As others have already pointed out, having a Linux port of Microsoft Office would not be a particularly good idea. Not only would there be no guarantee that Microsoft produces a bug-free port of Office (remember Caldera's accusations that MS deliberately made Windows crash on DR-DOS?), it would also only help Microsoft perpetuate its monopoly on closed standards and proprietary software.
Unfortunately, the Open Source Movement has shot itself in the foot by providing lots of alternative office solutions with non-interchangable file formats. One of the most well documented formats seems to be Open Office's new XML-based one. If Open Source Advocates agreed on a single format, then Microsoft could either be forced to use this format, or to provide filters. Without such an agreement, the only thing that can be asked for are 100% specifications of all Office formats, now and in the future -- this will be harder to verify since there would be no open source reference implementation.
One of the biggest threats to open source is open source itself. The fragmentation of different solutions makes migration hard or impossible.
yes, I agree that Access has a lot of problems. I haven't used it much personally, but I've worked on a pretty large erp system with a RAD package called Visual dBASE (which is really quite neat in its latest version). Multi-user support was poor, too, so we had to write our own login system, encrypted password database etc. But for a small company these should not be show-stoppers.
The main advantage of using RAD tools is that you can create and customize stuff easily. You still have to write source code, but basic stuff can be generated even by amateurs. (Yeah, I know that the result will probably suck and be neither scalable nor portable, but for typical tasks, you would provide lots of free templates.)
I'm not a great friend of web-interfaces for data entry. They still lack many of the features of native interfaces and can severely hamper productivity. Our "hotsearch" and filters were blazingly fast and quickly operable from any entryfield -- you can mess around with JavaScript until only one version of one browser is supported, and you still don't get the nice autocompletion and direct data display features (without latency) that a native interface can offer. This may change with XML, but looking at some of the more dynamic Mozilla demos, I don't see this change coming soon (the more complex stuff is often buggy and slow).
Not that it doesn't have its advantages, but if you were indeed standardizing on Linux, using a native interface would be easy anywhere, thanks to X11. Preferably, a RAD tool would be able to generate both interfaces dynamically. Java in the browser? Yes, perhaps, for this kind of stuff it should be fast enough already.
For anything non-web, PHP would obviously be a bad choice, but I could imagine something like a combination of QtDesigner, Python and MySQL (or BerkeleyDB, but I haven't used that) to work quite well.
Ah, I understand now that the problem is binary loading -- this would require a virtual machine to be portable. I notice that the WINE libraries, which allow recompiling software for Linux, have been ported to the PPC architecture though, so IBM could port Notes to DebianPPC using WINELIB. Ah, that's the problem if you don't have the source..
if there's so much interest in a Evolution plugin for PHP-Groupware, why don't you people try to collect some money, via PayPal or something, and pay someone to write this plugin? I'm not sure if that's workable, it's just an idea. What do you think?
could you explain why running Notes with WINE is impossible with Debian/PPC? Couldn't a finished Notes install be copied to any machine, or isn't WINE available for Debian/PPC for some reason?
While I agree that the time for moving stuff over is near (although a lot of business software is still missing), I would suggest waiting for the final release of Open Office 6.0 (or Star Office if you prefer the commercial variant) before switching a real-world office to Linux (designing a new one from scratch I might use Linux, but only with Win4Lin). Star Office 5.2 and Open Office 6.0 use different data formats, and Open Office is missing certain Star Office applications. KOffice may still require a few years to be recommendable, but the Open Office final should be relased soon. Also, by the time Open Office is finished, Mozilla is probably also ready, and most new PCs will come with more than enough RAM to handle KDE easily.
One important component I still find missing is a free desktop database a la Access. This is a very important tool for every company, and it will be missing from Open Office 6.0 (not sure about Star Office 6.0). There's a commercial contender called Rekall from theKompany (and a port of Paradox 9), but only a couple free beta apps. This should not be that hard to write, though, since scripting languages, database backends and form designers already exist in free versions.
The main problem with doing such things over a proxy is the lack of control you have over Google's database. While they can easily filter or sort their search results by any new criteria, you cannot. What you could do is have a central database of search phrases and related rated sites (which could have some semantic intelligence -- still I don't think you would get many hits on anything besides "sex" and "mp3").
This database could then be accsesed by users using UI controls added to the search result pages of major search engines by the proxy, which could be remote or local. As you would do a search over one of the supported search engines, the proxy would also query the db and add the highly rated sites on top of the result list. Trust could be implemented in a similar fashion, but the more complex your system gets, the more awkward the proxy method becomes, especially when Google changes their output format.
My preferred method would be making the rating controls and display independent from any particular site, having a small system-tray application instead that allows you to rate the currently viewed site (also filing it in a certain category -- fast UI is essential here). Then you could "browse recent ratings" and add users who share your tastes to your trusted user list manually, or let the server tell you about users who have rated things similarly to you, which would allow you to "browse recent ratings by friends" or "browse recent ratings by friends in category X". This concept could, of course, be extended to other document types.
.. this will only work when combined with trust metrics. There are certainly different views on what constitutes a quality site, and if you just let everyone vote, you get a fuzzy average (plus you have problems filtering false votes). So what you need is a system of identity where you can say "Show me all pages rated highly by people in my trusted user list".
To establish such a system, Google needs to get users to create accounts. A more feasible solution may be cooperation with instant messaging providers, using their identity pool and friends lists as filter criteria. But if they want people to create accounts, they need to turn Google into a community. The first thing to do this would be to have an automatic discussion forum for every major website.
That, again, would create a lot of traffic, so they might be better off using a peer-to-peer app residing on the users' systems instead, which would also allow you to add website-specific real time chat, file sharing, micropayments and other nifty things. It would also make it easier to create responsive user interfaces, which is always a problem with web UIs.
Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering.
Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may
not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or
see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.
Considering Slashdot is one of the slowest sites on the Net,
Actually Slashdot is usually one of the fastest site on the Net for me. I frequently use it to test if my DSL connection works properly. Their scripts/database often get hosed at high loads, though, I wonder what the bottleneck is. But Java as a replacement? Puhleeaze..
No. Copyright is about power, the GPL is about freedom. If there was no copyright, you would not need the GPL, distributing proprietary software would be mostly pointless.
They can make their own versions with whatever restrictions they want,
Meaning that you can be prosecuted and jailed for using or distributing a program that contains your code with trivial enhancements. This "get prosecuted and jailed" part is obviously not about freedom. Get it?
The GPL is a good thing because it uses copyright against itself. People need to stop equating the GPL with RMS -- if you like the GPL, but dislike RMS, then write your own license, it's not that hard.
That is only a matter of implementation (clever use of mouse buttons / scroll wheel, decent keybindings).
I can still drag items between windows
If you want to run separate windows, then open them and tile them a la ion. If you just want to drag for a single operation, drag on the taskbar and the window will pop up.
I can see what's going on in different windows
That's a myth. You can't really see what's going on, first, because your eyes can only see high-res on a very small amount of screenspace, second, because the information is not meaningful.
Say I'm comparing two lists of contents.
Tile them (or rather, let your WM do it). Scrollable workspaces are somewhat useful in certain cases and do not contradict the non-overlapping paradigm.
Or maybe one is performing a task - by just displaying a portion of its GUI, I can monitor that task without losing a potentially large portion of my desktop for its full UI.
If you have to carefully position the window in such a way that only a small part of its information is visible, because the application doesn't allow you to show only the relevant parts, then the application is badly designed.
Overlapping windows were a pretty brain-dead idea to begin with. This is increasingly being realized by developers who add sidebars and "panels" to their applications which can be moved and resized (knode, the KDE newsreader, implements this quite fully, although it's a bit awkward to use). The information below the window you're overlapping is cut in half: A browser window you're overlapping might show you text like
as not a good idea
creasingly being interested
ot to be confused with the
i.e. noise. The only purpose it serves is to faster identify the window you're dealing with. This has become unnecessary with the invention of the taskbar. Further additions to this concept, like window summarization and application-specific taskbars, make it even easier to use. If you want to view a lot of information simultaneously instead of having everything in full-screen mode, a smart window-manager like ion will rearrange windows automatically in useful tiles. Additional usability can be gained with clever hotkeys for application-switching.
But while overlapping windows are stupid, transparent windows are really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to stupidify the masses by making computers incapable of displaying information. The next step will be window-spectific screensavers, which turn on after a specific period of inactivity in a single window. Just you wait. Thanks to transparency:
Information becomes unreadable, especially with unfortunate color combinations.
Information you think is there is actually part of another window -- have fun editing that picture.
When two windows overlap with the wrong alpha-blending setting, you can no longer be sure which one is on top without looking at the taskbar or focus (in this screenshot, thanks to additional braindead color gradients in the title bars, this is especially hard).
Even your calculator will use more RAM than Mozilla..
If you like eye-candy, you may "drool" over this one and get your brain fucked by the Illuminati. A frontal lobotomy may be a quicker solution though.
Did they expect people to turn around and suddenly pay for Navigator Gold or whatever?
Yeah, they did. The free copy was technically only an evaluation copy for a long time. However, they had to make it totally free in order to compete with IE. There were lots of other channels which Netscape tried to use to make money, including partnerships with solution providers like Sun (Java in the browser - ugh), content providers (remember Netcaster? that thing was fucked up), licensees of the client software etc. They were fucked in almost every area by Microsoft, either because IE was free or because MS used its market power to stop people from entering any business relationship with Netscape. Netscape was also partially at fault because some things they did were really stupid.
If we assume that IE had not existed (Microsoft realizing in 2001 that the Internet may be relevant, or something), Netscape would certainly be a highly profitable company by now, and a very decent web-browser.
They are probably talking about some derivative -- AOL recently announced that they are testing Mozilla's Gecko engine in a special CompuServe web-browser (CompuServe is 0wned by AOL), and provided the test is a success, may eventually use it in AOL as well. (AOL had a deal from 1996-2000 with MS to use IE as its browser in return for desktop space. Don't know if it has been extended.) AOL's bastardized version of Mozilla under the Netscape brand is so messed up that only using Gecko seems like a good idea (and a must for a platform with little resources).
I don't think AOL will cancel Moz development anytime soon, unless they are conspiring with Microsoft (in which case they'd be better off sabotaging Moz through their developers). But if it happens, the only net effect will be a slowdown in development. Even many former paid hackers will likely continue working on Moz in their spare time.
After Netscape's failure to come up with immediate usable follow-up releases to Netscape 4.7, the future on the Windows browser market looked bleak: Microsoft had managed, by throwing enough smart people at the problem and leveraging its monopoly position to distribute the result, to entirely dominate the browser platform. In the US, IE is around 90% (strangely, Netscape 4.x still hovers at around 20% in Germany).
But Mozilla is now very fast and stable on Windows, and it is clear that the 1.0 release will be one of the best browsers available (memory usage will likely remain unsatisfying, but memory prices these days are negligible) -- and available on all relevant platforms. Then you have spin-offs like K-Meleon and Galeon which use the Mozilla Gecko engine with smaller general overhead and some new features.
Development of Moz & Co. will not stop with the 1.0 release -- they will continue to improve proportionally to the number of people that use and hack them. The same is true for KDE's Konqueror, which is an excellent, fast browser that just keeps getting better, and has some very nice features, especially on the GUI side. I'm not keeping up with IE, but some of the Mozilla/Konqueror features seem to be unmatched by IE: tabbed browsing (Moz), background loading, very flexible window layout, perfect search engine integration etc. etc. None of them are bundled with any specific vendor-services (except for Netscape's "What's Related" in Mozilla). Wonderful cookie management. No smart tags either.
From what I have heard, IE 6.0 only had marginal improvements, reminiscent of a single milestone in Mozilla. This would not surprise me, given the fact that Microsoft no longer needs to invest in the browser market since they already dominate it pretty safely (or so they think). This is completely different to oss, which keeps getting better until its developers are satisfied.
The KDE port to Windows may eventually give Windows users another mature choice for browsing, besides Opera, Mozilla and K-Meleon, Konqueror. The Qt libraries are cross-platform (though there may be licensing issues), so hopefully eventually we'll see a simple to install binary port of Konqueror.
There's lots to say about why choice in the browser market matters, but I'll save that for another rant. Trust Microsoft: They knew why they had to concentrate all of their resources on killing Netscape 5 years ago. Part of their strategy was OEM licensing, telling PC manufacturers not to include Netscape besides IE, or suffer the consequence of prohibitive Windows prices. From what I have gathered, many of these practices are now forbidden, so OEMs should now be legally able to install another browser besides IE. And the choices for them to do so are growing. This gives PC manufacturers potential revenue streams since they can "customize" these browsers in unprecedented ways.
So this should be a wake-up call to OEMs to install browsers besides IE. The time is now, and liberating the browser is the first step to breaking the MS OS monopoly.
you raise some valid points, although it should be obvious that I disagree. However, instead of citing in detail some of the examples that refute your arguments (including many successful shareware apps), I will try to actually create an open data-pool on this very subject. If you are interested in the results, you can email me at moeller@SPAGHETTIOSscireview.de, after removing a full serving of veggies and grains.
As others have pointed out, the e-mail is very likely to be fake. I see another problem with the article.
When his message came, the Taliban had just fled, Northern Alliance soldiers had taken over his village, and everybody rushed to barbers to cut off their beards and to nearby holes and hiding spots to dig up their Walkmen, VCRs, TVs, CD players, and -- in Junis's case -- his ancient Commodore, one of four in the village. Cafes had popped up all over, with impromptu dances and parties everywhere
Surely life has improved tremendously in the few days since the Taliban left Kabul. And certainly many people are enjoying new (old) freedoms. However, your description is a gross exaggeration -- "everybody", "everywhere". Resistance groups like the RAWA have already expressed concern that life under groups like the Northern Alliance will be like life in Afghanistan was in the years before 1996 -- still brutal and repressive, just not in the extreme. While the picture of people shaving their forced beards off in masses or playing music and partying is certainly relieving, it is contrasted by a reality of executions/murders and, likely, rape. (Also, to be sure, many people are quite happy with their beards and appreciated the censorship and repression by the Taliban, much like many Germans supported the nazis completely.) Save the picture of "liberated Afghanistan" for the day when Afghanistan is actually liberal.
Fortunately, the US government seems to be pushing for a secular Afghanistan, but do not be satisfied just because the Taliban are going into guerilla mode. The Northern Alliance are merely the lesser evil.
I think it is unfair to characterize open-source development as primarily driven by companies. After all, the projects you mention started as open-source projects without much or any commercial support. It was only when corporations recognized the benefit this software would give them that they jumped on the bandwagon. So what we see here is really a hybrid economy, where everyone who benefits from a certain piece of software, which is effectively in the public domain, has a self-interest to contribute to its improvement, either with money or with code. As I stated in my other comment, I'm afraid especially the "contribute with money" part is currently underdeveloped.
No, what I mean is really a system for regular donations without (many) additional privileges. Subscribers could get some benefits, like free e-mail support or access to the wishlist.
Another area where subscriptions can be useful is in a Street Performer Protocol like context, e.g. Transgaming, where the code is GPL'd when a sufficient number of subscribers is reached.
Currently, open source is used by many people who never give anything back, although they would be able to financially support development. The reason for this is not that people are malicious or exploitative, but simply that it's not convenient enough. Some sites have small "donate" buttons, but these give little feedback (a la Penny Arcade, only more detailed) and do not allow subscriptions or feature requests. The best implementation I've seen so far is Freenet, except that people only donate when they have a reason to visit the frontpage, which is not updated very frequently.
A sophisticated donation/subscription/feature request system which automatically suppports several payment methods should really be part of a collaborative development site like SourceForge. For using Amazon's Honor-System, which is very feature-poor, 15% of any donation go to Amazon. This would be an adequate level for something like SourceForge, and here people would gladly pay the 15% because they would know that they support important infrastructure. I really can't understand why SourceForge isn't trying anything of the sort, but I haven't noticed much innovation in their business strategy anyway.
Of course, in the long term, I'd love to see a standardized electronic payment client (with a Qt or GTK interface) which supports subscription management bundled with all Linux distributions. Then you could easily pay with a single click in your browser.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the Open Source Movement has shot itself in the foot by providing lots of alternative office solutions with non-interchangable file formats. One of the most well documented formats seems to be Open Office's new XML-based one. If Open Source Advocates agreed on a single format, then Microsoft could either be forced to use this format, or to provide filters. Without such an agreement, the only thing that can be asked for are 100% specifications of all Office formats, now and in the future -- this will be harder to verify since there would be no open source reference implementation.
One of the biggest threats to open source is open source itself. The fragmentation of different solutions makes migration hard or impossible.
Some background on WIPO can be found here.
yes, I agree that Access has a lot of problems. I haven't used it much personally, but I've worked on a pretty large erp system with a RAD package called Visual dBASE (which is really quite neat in its latest version). Multi-user support was poor, too, so we had to write our own login system, encrypted password database etc. But for a small company these should not be show-stoppers.
The main advantage of using RAD tools is that you can create and customize stuff easily. You still have to write source code, but basic stuff can be generated even by amateurs. (Yeah, I know that the result will probably suck and be neither scalable nor portable, but for typical tasks, you would provide lots of free templates.)
I'm not a great friend of web-interfaces for data entry. They still lack many of the features of native interfaces and can severely hamper productivity. Our "hotsearch" and filters were blazingly fast and quickly operable from any entryfield -- you can mess around with JavaScript until only one version of one browser is supported, and you still don't get the nice autocompletion and direct data display features (without latency) that a native interface can offer. This may change with XML, but looking at some of the more dynamic Mozilla demos, I don't see this change coming soon (the more complex stuff is often buggy and slow).
Not that it doesn't have its advantages, but if you were indeed standardizing on Linux, using a native interface would be easy anywhere, thanks to X11. Preferably, a RAD tool would be able to generate both interfaces dynamically. Java in the browser? Yes, perhaps, for this kind of stuff it should be fast enough already.
For anything non-web, PHP would obviously be a bad choice, but I could imagine something like a combination of QtDesigner, Python and MySQL (or BerkeleyDB, but I haven't used that) to work quite well.
Could this be a motivation for a fork? What would it be called? "Revolution"? "Divine Intervention"? Or maybe "Mutiny" :)
Ah, I understand now that the problem is binary loading -- this would require a virtual machine to be portable. I notice that the WINE libraries, which allow recompiling software for Linux, have been ported to the PPC architecture though, so IBM could port Notes to DebianPPC using WINELIB. Ah, that's the problem if you don't have the source ..
if there's so much interest in a Evolution plugin for PHP-Groupware, why don't you people try to collect some money, via PayPal or something, and pay someone to write this plugin? I'm not sure if that's workable, it's just an idea. What do you think?
could you explain why running Notes with WINE is impossible with Debian/PPC? Couldn't a finished Notes install be copied to any machine, or isn't WINE available for Debian/PPC for some reason?
Thanks.
One important component I still find missing is a free desktop database a la Access. This is a very important tool for every company, and it will be missing from Open Office 6.0 (not sure about Star Office 6.0). There's a commercial contender called Rekall from theKompany (and a port of Paradox 9), but only a couple free beta apps. This should not be that hard to write, though, since scripting languages, database backends and form designers already exist in free versions.
The main problem with doing such things over a proxy is the lack of control you have over Google's database. While they can easily filter or sort their search results by any new criteria, you cannot. What you could do is have a central database of search phrases and related rated sites (which could have some semantic intelligence -- still I don't think you would get many hits on anything besides "sex" and "mp3").
This database could then be accsesed by users using UI controls added to the search result pages of major search engines by the proxy, which could be remote or local. As you would do a search over one of the supported search engines, the proxy would also query the db and add the highly rated sites on top of the result list. Trust could be implemented in a similar fashion, but the more complex your system gets, the more awkward the proxy method becomes, especially when Google changes their output format.
My preferred method would be making the rating controls and display independent from any particular site, having a small system-tray application instead that allows you to rate the currently viewed site (also filing it in a certain category -- fast UI is essential here). Then you could "browse recent ratings" and add users who share your tastes to your trusted user list manually, or let the server tell you about users who have rated things similarly to you, which would allow you to "browse recent ratings by friends" or "browse recent ratings by friends in category X". This concept could, of course, be extended to other document types.
This, of course, is the basic use that should always be possible. However, it is not the only nifty thing you can do with an index of webpages.
To establish such a system, Google needs to get users to create accounts. A more feasible solution may be cooperation with instant messaging providers, using their identity pool and friends lists as filter criteria. But if they want people to create accounts, they need to turn Google into a community. The first thing to do this would be to have an automatic discussion forum for every major website.
That, again, would create a lot of traffic, so they might be better off using a peer-to-peer app residing on the users' systems instead, which would also allow you to add website-specific real time chat, file sharing, micropayments and other nifty things. It would also make it easier to create responsive user interfaces, which is always a problem with web UIs.
Actually Slashdot is usually one of the fastest site on the Net for me. I frequently use it to test if my DSL connection works properly. Their scripts/database often get hosed at high loads, though, I wonder what the bottleneck is. But Java as a replacement? Puhleeaze..
No. Copyright is about power, the GPL is about freedom. If there was no copyright, you would not need the GPL, distributing proprietary software would be mostly pointless.
Meaning that you can be prosecuted and jailed for using or distributing a program that contains your code with trivial enhancements. This "get prosecuted and jailed" part is obviously not about freedom. Get it?
The GPL is a good thing because it uses copyright against itself. People need to stop equating the GPL with RMS -- if you like the GPL, but dislike RMS, then write your own license, it's not that hard.
That is only a matter of implementation (clever use of mouse buttons / scroll wheel, decent keybindings).
I can still drag items between windows
If you want to run separate windows, then open them and tile them a la ion. If you just want to drag for a single operation, drag on the taskbar and the window will pop up.
I can see what's going on in different windows
That's a myth. You can't really see what's going on, first, because your eyes can only see high-res on a very small amount of screenspace, second, because the information is not meaningful.
Say I'm comparing two lists of contents.
Tile them (or rather, let your WM do it). Scrollable workspaces are somewhat useful in certain cases and do not contradict the non-overlapping paradigm.
Or maybe one is performing a task - by just displaying a portion of its GUI, I can monitor that task without losing a potentially large portion of my desktop for its full UI.
If you have to carefully position the window in such a way that only a small part of its information is visible, because the application doesn't allow you to show only the relevant parts, then the application is badly designed.
as not a good idea
creasingly being interested
ot to be confused with the
i.e. noise. The only purpose it serves is to faster identify the window you're dealing with. This has become unnecessary with the invention of the taskbar. Further additions to this concept, like window summarization and application-specific taskbars, make it even easier to use. If you want to view a lot of information simultaneously instead of having everything in full-screen mode, a smart window-manager like ion will rearrange windows automatically in useful tiles. Additional usability can be gained with clever hotkeys for application-switching.
But while overlapping windows are stupid, transparent windows are really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to stupidify the masses by making computers incapable of displaying information. The next step will be window-spectific screensavers, which turn on after a specific period of inactivity in a single window. Just you wait. Thanks to transparency:
If you like eye-candy, you may "drool" over this one and get your brain fucked by the Illuminati. A frontal lobotomy may be a quicker solution though.
Yeah, they did. The free copy was technically only an evaluation copy for a long time. However, they had to make it totally free in order to compete with IE. There were lots of other channels which Netscape tried to use to make money, including partnerships with solution providers like Sun (Java in the browser - ugh), content providers (remember Netcaster? that thing was fucked up), licensees of the client software etc. They were fucked in almost every area by Microsoft, either because IE was free or because MS used its market power to stop people from entering any business relationship with Netscape. Netscape was also partially at fault because some things they did were really stupid.
If we assume that IE had not existed (Microsoft realizing in 2001 that the Internet may be relevant, or something), Netscape would certainly be a highly profitable company by now, and a very decent web-browser.
I don't think AOL will cancel Moz development anytime soon, unless they are conspiring with Microsoft (in which case they'd be better off sabotaging Moz through their developers). But if it happens, the only net effect will be a slowdown in development. Even many former paid hackers will likely continue working on Moz in their spare time.
But Mozilla is now very fast and stable on Windows, and it is clear that the 1.0 release will be one of the best browsers available (memory usage will likely remain unsatisfying, but memory prices these days are negligible) -- and available on all relevant platforms. Then you have spin-offs like K-Meleon and Galeon which use the Mozilla Gecko engine with smaller general overhead and some new features.
Development of Moz & Co. will not stop with the 1.0 release -- they will continue to improve proportionally to the number of people that use and hack them. The same is true for KDE's Konqueror, which is an excellent, fast browser that just keeps getting better, and has some very nice features, especially on the GUI side. I'm not keeping up with IE, but some of the Mozilla/Konqueror features seem to be unmatched by IE: tabbed browsing (Moz), background loading, very flexible window layout, perfect search engine integration etc. etc. None of them are bundled with any specific vendor-services (except for Netscape's "What's Related" in Mozilla). Wonderful cookie management. No smart tags either.
From what I have heard, IE 6.0 only had marginal improvements, reminiscent of a single milestone in Mozilla. This would not surprise me, given the fact that Microsoft no longer needs to invest in the browser market since they already dominate it pretty safely (or so they think). This is completely different to oss, which keeps getting better until its developers are satisfied.
The KDE port to Windows may eventually give Windows users another mature choice for browsing, besides Opera, Mozilla and K-Meleon, Konqueror. The Qt libraries are cross-platform (though there may be licensing issues), so hopefully eventually we'll see a simple to install binary port of Konqueror.
There's lots to say about why choice in the browser market matters, but I'll save that for another rant. Trust Microsoft: They knew why they had to concentrate all of their resources on killing Netscape 5 years ago. Part of their strategy was OEM licensing, telling PC manufacturers not to include Netscape besides IE, or suffer the consequence of prohibitive Windows prices. From what I have gathered, many of these practices are now forbidden, so OEMs should now be legally able to install another browser besides IE. And the choices for them to do so are growing. This gives PC manufacturers potential revenue streams since they can "customize" these browsers in unprecedented ways.
So this should be a wake-up call to OEMs to install browsers besides IE. The time is now, and liberating the browser is the first step to breaking the MS OS monopoly.
you raise some valid points, although it should be obvious that I disagree. However, instead of citing in detail some of the examples that refute your arguments (including many successful shareware apps), I will try to actually create an open data-pool on this very subject. If you are interested in the results, you can email me at moeller@SPAGHETTIOSscireview.de, after removing a full serving of veggies and grains.
When his message came, the Taliban had just fled, Northern Alliance soldiers had taken over his village, and everybody rushed to barbers to cut off their beards and to nearby holes and hiding spots to dig up their Walkmen, VCRs, TVs, CD players, and -- in Junis's case -- his ancient Commodore, one of four in the village. Cafes had popped up all over, with impromptu dances and parties everywhere
Surely life has improved tremendously in the few days since the Taliban left Kabul. And certainly many people are enjoying new (old) freedoms. However, your description is a gross exaggeration -- "everybody", "everywhere". Resistance groups like the RAWA have already expressed concern that life under groups like the Northern Alliance will be like life in Afghanistan was in the years before 1996 -- still brutal and repressive, just not in the extreme. While the picture of people shaving their forced beards off in masses or playing music and partying is certainly relieving, it is contrasted by a reality of executions/murders and, likely, rape. (Also, to be sure, many people are quite happy with their beards and appreciated the censorship and repression by the Taliban, much like many Germans supported the nazis completely.) Save the picture of "liberated Afghanistan" for the day when Afghanistan is actually liberal.
Fortunately, the US government seems to be pushing for a secular Afghanistan, but do not be satisfied just because the Taliban are going into guerilla mode. The Northern Alliance are merely the lesser evil.
I think it is unfair to characterize open-source development as primarily driven by companies. After all, the projects you mention started as open-source projects without much or any commercial support. It was only when corporations recognized the benefit this software would give them that they jumped on the bandwagon. So what we see here is really a hybrid economy, where everyone who benefits from a certain piece of software, which is effectively in the public domain, has a self-interest to contribute to its improvement, either with money or with code. As I stated in my other comment, I'm afraid especially the "contribute with money" part is currently underdeveloped.
Another area where subscriptions can be useful is in a Street Performer Protocol like context, e.g. Transgaming, where the code is GPL'd when a sufficient number of subscribers is reached.
A sophisticated donation/subscription/feature request system which automatically suppports several payment methods should really be part of a collaborative development site like SourceForge. For using Amazon's Honor-System, which is very feature-poor, 15% of any donation go to Amazon. This would be an adequate level for something like SourceForge, and here people would gladly pay the 15% because they would know that they support important infrastructure. I really can't understand why SourceForge isn't trying anything of the sort, but I haven't noticed much innovation in their business strategy anyway.
Of course, in the long term, I'd love to see a standardized electronic payment client (with a Qt or GTK interface) which supports subscription management bundled with all Linux distributions. Then you could easily pay with a single click in your browser.