With all of this talk surrounding the prospect of a boom in GNU/Linux desktop marketshare, is seems that many are forgetting that the desktop market in and of itself has evolved into a varied and diverse landscape depending on the intents of the user of the machine. It's not as simple as cheering on the continued success of GNU/Linux adoption in the embedded and server markets but anxiously awaiting the ever-elusive "Year of the Linux Desktop."
There's a notable difference between placing a supported bulk corporate purchase of a specific distribution of GNU/Linux on all desktops in a given company accompanied by a trained IT staff and trying to market a Lindows machine at Walmart to Joe Sixpack. Both are rightly desktop computers, but the scenarios surrounding their use are so different that the relative success of either instance is not comparable: they are truly different markets.
To claim the desktop market as the final frontier for GNU/Linux adoption is all fine and good, but do take into account the variety of sub-markets that comprise the whole. It's much less likely that Jill Sixpack is going to be rushing to buy Dell or HP machines preinstalled with GNU/Linux to use as his sole home PC. As others have pointed out, the lack of preinstalled proprietary crapware could very well make this option more expensive in addition to the difficulties that would be experienced with practically all boxed software, including games, not being native to her operating system (what does that even mean to her?).
No, much more likely to be widely successful in the shorter term is massive amounts of corporate installations, situations whereupon the both the purchasing company and HP would see a real benefit not having to pay the Microsoft tax. There would be no crapware in these instances anyway. Such bulk purchases are a very large incentive for OEMs to choose hardware options with drivers in the Linux kernel, directly putting pressure on hardware companies to release driver source code, or at least hardware documentation. It's all a complex and intricate chain of successive events, but it's obvious where it's leading.
It's been an incredibly arduous and taxing war to get adoption and quality of the most viable free software operating system this far. But momentum is only gaining, inertia in full force, and the more entrenched GNU/Linux becomes, the easier it will be to keep the acceleration of its evolution increasing all the time.
Thing is, even though some of those changes were done by programmers in the course of their paid jobs, isn't the work still being "volunteered," albeit by the company rather than an individual? As companies, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, or Big Roy's Heating and Plumbing don't need to help improve the kernel, nor are they directly paid for their work on it. They simply do so because a better Linux kernel does benefit them directly or indirectly, as do many individual volunteers.
This shouldn't be so much a debate about the technicalities of labeling the code contributions to the Linux kernel as "volunteered" or not, so much as it is an interesting discussion and analysis of the current state of the ratio of bugfixes/features that were written by someone paid for their work vs. an ambitious hacker taking on the task on their own spare time.
Of course the contributions made by any one person or company to the Linux kernel are not going to be paid for in the same way that a Microsoft employee's bugfix to the NT 6 kernel will be directly funded by the sizable cash reserves of that corporation. But that's because of how each of those respective software projects are licensed, the Linux kernel obviously being licensed under the GPL, ultimately causing no one to "own" that code and thus no central financial entity to fund every single contribution to the project (even though each contribution is technically still copyrighted by the respective programmer, GPLed code for all intents and purposes is owned by all because of the freedom to fork).
So, what is the remarkable information that this breakdown of Linux contribution funding tells us? That even though such code is known by each of the listen publicly traded corporations to be licensed under the GPL, that there will be no direct monetary compensation from a non-existent universal Linux code contribution funder, that it is still worth paying their employees to make whatever contributions they desire, or see to their advantage.
The biggest news to my mind is something that many of us have known for quite some time now: that the GPL works. This is a direct acknowledgment that although such code is not restricted by any sort of proprietary license, that the liberation of the market is too attractive for a wide variety of big-name technology companies to not dive directly in to the community themselves in order to aid in the process of creating and improving what is now easily the most viable alternative to any proprietary operating system, be it Windows, UNIX, or Mac OS X.
At this point it should be obvious to anyone that a victory over the omnipresence of the MP3 format in the realm of digital audio formats is a mere pipe dream, at least within the next few years. The Slashdot headline for this story is obviously pandering to the affinity that many technology literate people have for digital formats unencumbered by patents, in this case the Xiph.Org offerings of Vorbis for lossy and FLAC for lossless audio compression (there also exists Theora for video, but this discussion revolves only around audio, specifically lossy compressed audio, so we'll limit the scope of discussion to that category of digital media format).
It is obvious that the core of the current dilemma with respect to the MP3 format revolves around patents, patents that are licensed across national borders no less (Fraunhofer IIS being the German research organization previously recognized as the sole patent holder for the technology involved in encoding and decoding MP3s). But within the framework of discussing a movement away from the MP3 format as a result of ambiguity on the legal weight behind Alcatel-Lucent's claims (which were obviously convincing enough to defeat Microsoft's well-funded lawyer teams in a United States federal court of law), we must examine the source of the format's omnipresence in the first place. Yes, $1.65 billion USD is nothing to sneeze at, and if Microsoft's appeal doesn't go through, there will very well be a motivation for other big players on the market to drop MP3 encoding support from their audio products (it remains to be seen if Alcatel-Lucent's patents also cover decoding).
But why is MP3 the de facto audio format in the market? The true reason has nothing to do with Fraunhofer, their patents, and especially not Alcatel-Lucent. It was merely the only viable format for copying and transferring audio files at the pivotal point in the evolution of the Internet when it become viable to do so. Nullsoft's Winamp provided out-of-the box support for MP3s in 1997, followed by the release of Napster in 1999 which kickstarted the real explosion of music trading, almost solely in MP3 format. The average person today who has a digital music collection has the majority of their files in the MP3 format. This lawsuit will not compel them to covert these files to Ogg Vorbis, especially if the much more tangible benefits of higher quality per filesize ratio has not already enticed them (not to mention the quality degradation of conversion from one lossy format to another).
So, Microsoft got nailed for including MP3 encoding support in Windows Media Player. But in all of this speculation about the industry migrating away from MP3 as a result of this lawsuit, did anyone stop to consider that MP3 is not even the default format that WMP encodes to? And sure, iTunes has support for encoding to MP3 as well, but is the default not to rip to MPEG-4 AAC from digital audio CDs? And even so, none of this changes the fact that MP3 is still the most commonly used file format for audio files on Bit Torrent, Usenet, IRC, etc. Most organized ripping groups use LAME anyway, so it's not as if they aren't already using software that infringes upon patents once compiled. No, it's quite obvious that patents have little to nothing to do with MP3's claim to fame as the most popular digital audio format, just as it should be readily apparent that dubious patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent will have nothing to do with any sort of mass migration away from the MP3 format in the next couple of years.
It's 2007. Any significant gains for the Free/Open Source community will come when the MP3 patent expires in 2010 and GNU/Linux distributions can include support for the format by default, sans royalties. It's naive to think that anything significant will happen with respect to some sort of organic migration away from one of the most classic examples of "format inertia" within the next three years, be it corporate-backed or not.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a notable difference between placing a supported bulk corporate purchase of a specific distribution of GNU/Linux on all desktops in a given company accompanied by a trained IT staff and trying to market a Lindows machine at Walmart to Joe Sixpack. Both are rightly desktop computers, but the scenarios surrounding their use are so different that the relative success of either instance is not comparable: they are truly different markets.
To claim the desktop market as the final frontier for GNU/Linux adoption is all fine and good, but do take into account the variety of sub-markets that comprise the whole. It's much less likely that Jill Sixpack is going to be rushing to buy Dell or HP machines preinstalled with GNU/Linux to use as his sole home PC. As others have pointed out, the lack of preinstalled proprietary crapware could very well make this option more expensive in addition to the difficulties that would be experienced with practically all boxed software, including games, not being native to her operating system (what does that even mean to her?).
No, much more likely to be widely successful in the shorter term is massive amounts of corporate installations, situations whereupon the both the purchasing company and HP would see a real benefit not having to pay the Microsoft tax. There would be no crapware in these instances anyway. Such bulk purchases are a very large incentive for OEMs to choose hardware options with drivers in the Linux kernel, directly putting pressure on hardware companies to release driver source code, or at least hardware documentation. It's all a complex and intricate chain of successive events, but it's obvious where it's leading.
It's been an incredibly arduous and taxing war to get adoption and quality of the most viable free software operating system this far. But momentum is only gaining, inertia in full force, and the more entrenched GNU/Linux becomes, the easier it will be to keep the acceleration of its evolution increasing all the time.
This shouldn't be so much a debate about the technicalities of labeling the code contributions to the Linux kernel as "volunteered" or not, so much as it is an interesting discussion and analysis of the current state of the ratio of bugfixes/features that were written by someone paid for their work vs. an ambitious hacker taking on the task on their own spare time.
Of course the contributions made by any one person or company to the Linux kernel are not going to be paid for in the same way that a Microsoft employee's bugfix to the NT 6 kernel will be directly funded by the sizable cash reserves of that corporation. But that's because of how each of those respective software projects are licensed, the Linux kernel obviously being licensed under the GPL, ultimately causing no one to "own" that code and thus no central financial entity to fund every single contribution to the project (even though each contribution is technically still copyrighted by the respective programmer, GPLed code for all intents and purposes is owned by all because of the freedom to fork).
So, what is the remarkable information that this breakdown of Linux contribution funding tells us? That even though such code is known by each of the listen publicly traded corporations to be licensed under the GPL, that there will be no direct monetary compensation from a non-existent universal Linux code contribution funder, that it is still worth paying their employees to make whatever contributions they desire, or see to their advantage.
The biggest news to my mind is something that many of us have known for quite some time now: that the GPL works. This is a direct acknowledgment that although such code is not restricted by any sort of proprietary license, that the liberation of the market is too attractive for a wide variety of big-name technology companies to not dive directly in to the community themselves in order to aid in the process of creating and improving what is now easily the most viable alternative to any proprietary operating system, be it Windows, UNIX, or Mac OS X.
It is obvious that the core of the current dilemma with respect to the MP3 format revolves around patents, patents that are licensed across national borders no less (Fraunhofer IIS being the German research organization previously recognized as the sole patent holder for the technology involved in encoding and decoding MP3s). But within the framework of discussing a movement away from the MP3 format as a result of ambiguity on the legal weight behind Alcatel-Lucent's claims (which were obviously convincing enough to defeat Microsoft's well-funded lawyer teams in a United States federal court of law), we must examine the source of the format's omnipresence in the first place. Yes, $1.65 billion USD is nothing to sneeze at, and if Microsoft's appeal doesn't go through, there will very well be a motivation for other big players on the market to drop MP3 encoding support from their audio products (it remains to be seen if Alcatel-Lucent's patents also cover decoding).
But why is MP3 the de facto audio format in the market? The true reason has nothing to do with Fraunhofer, their patents, and especially not Alcatel-Lucent. It was merely the only viable format for copying and transferring audio files at the pivotal point in the evolution of the Internet when it become viable to do so. Nullsoft's Winamp provided out-of-the box support for MP3s in 1997, followed by the release of Napster in 1999 which kickstarted the real explosion of music trading, almost solely in MP3 format. The average person today who has a digital music collection has the majority of their files in the MP3 format. This lawsuit will not compel them to covert these files to Ogg Vorbis, especially if the much more tangible benefits of higher quality per filesize ratio has not already enticed them (not to mention the quality degradation of conversion from one lossy format to another).
So, Microsoft got nailed for including MP3 encoding support in Windows Media Player. But in all of this speculation about the industry migrating away from MP3 as a result of this lawsuit, did anyone stop to consider that MP3 is not even the default format that WMP encodes to? And sure, iTunes has support for encoding to MP3 as well, but is the default not to rip to MPEG-4 AAC from digital audio CDs? And even so, none of this changes the fact that MP3 is still the most commonly used file format for audio files on Bit Torrent, Usenet, IRC, etc. Most organized ripping groups use LAME anyway, so it's not as if they aren't already using software that infringes upon patents once compiled. No, it's quite obvious that patents have little to nothing to do with MP3's claim to fame as the most popular digital audio format, just as it should be readily apparent that dubious patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent will have nothing to do with any sort of mass migration away from the MP3 format in the next couple of years.
It's 2007. Any significant gains for the Free/Open Source community will come when the MP3 patent expires in 2010 and GNU/Linux distributions can include support for the format by default, sans royalties. It's naive to think that anything significant will happen with respect to some sort of organic migration away from one of the most classic examples of "format inertia" within the next three years, be it corporate-backed or not.