I'll bet you we see a lot more of this in the future, because internationalization has introduced an element of nationalism into the competitions between companies. Nationalism enables our tribalist ability to slaughter (i.e. rip off) any human who is from a different tribe.
I think that calling this "nationalism" is to give it too much credit... it's more like a retreat to
a medieval attitude, a worship of the divine right of your local warlord. There's this general sense that
whatever Big Corporation wants to do must be okay, it's not as if they were criminals or terrorists
or something.
I would guess that "tribalism" is closer to the mark, but I wouldn't be suprised if actual tribes are
often saner and more sensible than nations about these things (if you were an Igbo living in Nigeria,
why would you care more about country than tribe? The country wasn't even there a hundred years ago,
and it demonstrably cares more about international oil companies than local citizens).
Rather than indulge in this academic excercise of arguing
which languages will stretch your brain in just the right way for you to claim
you're the top dog, why not pick a project in the world that needs to be done, and go
to work on it, and learn whatever you need to learn to work on the project.
With some luck, your work on the project might even bring some money in, and you won't need
to impress employeers with a long list of languages. Even if the project doesn't
bring any money in, you're resume will show that you're someone who can work
on an actual project.
...oh forget it. Waste of breath, right? Let's just go back to "My syntax can beat your syntax, so there!".
There's an icon in the Dashboard that looks like a compass and if you hover your mouse over it it says "Safari", there's your browser.
Thanks: if it was there, I missed it... but like I said "Safari"? What's that supposed to mean?
If I remember right, the Gnome and KDE guys have that particular detail covered a little better (I actually
don't use either, I could be off)... if you go poking around in the application menus you get functional
descriptions rather than just proper names that make sense only to insiders. (If I remember right, the KDE
guys also include the proper name in parenthesis, so you might see an application listed like "cd burning (k3b)" --
that strikes me as a nice balance of catering to the average degree of ignorence, without condescending to
it and hiding a detail a more knowledgeable person would like to know).
...that going online on my Linux PC was just as easy, I just plugged the Ethernet cable from the PC to the router and Linux automatically configured the connection.
Yes, the Linux world continues to improve... a few years ago, kubuntu had trouble installing on some of my amd64 machines,
now kubuntu 7.10 installed without much trouble [1], and connection to the internet is a lot smoother (I don't need to manual
type "ifup eth1" or anything like that when I plug my laptop into the ethernet, for example).
[1] Actually, I have one complaint: they switched to "quiet" mode in the boot process, so you don't see the technical details of
what's going on during boot-up and worse, they didn't replace this with any kind of wait cursor: they leave you staring at the
machine wondering if it's really booting.
Linux doesn't come with an icon labeled "Internet" it comes with an icon labeled firefox or mozilla.
And I don't tell people they should switch to using Linux either...
for one thing, I barely have a clue how gnome or KDE is set-up, since I use neither, and for another, I don't want to be my friend's volunteer tech support. But whatever problems "Linux Evangelists" may have, they don't go around telling you a linux desktop is as easy to use as a telephone.
(Just in case it ain't clear: bringing me in as The Computer Guy is a joke -- I haven't touched anything but linux -- mostly running icewm -- in over a decade, and I've never been particularly enthused about Apple's output... the above story is just one of the latest I could tell, whenever
I do look at Apple-stuff I always conclude the enthusiasts have been exaggerating.)
And you being the computer guy, no offense, should have known to read the manual (available to you online [apple.com] if not in print form.)
And to refer you once again to my question, it was "how is this any different from linux?".
It's precisely the point that I'm trying to make: all computers are a pain in the ass, all software takes some work to master.
And yet many an Apple-fan tries to tell you that Apple Is Different, and it's all fabulously intuitive and it all just works.
Now me, I know better than to believe that, but it's still remarkable that Apple couldn't figure out how to make the system a little easier to deal with (e.g. an obvious button labeled "internet" or "web" or some such).
Using OSX out of the box, without any help from the internet is possible.
This has not been my experience. I suspect that you don't know how much special knowledge you have
that makes it possible for OSX to seem "easy to use" to you.
Linux is a pain in the ass to learn and use. Every distro has things in all sorts of places, there is no consistency, NONE.
Right. Well, my roomate was trying to get started with a new iBook recently, and being The Computer Guy,
I got recruited to try to help her with it. Despite the rainbow stripe of pretty-pretty hieroglyphics
stretching across the screen, there didn't seem to be a web browser in the lot. (What she really wanted to
see, of course, was a big widget on the desktop labeled "Internet"... wouldn't that be "consistent", "standard",
"easy to use", etc, etc?). So I went poking around on the harddrive (which I know how to do, but she, of course does not)
and I go looking through an "Applications" folder (or whatever) and I happen to note that "Safari" is there.
Since I happen to be a Computer Guy, I dimly remember that this is what Apple named their web browser...
this is, needless to say, not something that a normal, sane, human being would be expected to know. So,
I go and create a desktop short cut for her to run Safari, and she's reasonably happy with that.
There are, however, other things she's not happy with, that I can't figure out. She needs to travel between
different places, with different internet configurations with this computer (which is, after all, a laptop),
and she needs to be able to switch between having a DSL line and doing a phone dial-up.
We go blundering around in various Wizards (or whatever apple calls them) and with a suprising quantity of work,
I can get it configured to work in one location. It appears we need to go back into Wizard-land every time she
switches her internet configuration. This doesn't make any sense -- it strikes me as a near impossibility that
Apple didn't allow for different network connection profiles, and provide some easy way (perhaps automatic?) of
switching between the two, but whatever it is, I certainly couldn't figure it out.
The point being, of course: how is this sort of shit any better than linux, really?
And a secondary point, being: how is it that Apple-fanatics manage to remain quiet about all of these
stupid little problems, and keep swearing that it's Great Great Great (until the stupid little problem
is fixed, then they want credit for how Great it is that it's been fixed -- "hey, you can buy a multi-button mouse now!").
The manager who dresses him down saying he can't code, then comes back later and claims he meant someone else. Since he's obviously too busy being angry he completely missed that the manager backtracked to try and protect himself from any lawsuits.
Almost certainly correct. My understanding is that the system of "personal references" has essentially broken down, because no one is willing to risk getting sued for saying something wrong.
I can easily believe that there are "secret blacklists" circulating out there, and the only thing that's really peculiar is
that the manager in question was so clueless he was willing to admit -- at first -- that they exist.
And writing test cases before I write code? Come 'on, that's verifying the spec and my code can do that without test cases. Zed mentioned both points.
Actually, it's automatically verifying that the code complies with the spec (presuming that you have a spec).
I'm firmly convinced that writing automated tests around the time you develop some code (before or shortly after) really
and truly works. Nearly every software development methodology I've encountered in the last 20 years has struck me as
around 80% snake oil, but test-oriented programming is the one exception.
What zed actually objected to was having absurd quantities of test code (something like 5 to 1, he claims), and that indeed does
sound excessive.
This brings up an interesting (to me) issue. When someone DOES post something on the internet which others would consider sufficient for instant-rejection, how does that individual reform (and subsequently recover)?
Seriously? Said person should just go on to do better things that will google more highly, and after awhile even if someone
does encounter that famous "Scheme to Kill the President" post it'll seem like ancient history.
And I suppose if you didn't feel like waiting several years for it to be forgotten, you could just change your name
legally. At a guess that would defeat most casual websearches (caveat: if your previous
name can be looked up easily, e.g. on your credit rating, then this obviously wouldn't work terribly well -- abuse of the credit rating system by prospective
employers is a bigger problem than websearches, if you ask me, but no one can be bothered to think about that
one).
So of course somebody wouldn't be taken seriously with such an idea today. After all, why would somebody bother making a prediction for a train of the "future" that can basically be built today?
Actually, no one would take that prediction seriously, because it doesn't have the word "car" in it.
Everyone knows that the future is "cars". Cars cars cars.
In any event, most of what made the web browser a successful platform, from the table tag to JavaScript, was developed in an entirely commercial environment.
You think Javascript was essential for the web to become successful? That's crazy.
no company that things they're going to win with close-source, proprietary code is sincerely interested in promoting an open protocol.
Well, reality proves you to be wrong. There are tons of companies who write proprietary software that specifically supports open standards. There are plenty whose software only supports open standards, even though the source code to their application is not available. Believe it or not, many commercial software companies don't want to establish their own incompatible formats and standards. Many just compete on writing good software that interoperates well. For many (most?) companies that write proprietary software, having their own proprietary formats would be suicide.
Okay, so can you name an example of a proprietary company innovating a new type of software, and along the way voluntarily choosing to establish an open protocol/format that it depends on, to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
I suggest that open standards look good to (1) small companies and (2) followers. Leaders rarely establish an open standard if they can avoid it, and large companies do what they can to subtly subvert open standards, whenever they think they can get away with it.
Right. I remember being impressed by Mosaic when I saw it. But I'm not sure how this rebuts the argument that there are more examples of innovation in proprietary software.
Now you're moving the goal posts, aren't you? Before you were saying that the contributions of the free and open world were "little", now that I've pointed out one that was huge, you're claiming that they were few in number.
Everyone really should read this article through to the end...
he veers off into a discussion of a recent Freeman Dyson article
that made comparisions between cellular evolution and the open/closed
software issue and there are a few things about this that are
interesting to me.
One point: it's really weird that Freeman Dyson articles never seem
to be featured on slashdot. I can only infer that the slash kiddies don't
have any idea who he is.
Another: it's by no means clear that this analogy between species differentiation
and software does what Jaron Lanier wants it to do. For one thing, evolved, biological systems
are famously, incredibly crufty: there's all sorts of crud in there that no sane designer
would want to live with, and yet it does it's job well enough that there's apparently no great evolutionary pressure to remove the crud (first example that comes to mind: the human eye has
light absorbers mounted behind the wiring, so the wiring interferes with some incoming light, hence the "blind spot"). I would argue that this is very much like the state of open source software,
where we make do with some clunky decisions made with Unix and X Windows, because "starting from scratch" just isn't worth the trouble to fix the problems.
The notion that "innovation" requires slower release cycles, or perhaps, a looser connection to external feedback is interesting, but here again it's not so clear that the closed-source world has such an advantage... yes, proprietary software typically has some deep pockets behind it, so that it can at least try to move quickly in a desired direction, but the (usually) volunteer open source projects also have some advantages in that they can move without having to demonstrate a business model, and can continue for years without much external encouragement...
Proprietary software has been using open standards for a very long time.
Name a couple. I have no idea what you have in mind.
Not having used Lyx, I couldn't judge how innovative it is, though.
Try following the link I posted. Lyx is a GUI "document processor" that uses
LaTex as the back-end: it encourages the author of documents to focus on structure
rather than formatting. It's the precise opposite of WYSIWYG, but arguably it's
much more efficient for dealing with large-scale projects.
It has, however, not Taken The World By Storm. Do we infer from that that it is not innovative or useful?
Or do we infer from that that it is difficult to Take The World By Storm without a large marketing budget?
Are we arguing about the virtues of openness, or the fact that most people are sheep?
I never said there is any futility to it. My argument is that Open Source has been a relatively minor contributor to creativity and innovation in software.
And my argument is that emacs was a tremendously influential piece of software, which introduced many, many, ideas we now take for granted
in all desktop software, and you -- like most people -- are simply ignorant of the history of these things.
But it's more about execution than revolution. Which is probably why FOSS has yet contributed little to innovation in desktop software.
You and Jaron Lanier are not at all on the same page here. He thinks open source can only create polished copies (I can't imagine what he's talking about... I tend to think all existing software is pretty clunky, including Apple's recent output, but I certainly wouldn't try to argue that, say, KDE is more "polished" than OS X).
Let me try this one more time though:
"Which is probably why FOSS has yet contributed little to innovation in desktop software"?
I repeat: Mosaic. You're objection that Mosaic was just a demo of a protocol doesn't impress me.
It was the first web browser that automatically displayed images embedded in automatically formated, proportionally-spaced text.
Anyone who looked at it immediately Got The Idea. That's how we got to where we are today:
Mosaic -> Mozilla -> Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox.
And secondly, I can't imagine why in the context of this discussion we should care about a distinction
between open protocols and open source software -- certainly a desktop user isn't going to care.
And I think you can make an argument that open protocols and open source code arise out of the same culture --
no company that things they're going to win with close-source, proprietary code is sincerely interested
in promoting an open protocol.
Well, the reason BeOS didn't make it is for the same reason that all the operation system companies didn't make it... they think the operating system matters to people, and it doesn't. People use applications, not operating systems.
This is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand but the fundamental reason that BeOS didn't "make it"
is that Steve Jobs chose not to buy it and use it as the basis of OS X, and the reason he went with using
NeXt as a basis instead of BeOs might have been for some sort of technical reason, but almost certainly it
had to do with the ego he had invested in the NeXt project. I would guess that for Jobs, the success of
OS X is the vindication of the work he put into the not-terribly-successful NeXt project.
Just to clarify: The protocol of bittorrent was published before the "official" client. So, why would subsequent implementations depend on the client, when anybody could implement the protocol without referring to the official client software at all? The innovation was in the protocol, not the client.
The original idea was published in a free and open manner, which made it possible for people to create multiple implementations of it,
whether closed source or not. You're getting hung up on semantic games here.
For a long time now, when people ask for an example of innovative open source desktop sofware, I've pointed them at Lyx.
Lyx has a pretty strange way of doing things from the point of view of someone raised on Microsoft Word, in fact it's so strange
I would guess that someone who thinks Word is the ultimate word processor probably couldn't follow what Lyx is for. You will no doubt object that Lyx has not taken the world by storm, but what does that have to do with whether or not it was innovative? Developing a new idea, and selling people on are two different things, though unfortunately Jaron Lanier seems to have conflated the two.
The piece of innovative open source software that I use most often, though, is "emacs" -- and arguably, it too is merely a niche app that has failed to take the world by storm, and yet ideas originally developed for emacs have been re-implemented under different names many times (windowing systems, ides, file managers...).
It's hard for me to see this as a demonstration of the inherent futility of developing software like emacs.
And the objection that we can "only name a handful" of successful, creative pieces of open source software is truly inane.
The web browser has transformed western civilization, and every web browser is essentially a clone of the original Mosaic.
Responding to that example with a "well okay, that's one" is just crazy. Do you sincerely think that the iPhone is a
historic event on the level of the development of the web browser?
Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth?
And yet, OS X has a variant of FreeBSD down there underneath it all. Was that mistake?
Would Apple have been better off if they'd started over from scratch?
An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn't been so good at creating notable originals.
Heh. Which polished copy is that? A lot of linux desktop software is certainly useable, but very little of it strikes me as terribly "polished".
What I would say, is that a dishonest empiricist can prove any point they like by cherry-picking the data, and an honest empiricist would have to admit it's nearly impossible to track all the developments in the open-source world to make any great pronouncements about the lack of innovation. What is easy to know is where the buzz is, and Apple is in the fortunate position of having a fairly large marketing budget, and (more importantly) some very clever marketing, and it can create buzz where it wants it.
But more to the point, I would question the initial premise that what the world needs now is "creative software". Myself, I would suggest that we need to get the crap we've got now actually working right (like email inboxes that aren't drowning in spam, and companies that are willing to read their email instead of insisting on clumsy webmail interfaces to try to screen out bots, etc). That might or might not require "creativity", and if it doesn't, that's fine by me.
(If Nokia comes up with a linux based gadget that blows the iPhone out of the water,
will this "honest empiricist" admit that he was wrong?)
This points to my theory that drugs don't make people dumb, but dumb people can be easily attracted to drugs. More intelligent and self controlled people can use drugs with little to no ill effects.
Funny, I would've said that the main advantage more intelligent people have is the ability to come
up with clever, elaborate rationales to justify their drug habits.
But then, it's so hard to think of examples of bright, intelligent people who've burned themselves out with drug addictions....
Slashdot Mirror
Hitler was no doubt greatly mislead.
(Shut up, Godwin!)
I think that calling this "nationalism" is to give it too much credit... it's more like a retreat to a medieval attitude, a worship of the divine right of your local warlord. There's this general sense that whatever Big Corporation wants to do must be okay, it's not as if they were criminals or terrorists or something.
I would guess that "tribalism" is closer to the mark, but I wouldn't be suprised if actual tribes are often saner and more sensible than nations about these things (if you were an Igbo living in Nigeria, why would you care more about country than tribe? The country wasn't even there a hundred years ago, and it demonstrably cares more about international oil companies than local citizens).
With some luck, your work on the project might even bring some money in, and you won't need to impress employeers with a long list of languages. Even if the project doesn't bring any money in, you're resume will show that you're someone who can work on an actual project.
Brainfuck. Real programmer's can do anything in Brainfuck.
Or if you really want to impress someone, try inventing a language of your own and implement it on Parrot by writing a grammar in Perl 6.
And the 2008 results are just in -- it's the write-in candidate, our new president, William Henry Gates!
Thanks: if it was there, I missed it... but like I said "Safari"? What's that supposed to mean?
If I remember right, the Gnome and KDE guys have that particular detail covered a little better (I actually don't use either, I could be off)... if you go poking around in the application menus you get functional descriptions rather than just proper names that make sense only to insiders. (If I remember right, the KDE guys also include the proper name in parenthesis, so you might see an application listed like "cd burning (k3b)" -- that strikes me as a nice balance of catering to the average degree of ignorence, without condescending to it and hiding a detail a more knowledgeable person would like to know).
Yes, the Linux world continues to improve... a few years ago, kubuntu had trouble installing on some of my amd64 machines, now kubuntu 7.10 installed without much trouble [1], and connection to the internet is a lot smoother (I don't need to manual type "ifup eth1" or anything like that when I plug my laptop into the ethernet, for example).
[1] Actually, I have one complaint: they switched to "quiet" mode in the boot process, so you don't see the technical details of what's going on during boot-up and worse, they didn't replace this with any kind of wait cursor: they leave you staring at the machine wondering if it's really booting.
And I don't tell people they should switch to using Linux either... for one thing, I barely have a clue how gnome or KDE is set-up, since I use neither, and for another, I don't want to be my friend's volunteer tech support. But whatever problems "Linux Evangelists" may have, they don't go around telling you a linux desktop is as easy to use as a telephone.
(Just in case it ain't clear: bringing me in as The Computer Guy is a joke -- I haven't touched anything but linux -- mostly running icewm -- in over a decade, and I've never been particularly enthused about Apple's output... the above story is just one of the latest I could tell, whenever I do look at Apple-stuff I always conclude the enthusiasts have been exaggerating.)
And to refer you once again to my question, it was "how is this any different from linux?".
It's precisely the point that I'm trying to make: all computers are a pain in the ass, all software takes some work to master. And yet many an Apple-fan tries to tell you that Apple Is Different, and it's all fabulously intuitive and it all just works.
Now me, I know better than to believe that, but it's still remarkable that Apple couldn't figure out how to make the system a little easier to deal with (e.g. an obvious button labeled "internet" or "web" or some such).
This has not been my experience. I suspect that you don't know how much special knowledge you have that makes it possible for OSX to seem "easy to use" to you.
Right. Well, my roomate was trying to get started with a new iBook recently, and being The Computer Guy, I got recruited to try to help her with it. Despite the rainbow stripe of pretty-pretty hieroglyphics stretching across the screen, there didn't seem to be a web browser in the lot. (What she really wanted to see, of course, was a big widget on the desktop labeled "Internet"... wouldn't that be "consistent", "standard", "easy to use", etc, etc?). So I went poking around on the harddrive (which I know how to do, but she, of course does not) and I go looking through an "Applications" folder (or whatever) and I happen to note that "Safari" is there. Since I happen to be a Computer Guy, I dimly remember that this is what Apple named their web browser... this is, needless to say, not something that a normal, sane, human being would be expected to know. So, I go and create a desktop short cut for her to run Safari, and she's reasonably happy with that.
There are, however, other things she's not happy with, that I can't figure out. She needs to travel between different places, with different internet configurations with this computer (which is, after all, a laptop), and she needs to be able to switch between having a DSL line and doing a phone dial-up. We go blundering around in various Wizards (or whatever apple calls them) and with a suprising quantity of work, I can get it configured to work in one location. It appears we need to go back into Wizard-land every time she switches her internet configuration. This doesn't make any sense -- it strikes me as a near impossibility that Apple didn't allow for different network connection profiles, and provide some easy way (perhaps automatic?) of switching between the two, but whatever it is, I certainly couldn't figure it out.
The point being, of course: how is this sort of shit any better than linux, really?
And a secondary point, being: how is it that Apple-fanatics manage to remain quiet about all of these stupid little problems, and keep swearing that it's Great Great Great (until the stupid little problem is fixed, then they want credit for how Great it is that it's been fixed -- "hey, you can buy a multi-button mouse now!").
synthesizerpatel wrote:
Almost certainly correct. My understanding is that the system of "personal references" has essentially broken down, because no one is willing to risk getting sued for saying something wrong.
I can easily believe that there are "secret blacklists" circulating out there, and the only thing that's really peculiar is that the manager in question was so clueless he was willing to admit -- at first -- that they exist.
Actually, it's automatically verifying that the code complies with the spec (presuming that you have a spec).
I'm firmly convinced that writing automated tests around the time you develop some code (before or shortly after) really and truly works. Nearly every software development methodology I've encountered in the last 20 years has struck me as around 80% snake oil, but test-oriented programming is the one exception.
What zed actually objected to was having absurd quantities of test code (something like 5 to 1, he claims), and that indeed does sound excessive.
Seriously? Said person should just go on to do better things that will google more highly, and after awhile even if someone does encounter that famous "Scheme to Kill the President" post it'll seem like ancient history.
And I suppose if you didn't feel like waiting several years for it to be forgotten, you could just change your name legally. At a guess that would defeat most casual websearches (caveat: if your previous name can be looked up easily, e.g. on your credit rating, then this obviously wouldn't work terribly well -- abuse of the credit rating system by prospective employers is a bigger problem than websearches, if you ask me, but no one can be bothered to think about that one).
Actually, no one would take that prediction seriously, because it doesn't have the word "car" in it. Everyone knows that the future is "cars". Cars cars cars.
You think Javascript was essential for the web to become successful? That's crazy.
Okay, so can you name an example of a proprietary company innovating a new type of software, and along the way voluntarily choosing to establish an open protocol/format that it depends on, to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
I suggest that open standards look good to (1) small companies and (2) followers. Leaders rarely establish an open standard if they can avoid it, and large companies do what they can to subtly subvert open standards, whenever they think they can get away with it.
Now you're moving the goal posts, aren't you? Before you were saying that the contributions of the free and open world were "little", now that I've pointed out one that was huge, you're claiming that they were few in number.
One point: it's really weird that Freeman Dyson articles never seem to be featured on slashdot. I can only infer that the slash kiddies don't have any idea who he is.
Another: it's by no means clear that this analogy between species differentiation and software does what Jaron Lanier wants it to do. For one thing, evolved, biological systems are famously, incredibly crufty: there's all sorts of crud in there that no sane designer would want to live with, and yet it does it's job well enough that there's apparently no great evolutionary pressure to remove the crud (first example that comes to mind: the human eye has light absorbers mounted behind the wiring, so the wiring interferes with some incoming light, hence the "blind spot"). I would argue that this is very much like the state of open source software, where we make do with some clunky decisions made with Unix and X Windows, because "starting from scratch" just isn't worth the trouble to fix the problems.
The notion that "innovation" requires slower release cycles, or perhaps, a looser connection to external feedback is interesting, but here again it's not so clear that the closed-source world has such an advantage... yes, proprietary software typically has some deep pockets behind it, so that it can at least try to move quickly in a desired direction, but the (usually) volunteer open source projects also have some advantages in that they can move without having to demonstrate a business model, and can continue for years without much external encouragement...
Name a couple. I have no idea what you have in mind.
Try following the link I posted. Lyx is a GUI "document processor" that uses LaTex as the back-end: it encourages the author of documents to focus on structure rather than formatting. It's the precise opposite of WYSIWYG, but arguably it's much more efficient for dealing with large-scale projects.It has, however, not Taken The World By Storm. Do we infer from that that it is not innovative or useful? Or do we infer from that that it is difficult to Take The World By Storm without a large marketing budget? Are we arguing about the virtues of openness, or the fact that most people are sheep?
And my argument is that emacs was a tremendously influential piece of software, which introduced many, many, ideas we now take for granted in all desktop software, and you -- like most people -- are simply ignorant of the history of these things.
You and Jaron Lanier are not at all on the same page here. He thinks open source can only create polished copies (I can't imagine what he's talking about... I tend to think all existing software is pretty clunky, including Apple's recent output, but I certainly wouldn't try to argue that, say, KDE is more "polished" than OS X).
Let me try this one more time though: "Which is probably why FOSS has yet contributed little to innovation in desktop software"? I repeat: Mosaic. You're objection that Mosaic was just a demo of a protocol doesn't impress me. It was the first web browser that automatically displayed images embedded in automatically formated, proportionally-spaced text. Anyone who looked at it immediately Got The Idea. That's how we got to where we are today: Mosaic -> Mozilla -> Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox.
And secondly, I can't imagine why in the context of this discussion we should care about a distinction between open protocols and open source software -- certainly a desktop user isn't going to care. And I think you can make an argument that open protocols and open source code arise out of the same culture -- no company that things they're going to win with close-source, proprietary code is sincerely interested in promoting an open protocol.
Emacs was a clone of emacs.
This is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand but the fundamental reason that BeOS didn't "make it" is that Steve Jobs chose not to buy it and use it as the basis of OS X, and the reason he went with using NeXt as a basis instead of BeOs might have been for some sort of technical reason, but almost certainly it had to do with the ego he had invested in the NeXt project. I would guess that for Jobs, the success of OS X is the vindication of the work he put into the not-terribly-successful NeXt project.
Oh come on. Yes, Netscape begat FireFox, but Mosaic begat Netscape. Where did the fundamental innovation happen?
And you're really confused on a number of issues. "Commerical" development is not the opposite of "open source"
dangitman wrote:
The original idea was published in a free and open manner, which made it possible for people to create multiple implementations of it, whether closed source or not. You're getting hung up on semantic games here.
For a long time now, when people ask for an example of innovative open source desktop sofware, I've pointed them at Lyx. Lyx has a pretty strange way of doing things from the point of view of someone raised on Microsoft Word, in fact it's so strange I would guess that someone who thinks Word is the ultimate word processor probably couldn't follow what Lyx is for. You will no doubt object that Lyx has not taken the world by storm, but what does that have to do with whether or not it was innovative? Developing a new idea, and selling people on are two different things, though unfortunately Jaron Lanier seems to have conflated the two.
The piece of innovative open source software that I use most often, though, is "emacs" -- and arguably, it too is merely a niche app that has failed to take the world by storm, and yet ideas originally developed for emacs have been re-implemented under different names many times (windowing systems, ides, file managers...). It's hard for me to see this as a demonstration of the inherent futility of developing software like emacs.
And the objection that we can "only name a handful" of successful, creative pieces of open source software is truly inane. The web browser has transformed western civilization, and every web browser is essentially a clone of the original Mosaic. Responding to that example with a "well okay, that's one" is just crazy. Do you sincerely think that the iPhone is a historic event on the level of the development of the web browser?
Just to RTFA for a minute:
And yet, OS X has a variant of FreeBSD down there underneath it all. Was that mistake? Would Apple have been better off if they'd started over from scratch?Heh. Which polished copy is that? A lot of linux desktop software is certainly useable, but very little of it strikes me as terribly "polished".
What I would say, is that a dishonest empiricist can prove any point they like by cherry-picking the data, and an honest empiricist would have to admit it's nearly impossible to track all the developments in the open-source world to make any great pronouncements about the lack of innovation. What is easy to know is where the buzz is, and Apple is in the fortunate position of having a fairly large marketing budget, and (more importantly) some very clever marketing, and it can create buzz where it wants it.
But more to the point, I would question the initial premise that what the world needs now is "creative software". Myself, I would suggest that we need to get the crap we've got now actually working right (like email inboxes that aren't drowning in spam, and companies that are willing to read their email instead of insisting on clumsy webmail interfaces to try to screen out bots, etc). That might or might not require "creativity", and if it doesn't, that's fine by me.
(If Nokia comes up with a linux based gadget that blows the iPhone out of the water, will this "honest empiricist" admit that he was wrong?)
Funny, I would've said that the main advantage more intelligent people have is the ability to come up with clever, elaborate rationales to justify their drug habits.
But then, it's so hard to think of examples of bright, intelligent people who've burned themselves out with drug addictions....