is reinforcing the utility of Ubuntu. Basically anything FOSS gets a concerted effort to put it in the repos if it is any good, or a howto gets written for it. And any hardware has someone using Ubuntu having a hack at it to get it to go first.
From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct clothing article has been showing up lately. And we don't mean the fanny pack. Suits, especially the luxurious wool pin-striped suit that helped define the golden era of business in the 1980s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of fashion executives, increasing numbers of the Emo generation are also purchasing suits (or dusting off Dad's), buying ties and dressing to impress!
"Granted, they probably use more electricity... That's the biggest downside:-("
I never thought of going to a recycling center for dumpster diving, so far I've only seen what gets thrown away by my work, which I generally would only only put to server uses. The trouble with servers is that they are always on and so consume as much electricity as possible.
"I just wonder if the business model won't be fruitful at first and slowly fade into non-existence."
This can happen. However, before it happens the business in question will sell a lot of Model Ts, or AK-47s, or airline travel without meals, or Honda Cubs, or VW Bugs, etc etc. And it may go on selling, and selling, and selling, and selling. There are a lot of people in the world out there with basic computer needs.
"People around here love things like Soekris boards or Gumstix modules and you should have read the enthousiasm about the EEE PC. For 200$ (135), "
The Soekris and WRAP boards rock! Perfect for firewalls, and can run on the power generated by a small hamster.
Unfortunately, they've spoiled me from dumpster diving because of the reliability and efficiency they have. The old stuff now is more like being given an old Buick from the 1980s... sure, it will probably get you from A to B but it will cost you in fuel and repairs. It used to be so fun to resuscitate an old computer.
"While I agree that we are spending too much money in iraq, but the defense budget is not necessarily a bad thing."
At least if they are going to spend the money in the way they are now, they should change it back to what it was before the marketers got a hold of it in 1947 - the War Department. A lot more honest.
This is similar to an experiment where people were made to wear lenses that turned everything upside down. After a while, they started seeing everything the right way again. Different I/O port but same phenomenon.
"However, on a different train of thought - what are the odds of current civilization living another 1000 years? I mean, we already have weapons that could decimate the entire world population within a matter of days. I hate to be a pessimist, but I can't help but think that the more knowledge we gather, the more likely we are to blow everyone up (not to mention natural disasters)."
The more advanced we are, the more likely colonizing other planets becomes, giving us built in redundancy. Hopefully it gets done sometime within the next 50-100 years. I guess what humanity needs is motivation - a spectacular close shave with a small asteroid, big enough to give us a huge scare but not big enough to wipe us out. Kind of like the asteroid equivalent of a New Pearl Harbor.
I suppose the other thing is, there will always be a cryptic population of humans, and the destruction of a nuke is only temporary. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have both been repopulated for decades. And if a government has the wherewithal for nukes, it has the wherewithal for some sort of continuity of government program. And the people preserved aren't likely to be stupid, either. So as those humans repopulated the earth, the progress per person would likely be far higher, and the likelihood of reinventing wheels should be low since a good CoG program should be preserving a lot of the knowledge.
"That's what pie-in-the-sky greenies want. Most Americans don't want a diesel of any sort."
All Americans need money to live. For most, this means a job. For most of those, this means transport to and from said job. If fuel prices are high compared to disposable income, they will take the highest mpg vehicle they can get, or bicycle to work, irrespective of the technology.
It's got nothing to do with being a "pie-in-the-sky greenie". The only thing pie in the sky is the belief that lim e^x as x-> infinity (i.e., human population growth) is less than the same limit for mx+b (supply of oil, where m = 0 using the dinosaur theory, or some positive real number for abiotic theory), c is a real number.
"i'll explain in mathematical terms: as time, thats our X axis, increases, the Y value decreases. If you guessed Y to be the cost, give yourself a chimichanga."
That would be real cost, not dollar cost. Inflation could well make the nominal price increase faster than Moore's Law can knock it down. If the Y axis was "Cost, denominated in equivalent litres of goat milk", it might actually be closer to the real price, and hence, more correct.
Now go out in two years and buy yourself a $500 microwave burrito.
Are those supposed to be his bad points? I can't tell, but it sure seems better than the current practice of tacitly turning America into the love child of the GDR and a favela, all the while randomly invading oil bearing countries.
"People have been saying that since, what, 1994?" Yep. I also remember my first computer science teacher saying that Macs will win out eventually because they get them into the schools. This was circa 1995. Hasn't happened either.
Macs were usable then. Linux certainly wasn't really usable for anything other than a server, though people did. I certainly can't speak for all linux distros, but Ubuntu certainly is very usable, and the support through ubuntuforums is phenomenal. It's not just the live CD, it's the quality and breadth of the repositories and the seamless way you can download virtually anything to work with it, without the threat of malware.
I would be surprised if you had tried any of the recent Ubuntu distributions, e.g. Feisty or Gutsy. You'd be surprised.
"I have read the GPL. What has that got to do with anything?"
Forks. It means that once something has been released as GPL, it never dies, and so someone else can always understand it and improve on it. It's like a ratchet - there is only one way to go, and there are always willing developers to work on a good project.
"It's about time the Linux movement starts to think in a more market-oriented way."
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to Ubuntu? Branding, extreme newbie friendly forums, LiveCD so that it people can check it out and install it easily, free CDs, large corporate backing...
"I see versions of this same sentiment echoed all over the place... I'm really curious to know, why do you believe this is the case?"
It's basically how FOSS works.
1. The software can't get worse - if it does, you use an older version. 2. Developers are attracted to good software, which guarantees better versions. 3. Applications can't continually improve forever - there are diminishing returns. This is the case with every piece of software I have seen.
Then there is Moore's Law to contend with. For the vast majority of things, the computers we have today are ample. THey will only get cheaper. Eventually OS becomes a sizeable portion of computer cost, and this favors linux distros such as Ubuntu greatly. Most people in the world being poor of course.
Add those things together, and FOSS operating system dominance is only a matter of time.
"Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today."
The reason is that assembling all the basics of what we think of as an "operating system" is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than creating any particular app. The process of creating said operating system and converting people into using it does not happen in a single year. It's a bit like comparing creating a TNT bomb for the first time compared to the Manhatten project. One was virtually a backyard invention, the other required the top scientists from around the world and lots of government money.
It doesn't mean that it can't be done, it just means it takes longer.
"if there's one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app."
Absolutely! If there is a killer app in Ubuntu, it is synaptic and the repositories. For people who always look for free and functional software first, Ubuntu takes all the guesswork out of the equation. No worries about malware. And if it doesn't work, you just remove it and it's gone. And it's probably on your ISP, so the download is fast.
"I want Linux to succeed among nontechnical users, but for that to happen, a number of changes will have to be made.
1) Standardization.
2) Branding and marketing. "
Perhaps you should read the GPL. For what you are proposing, the only way I can see it working is for you to assassinate all the developers of every distribution, and find every last copy of linux anywhere and erase the bits.
The reality is that FOSS evolves by natural selection. What that means in practice is that the bar is constantly being raised. If it were lowered, then the users and developers would just resurrect a previous, superior version to use and work on. And the best FOSS is basically guaranteed to improve because good software brings good developers and good developers improve things.
You may get some local maximum phenomenon happening (see CVS) but sooner or later some enterprising developer(s) decides that he can do it better and that gains popularity at a greater rate (see SVN).
So, I think that it is only a matter of time before FOSS operating systems eclipse proprietary systems, the question is when.
"Additionally, reality being some kind of "VR" begs all kinds of questions. Like how was the VR created (it's existence as a simulation implies it was created). What is the "reality" that the simulator resides in? If the VR was created, how was it created?"
Very clever young man, very clever. But it's VR simulators all the way down!
Would an intelligence agency want to control a site where its users are encouraged to divulge a laundry list of dirt that can later be used to track/blackmail/embarrass when said users are older, wiser and more useful/dangerous. Do they have the money and the motivation?
Standard Disclaimer: Of course, only a whackjob conspiracy theorist would think that an Intelligence Agency with a large budget might, you know, actually collect intelligence, and furthermore, do it surreptitiously. That's crazy talk!
Slashdot Mirror
"...I gave an hour long presentation on open source, including its history, the principles of community development, licensing, business models, and a class discussion. Suggestions on how to improve my presentation for next term's class would be most welcome."
Perhaps you should identify what it is you hope to achieve with your talk, why you were asked to give the talk, and who your audience is?
It seems that your speech was an expository speech, and at the same time you wanted to make a speech to persuade. Or maybe that you wanted to speak to persuade, but felt the need to do a lot of exposition. Is that correct?
If so... you probably need to skip a lot of the exposition. Remember that your audience are fourth year engineering students. No one stays in engineering because of the fun factor. I know, I was one, I asked many others the same question. By the fourth year, they all want money otherwise they would have done an easier major. So appeal to their practicality. What will give them an advantage in their job or their own business over a proprietary solution?
So, in your speech, nail the key points about what FOSS is, very briefly. FOSS is software with a license that states that you may freely copy and distribute the source code, and modify it, subject to a few conditions. Mention GPL and BSD licenses. Mention a few major FOSS examples they might be familiar with. Linux, Apache, Postgresql, Firefox, Ubuntu, OpenOffice, to create a connection between the concepts and something they might be familiar.
Now, you sell. What's in it for them? In many cases, FOSS has the potential to cut costs and improve profit margins. It cuts costs because the only expense is often your time or limited support costs. This is especially valuable in a startup, where you are under capitalized by definition. And your ability to make more profit for a company always looks good to a manager, as that is what most are judged on themselves.
Mention Vendor lock-in. If your mission critical app is with FOSS and has a sizeable community, no worries! Worse case scenario, you hire in a coder to improve your app. You are never SOL.
The other side of the coin with FOSS is improved profit margins through being able to custom design software for the business, or to unlock additional capability without having to persuade management to buy you extra software you may not even use. That is useful whether your boss is a tightwad, or whether a recession means that everyone is being tight with their money.
Also mention that any noteworthy open source contributions of their own can often lead to good job offers.
To give them another example of how it could be useful _to them_, since they are engineers you should research a major FOSS example with relevance to each major field. Bonus points if you can mention how a major company has profited from FOSS.
To cap off, emphasize that if they do nothing else, make sure that they exhaust the FOSS solutions first before moving on to proprietary software. Start with sourceforge.
By the way, I would have answered the firefox question with noscript. Noscript kills a major attack vector of malware, and the best method of dealing with malware is prevention, not periodic reinstalls and bloaty, always on malware defense systems.
"Firefox is not really free its disguised in the price of a computer..."
A better argument that Firefox is not free, it has an income stream that is tied to Google and making your default search routed through Google (which can be changed of course). A certain percentage of users will stick with Google, giving Google more advertising revenue some of which is funneled back to Firefox.
But that's really besides the point. Someone can always fork the Firefox code and make a new Firefox that is identical, not tied to the big G, and also free. You can't do that with IE.
"I see nothing extremely superior about Ubuntu per se. Other distros have been "on top", have had some features which rivaled Windows of the day in terms of ease of use, etc."
I probably exaggerated saying that it was extremely polished _compared_ to other linux distros. There is not a lot of difference in usability between say, that and PCLinuxOS for example. But there was enough to notice. That last 10% of polish does take a lot more than 10% of the total work.
As you say, the difference is in the repos. Ubuntu has finally solved the "one click install" thing in a way that is not just as good as, but superior to the way XP does things. With XP, the process (for a lot of people) involves looking for something free first (freeware or pirated), praying that it is not infected with malware, then clicking setup.exe. With ubuntu the research process is very similar but there are no issues about malware and you know that if it's in the repos, it's free.
I think that due to network effect, other linux distros will have an increasingly tough time dislodging existing ubuntu users. It's also at the point where I feel very little frustration with things on a day to day level. This makes it tough to change - it means migrating all my data, applications and modifications to those applications. I'm essentially where I used to be with XP minus the frustration at all the malware issues.
"What makes linux 'work' is hardware support - that has improved, but this has almost nothing to do with particular distros."
True. I suppose another factor in the adoption of linux in general is that a person can comfortably run it with a fairly low end P4 - some 5 years old. By this time, that hardware is well and truly supported but the original XP installation is usually well and truly hosed with malware. That was a lot less true back in the Mandrake days. So I think Ubuntu has come along at the right time.
It also helps that openoffice is now usable, which has little to do with Ubuntu.
"This is why Ubuntu is more popular then other distributions, because Mark S. has associated Ubuntu with larger brands."
As someone who actually uses Ubuntu and has in the past used (trying some extensively, some still in use) such Linuxen as PCLinuxOS, puppy, DSL, SUSE, CentOS, Mepis, and probably a few others I forget, I think I'm qualified to say that the difference is not just in the branding. I've also developed nothing in Ubuntu nor hold any financial interest in its success. I have used it solely for about 6 months and the last time I booted my XP HDD for any reason was at least 4 months ago. And I really didn't want to like it because of the ugly default shit brown theme, the name and icon seemed like something more appropriate to a Michael Jackson music video than an operating system, and just because it was too popular already. But in the end I succumbed.
Ubuntu succeeds because it is amazingly polished and stable compared to other linux distributions, with a focus on the newbie and a shockingly vast array of software in the repositories that Just Works. No one uses an OS to use an OS, they use an OS for their favorite applications.
If you want help, you are more likely to find success through googling ubuntuforums.org or posting there yourself. This is because the forums are moderated in a specifically newbie friendly fashion where RTFM is banned.
http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php?page=policy
And now network effect is reinforcing the utility of Ubuntu. Basically anything FOSS gets a concerted effort to put it in the repos if it is any good, or a howto gets written for it. And any hardware has someone using Ubuntu having a hack at it to get it to go first.
Suits are back in style!
From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct clothing article has been showing up lately. And we don't mean the fanny pack. Suits, especially the luxurious wool pin-striped suit that helped define the golden era of business in the 1980s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of fashion executives, increasing numbers of the Emo generation are also purchasing suits (or dusting off Dad's), buying ties and dressing to impress!
"Granted, they probably use more electricity... That's the biggest downside :-("
I never thought of going to a recycling center for dumpster diving, so far I've only seen what gets thrown away by my work, which I generally would only only put to server uses. The trouble with servers is that they are always on and so consume as much electricity as possible.
Thanks for the tip!
"I just wonder if the business model won't be fruitful at first and slowly fade into non-existence."
This can happen. However, before it happens the business in question will sell a lot of Model Ts, or AK-47s, or airline travel without meals, or Honda Cubs, or VW Bugs, etc etc. And it may go on selling, and selling, and selling, and selling. There are a lot of people in the world out there with basic computer needs.
"People around here love things like Soekris boards or Gumstix modules and you should have read the enthousiasm about the EEE PC. For 200$ (135), "
The Soekris and WRAP boards rock! Perfect for firewalls, and can run on the power generated by a small hamster.
Unfortunately, they've spoiled me from dumpster diving because of the reliability and efficiency they have. The old stuff now is more like being given an old Buick from the 1980s... sure, it will probably get you from A to B but it will cost you in fuel and repairs. It used to be so fun to resuscitate an old computer.
"While I agree that we are spending too much money in iraq, but the defense budget is not necessarily a bad thing."
At least if they are going to spend the money in the way they are now, they should change it back to what it was before the marketers got a hold of it in 1947 - the War Department. A lot more honest.
This is similar to an experiment where people were made to wear lenses that turned everything upside down. After a while, they started seeing everything the right way again. Different I/O port but same phenomenon.
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae353.cfm
"However, on a different train of thought - what are the odds of current civilization living another 1000 years? I mean, we already have weapons that could decimate the entire world population within a matter of days. I hate to be a pessimist, but I can't help but think that the more knowledge we gather, the more likely we are to blow everyone up (not to mention natural disasters)."
The more advanced we are, the more likely colonizing other planets becomes, giving us built in redundancy. Hopefully it gets done sometime within the next 50-100 years. I guess what humanity needs is motivation - a spectacular close shave with a small asteroid, big enough to give us a huge scare but not big enough to wipe us out. Kind of like the asteroid equivalent of a New Pearl Harbor.
I suppose the other thing is, there will always be a cryptic population of humans, and the destruction of a nuke is only temporary. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have both been repopulated for decades. And if a government has the wherewithal for nukes, it has the wherewithal for some sort of continuity of government program. And the people preserved aren't likely to be stupid, either. So as those humans repopulated the earth, the progress per person would likely be far higher, and the likelihood of reinventing wheels should be low since a good CoG program should be preserving a lot of the knowledge.
Exactly... if you think that computers only hold information you should try prying off the keys of a keyboard and giving it a clean sometime.
"That's what pie-in-the-sky greenies want. Most Americans don't want a diesel of any sort."
All Americans need money to live. For most, this means a job. For most of those, this means transport to and from said job. If fuel prices are high compared to disposable income, they will take the highest mpg vehicle they can get, or bicycle to work, irrespective of the technology.
It's got nothing to do with being a "pie-in-the-sky greenie". The only thing pie in the sky is the belief that lim e^x as x-> infinity (i.e., human population growth) is less than the same limit for mx+b (supply of oil, where m = 0 using the dinosaur theory, or some positive real number for abiotic theory), c is a real number.
Check out these while you are at it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/
The whole world is about to learn the very real difference between "want" and "need", Americans included.
"i'll explain in mathematical terms: as time, thats our X axis, increases, the Y value decreases. If you guessed Y to be the cost, give yourself a chimichanga."
That would be real cost, not dollar cost. Inflation could well make the nominal price increase faster than Moore's Law can knock it down. If the Y axis was "Cost, denominated in equivalent litres of goat milk", it might actually be closer to the real price, and hence, more correct.
Now go out in two years and buy yourself a $500 microwave burrito.
Are those supposed to be his bad points? I can't tell, but it sure seems better than the current practice of tacitly turning America into the love child of the GDR and a favela, all the while randomly invading oil bearing countries.
"We've reached Peak Music."
Peak music was reached in 1988, the same year Metallica released "And Justice For All". It's been downhill ever since.
"People have been saying that since, what, 1994?"
Yep. I also remember my first computer science teacher saying that Macs will win out eventually because they get them into the schools. This was circa 1995. Hasn't happened either.
Macs were usable then. Linux certainly wasn't really usable for anything other than a server, though people did. I certainly can't speak for all linux distros, but Ubuntu certainly is very usable, and the support through ubuntuforums is phenomenal. It's not just the live CD, it's the quality and breadth of the repositories and the seamless way you can download virtually anything to work with it, without the threat of malware.
I would be surprised if you had tried any of the recent Ubuntu distributions, e.g. Feisty or Gutsy. You'd be surprised.
"I have read the GPL. What has that got to do with anything?"
Forks. It means that once something has been released as GPL, it never dies, and so someone else can always understand it and improve on it. It's like a ratchet - there is only one way to go, and there are always willing developers to work on a good project.
"It's about time the Linux movement starts to think in a more market-oriented way."
Maybe you haven't been paying attention to Ubuntu? Branding, extreme newbie friendly forums, LiveCD so that it people can check it out and install it easily, free CDs, large corporate backing...
"I see versions of this same sentiment echoed all over the place... I'm really curious to know, why do you believe this is the case?"
It's basically how FOSS works.
1. The software can't get worse - if it does, you use an older version.
2. Developers are attracted to good software, which guarantees better versions.
3. Applications can't continually improve forever - there are diminishing returns. This is the case with every piece of software I have seen.
Then there is Moore's Law to contend with. For the vast majority of things, the computers we have today are ample. THey will only get cheaper. Eventually OS becomes a sizeable portion of computer cost, and this favors linux distros such as Ubuntu greatly. Most people in the world being poor of course.
Add those things together, and FOSS operating system dominance is only a matter of time.
"Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today."
The reason is that assembling all the basics of what we think of as an "operating system" is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than creating any particular app. The process of creating said operating system and converting people into using it does not happen in a single year. It's a bit like comparing creating a TNT bomb for the first time compared to the Manhatten project. One was virtually a backyard invention, the other required the top scientists from around the world and lots of government money.
It doesn't mean that it can't be done, it just means it takes longer.
"But the good thing about that is when you want to do the unusual stuff, you probably already know how to fight."
That post was great. And fighting these days is pretty easy, either google or go straight to ubuntuforums.org.
"if there's one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app."
Absolutely! If there is a killer app in Ubuntu, it is synaptic and the repositories. For people who always look for free and functional software first, Ubuntu takes all the guesswork out of the equation. No worries about malware. And if it doesn't work, you just remove it and it's gone. And it's probably on your ISP, so the download is fast.
What's not to like?
"I want Linux to succeed among nontechnical users, but for that to happen, a number of changes will have to be made.
1) Standardization.
2) Branding and marketing. "
Perhaps you should read the GPL. For what you are proposing, the only way I can see it working is for you to assassinate all the developers of every distribution, and find every last copy of linux anywhere and erase the bits.
The reality is that FOSS evolves by natural selection. What that means in practice is that the bar is constantly being raised. If it were lowered, then the users and developers would just resurrect a previous, superior version to use and work on. And the best FOSS is basically guaranteed to improve because good software brings good developers and good developers improve things.
You may get some local maximum phenomenon happening (see CVS) but sooner or later some enterprising developer(s) decides that he can do it better and that gains popularity at a greater rate (see SVN).
So, I think that it is only a matter of time before FOSS operating systems eclipse proprietary systems, the question is when.
"Additionally, reality being some kind of "VR" begs all kinds of questions. Like how was the VR created (it's existence as a simulation implies it was created). What is the "reality" that the simulator resides in? If the VR was created, how was it created?"
Very clever young man, very clever. But it's VR simulators all the way down!
"We are way past that in europe (approaching 1.5 EUR here in germany) for some time now. And guess what? Civilisation is not collapsing."
That's because your civilization was not engineered by oil and car companies.
I found this:
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t34949.html
Would an intelligence agency want to control a site where its users are encouraged to divulge a laundry list of dirt that can later be used to track/blackmail/embarrass when said users are older, wiser and more useful/dangerous. Do they have the money and the motivation?
Standard Disclaimer: Of course, only a whackjob conspiracy theorist would think that an Intelligence Agency with a large budget might, you know, actually collect intelligence, and furthermore, do it surreptitiously. That's crazy talk!