Linux has several big advantages. One is that it is a generally superior product. Another is that it is FOSS. And another is that it is cheap (as in beer).
These are all good points, and they mean different things to different people. Like it or lump it, corporate bean-counters will never pick a product based on its quality or access to its source code, no matter how hard you sell it. They WILL pick it because it's cheap.
If all those abused IT professionals want the higher-quality FOSS product, they'll want it to be cheap too. Otherwise it'll never happen.
Well doy. "The Government" doesn't run a national health service- it pays doctors to. "The Government" doesn't run an army- it pays soldiers to.
"The Government" is just a fancy term for about 1000 people who make laws and dish out money. A "Government Project" isn't one where politicians do all the work, it's one where the Government is the principal financial backer.
"The Government" built spacecraft in that the scientists who designed it were paid by the government and the companies who assembled it were paid by the government and the fuel that ran it was bought by the government and the astronauts who flew it were government employees. Whether some parts of that chain also involved corporations is neither here nor there.
Why fly from Paris to Munich? Probably be quicker by train.
Most of the time travelling seems to be spent mucking around at airports. The actual moving-around part of travelling doesn't seem to make much difference on journeys less than 1000 miles...
All the Swiss (and other governments) are planning on doing is co-operating with criminal investigations, which until now they've refused to do. You'll still need warrants, court orders and all the other trappings of due process before they'll co-operate.
Like it or not, if you live/work in a country, you need to pay taxes there. And if you steal money in a country, you need to give it back. Anything that allows people to dodge taxes and profit from crimes is a bad thing, full stop.
But if the technical solutions find their way into mainstream programs as default settings, what then?
If Limewire and uTorrent and such were to adopt, as default, new technology to disguise file-sharing (and it'd be in their interest to, if ISPs were blocking these programmes en mass), most people would use it. Most people would use it and not even know they were using it.
Whats stopping you going to http://download.openoffice.org/other.html and clicking "download"? I really am actually asking, by the by- I can't remember how easy or difficult it was when I installed OO.o 3.0 on my Ubuntu machine last.
Strange. My GF, who is at uni, uses Blackboard regularly. She's used Firefox + unmodified Zonealarm for the entirety of her 4 year course, and never encountered a problem.
IMHO, the big problem with FOSS games is that FOSS is, generally, pretty leaderless and community-driven.
With something like, say, CD burning, this doesn't tend to matter. CD burning software has one single really obvious goal: to be really good at burning disks, with the possible additional goal of: being easy to use. Even the most fragmented group of volunteers can't argue too much about that.
But with games, EVERYTHING is a matter of taste. Every feature, every mode, every act of balancing, every model texture, it's all subjective. Getting 1000's of volunteers to agree unanimously on these choices is nearly impossible; without the strict leadership that comes from the rigid corporate structure, the project either devolves into squabbling or fractures into numerous spin-offs.
There are obvious exceptions, but its notable that many of them (FreeCiv, FreeCol, various FPSs and RTSs) are attempts to recreate some existing game, where the aforementioned choices are already made. The number of brand-new, from scratch FOSS games are pretty thin on the ground.
Software with a 25% market share isn't going to disappear over night just because their main sponsor backs out. That 25% who use Firefox now are going to keep doing so, until something actively changes their mind.
Google can certainly do a good job of changing people's minds if it tries, though, and it's something Mozilla will need to be ready to fight against. While they won't disappear over night, they can still be beaten by the competition just as easily as anyone else.
My old 1GB USB MP3 player stopped working as an MP3 player, but still works as a flash drive. It's now living out a happy second career as a bootable recovery OS, plus nerdy party piece.
Microsoft do one HUGE release every 3-7 years, with a mini release every year or two (service packs). Both of it's main rivals (Apple and the main Linux distros) have a smoother, more gradual release cycle (Ubuntu is every 6 months like clockwork, for example).
At the moment, we're all comparing Win7 with current Mac, Ubuntu and other such releases. In reality (as I believe was GP's original point), the goalposts will have moved by then. By the time Win7 hits the shelves, it'll be competing with new versions of Mac and Ubuntu, which will have their own glut of new features. And by the time Win7 SP1 is launched, their could be another 2 or 3 Ubuntu releases gone by.
So the real question ISN'T whether Win7 beats Ubuntu/Mac now, it's whether it'll beat these future releases, and whether it'll keep up with the rate of change.
I lived a sizeable chunk of my young childhood believing the night sky was orange. Could never comprehend why it was always that dark bluey-black in cartoons and such.
Street-lights + country that's always overcast = bemused childhood.
When it comes to cracking safes, you need to set about each one with industrial cutters with exactly the same effort as the last one, and the one before that. It never gets any easier to crack a safe.
When it comes to cracking DRM, it only needs to be done once. Once a particular DRM system has been cracked, and cracking software for it distributed, anyone can crack that DRM with very little effort. While Mr Hacksalot had to spend days and weeks of work breaking a DRM, each subsequent pirate need only to use his software. Not only that, but once a song/movie/game/ebook has been cracked, and it gets into the ecosystem of torrents and file distributors, anyone can download it. If I want to download a cracked copy of Spore then I can- I don't need to crack it again myself.
A safe is a good deterrent. To steal from a safe, I need to put a lot of effort in, me personally. DRM is not- once it is broken the first time, it may as well have never been there in the first place.
The real question is "what is sufficient for thinking", and I believe the answer is pretty easy - free will.
How do you figure?
When I play a game of chess, I'm free (as in free will) to make any move within the confines of the game's rules. I can make good decisions, bad decisions, monumentally stupid decisions, whatever, its up to me. Seeing as the goal is me to beat the other player, I always choose the move which appears to me to be the "best" at achieving this, which I do by thinking about the consequences of every move as best I can, and choosing the move with the "best" consequences.
When a computer plays chess, it is able to make any legal move possible in the game. It too is able to make good, bad, and stupid decisions. It's goal is, too, to win the game, and so it will always pick the move which it thinks will "best" accomplish that. It weighs up the consequences of all the possible moves, and picks the one that seems likely to result in the "best" consequences.
The computer's ability to pick the "best" move is entirely dependent on how "good" at chess it is, which itself is dependent on how it's software was programmed. A not-so-great chess computer can make stupid decisions just the same as a not-so-great human player can, although their aim (to win) is the same.
Seeing as the computer and the human are both playing the game and choosing their moves in pretty much the same way, I'm not sure where free will comes into it. They're both as free to select any given move as their opponent, and they're both making their judgement on the same criteria, with the same process behind the decision making.
So, is a human chess player not truly "thinking", because his free will is confined by the rules and goals of the game, or is the computer really "thinking" because it's following the same process as a good human player?
The GPL and BSD licenses fulfil completely different purposes, and attract different contributors because of it.
You can't declare either license the "winner" without first deciding what it is they're competing in. If you want the biggest, most widely used cross-platform free software, GPL wins- Linux's desktop share beats any of the *BSDs, and it has massive penetration in embedded devices, webservers and cross-platform applications. If you want the biggest, most widely used platform full stop, BSD wins- MacOSX has a colossally larger desktop share than Linux (but is of course mostly non-free), and BSD code can be found in almost any project you care to mention.
For people and big companies who want their free contributions to remain free, the GPL is far more attractive (just ask all those Linux vendors). For people who just want to see technology get out there and be used, BSD is the drawer.
The 2 camps can't both be pleased at the same time, and that's why the 2 licenses can exist side-by-side. Acting like the GPL is detrimental to Linux (or the same with BSD) is just plain ignoring the reality of the situation.
Indeed I was. Foreign if you're a Portuguese politician / citizen / campaigner, and foreign if you're in the European Commission.
The "so to speak" bit, incidentally, is mostly because they're not entirely foreign. Although like GP said, their HQ and most of their employees are in Redmond and the US, they're also pretty international. They employ a lot of people in Europe too, and bring in plenty of European tax revenue for their sales in the EU zone.
But like I said, mostly they're a foreign (non-European) company.
You're assuming the laws of the land don't apply to the internet.
If someone buys a website and dedicates it to making up nasty lies about you, you can take them to court for libel. In fact you probably don't need to do that- send a letter to their web-host informing them that you're going to sue them for libel, and they'll probably (happily) take it down.
Its exactly the same as someone publishing a book full of lies and slander about you, and the same laws apply. The internet is just cheaper.
If you don't want your boss to know about your nocturnal activities, don't post about them on the website. If you think belonging to the Stalinist Party might be a turn off for potential employers, don't join the Stalinist Party.
Without your Facebook / MySpace / YouTube page, and without anyone targeting you specifically, your employer won't find much. Sure there's still plenty of information out there to be found, but they're not going to dedicate all day to it...
On the other hand I think open source community is getting a little bit trigger happy with these kind of lawsuits (or whatever "a complaint to the European Commission" is).
The European Commission is the executive branch of the EU (a bit like the Cabinet in the US government). Among other things, it's their job to make sure the rules of the EU are carried out.
It's not uncommon for the government tenders to include some sort of requirement for proprietary formats,.pdf,.doc or whatever. How is this any different? Just use a PC to submit your bid, or as someone pointed out there are other options as well.
It's all very political really, isn't it. MS have been up for anti-trust cases in the EU quite a lot recently, and are not really top favourites in the upper echelons of government. They're also a foreign company (so to speak), who are notorious for vendor lock-in.
Making a government service compatible only with Microsoft products is just never going to pe popular in the circumstances.
It's clearly not going to be an anti-trust issue, and MS haven't done anything wrong here- they've just sold their product to someone fair and square, like they should do. But open standards in government is all the rage at the moment, and a "complaint to the European Commission" is a good way of grabbing the Portuguese government's attention.
You see, it's true that if you post that you've experimented with marijuana then everyone will be able to find that out forever. But that applies to everybody. It's estimated that 25% of adult Brits have experimented with drugs at some point- and that's based on a voluntary study (the real figure is liable to be higher). It'd be a lot more difficult for parliament to argue drug users are evil monsters if they know a quarter of them have tried it themselves (and can actually look up each other's names).
Same goes for everything. What the internet threatens to create is a society where you just plain can't lie anymore- a truly honest society! Not exactly by choice admittedly, but honest all the same...
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It's a bit of a strange attitude to take, that.
Linux has several big advantages. One is that it is a generally superior product. Another is that it is FOSS. And another is that it is cheap (as in beer).
These are all good points, and they mean different things to different people. Like it or lump it, corporate bean-counters will never pick a product based on its quality or access to its source code, no matter how hard you sell it. They WILL pick it because it's cheap.
If all those abused IT professionals want the higher-quality FOSS product, they'll want it to be cheap too. Otherwise it'll never happen.
Well doy. "The Government" doesn't run a national health service- it pays doctors to. "The Government" doesn't run an army- it pays soldiers to.
"The Government" is just a fancy term for about 1000 people who make laws and dish out money. A "Government Project" isn't one where politicians do all the work, it's one where the Government is the principal financial backer.
"The Government" built spacecraft in that the scientists who designed it were paid by the government and the companies who assembled it were paid by the government and the fuel that ran it was bought by the government and the astronauts who flew it were government employees. Whether some parts of that chain also involved corporations is neither here nor there.
Why fly from Paris to Munich? Probably be quicker by train.
Most of the time travelling seems to be spent mucking around at airports. The actual moving-around part of travelling doesn't seem to make much difference on journeys less than 1000 miles...
All the Swiss (and other governments) are planning on doing is co-operating with criminal investigations, which until now they've refused to do. You'll still need warrants, court orders and all the other trappings of due process before they'll co-operate.
Like it or not, if you live/work in a country, you need to pay taxes there. And if you steal money in a country, you need to give it back. Anything that allows people to dodge taxes and profit from crimes is a bad thing, full stop.
But if the technical solutions find their way into mainstream programs as default settings, what then?
If Limewire and uTorrent and such were to adopt, as default, new technology to disguise file-sharing (and it'd be in their interest to, if ISPs were blocking these programmes en mass), most people would use it. Most people would use it and not even know they were using it.
And, additionally, that there's no reason a mother can't be a loony too.
Can you not?
Whats stopping you going to http://download.openoffice.org/other.html and clicking "download"? I really am actually asking, by the by- I can't remember how easy or difficult it was when I installed OO.o 3.0 on my Ubuntu machine last.
Strange. My GF, who is at uni, uses Blackboard regularly. She's used Firefox + unmodified Zonealarm for the entirety of her 4 year course, and never encountered a problem.
No, I just can't do it.
IMHO, the big problem with FOSS games is that FOSS is, generally, pretty leaderless and community-driven.
With something like, say, CD burning, this doesn't tend to matter. CD burning software has one single really obvious goal: to be really good at burning disks, with the possible additional goal of: being easy to use. Even the most fragmented group of volunteers can't argue too much about that.
But with games, EVERYTHING is a matter of taste. Every feature, every mode, every act of balancing, every model texture, it's all subjective. Getting 1000's of volunteers to agree unanimously on these choices is nearly impossible; without the strict leadership that comes from the rigid corporate structure, the project either devolves into squabbling or fractures into numerous spin-offs.
There are obvious exceptions, but its notable that many of them (FreeCiv, FreeCol, various FPSs and RTSs) are attempts to recreate some existing game, where the aforementioned choices are already made. The number of brand-new, from scratch FOSS games are pretty thin on the ground.
Software with a 25% market share isn't going to disappear over night just because their main sponsor backs out. That 25% who use Firefox now are going to keep doing so, until something actively changes their mind.
Google can certainly do a good job of changing people's minds if it tries, though, and it's something Mozilla will need to be ready to fight against. While they won't disappear over night, they can still be beaten by the competition just as easily as anyone else.
My old 1GB USB MP3 player stopped working as an MP3 player, but still works as a flash drive. It's now living out a happy second career as a bootable recovery OS, plus nerdy party piece.
It depends on how you look at it.
Microsoft do one HUGE release every 3-7 years, with a mini release every year or two (service packs). Both of it's main rivals (Apple and the main Linux distros) have a smoother, more gradual release cycle (Ubuntu is every 6 months like clockwork, for example).
At the moment, we're all comparing Win7 with current Mac, Ubuntu and other such releases. In reality (as I believe was GP's original point), the goalposts will have moved by then. By the time Win7 hits the shelves, it'll be competing with new versions of Mac and Ubuntu, which will have their own glut of new features. And by the time Win7 SP1 is launched, their could be another 2 or 3 Ubuntu releases gone by.
So the real question ISN'T whether Win7 beats Ubuntu/Mac now, it's whether it'll beat these future releases, and whether it'll keep up with the rate of change.
Answers on a postcard, for that one.
A perfect practical example of this: Pop Idol/American Idol/X-Factor.
Every day millions of people tune in and vote for their "favourite" musician. 9 times out of 10, the winner is a total flop who sells nothing.
I lived a sizeable chunk of my young childhood believing the night sky was orange. Could never comprehend why it was always that dark bluey-black in cartoons and such.
Street-lights + country that's always overcast = bemused childhood.
IMEHO, it's only an "app store" if it facilitates paying for software (like Apple's app store does).
I haven't read TFA yet, so I don't know whether this is an actual pay-for-apps app store, or just some nobstick who doesn't know what a repository is.
There is a slight flaw to that analogy.
When it comes to cracking safes, you need to set about each one with industrial cutters with exactly the same effort as the last one, and the one before that. It never gets any easier to crack a safe.
When it comes to cracking DRM, it only needs to be done once. Once a particular DRM system has been cracked, and cracking software for it distributed, anyone can crack that DRM with very little effort. While Mr Hacksalot had to spend days and weeks of work breaking a DRM, each subsequent pirate need only to use his software. Not only that, but once a song/movie/game/ebook has been cracked, and it gets into the ecosystem of torrents and file distributors, anyone can download it. If I want to download a cracked copy of Spore then I can- I don't need to crack it again myself.
A safe is a good deterrent. To steal from a safe, I need to put a lot of effort in, me personally. DRM is not- once it is broken the first time, it may as well have never been there in the first place.
The real question is "what is sufficient for thinking", and I believe the answer is pretty easy - free will.
How do you figure?
When I play a game of chess, I'm free (as in free will) to make any move within the confines of the game's rules. I can make good decisions, bad decisions, monumentally stupid decisions, whatever, its up to me. Seeing as the goal is me to beat the other player, I always choose the move which appears to me to be the "best" at achieving this, which I do by thinking about the consequences of every move as best I can, and choosing the move with the "best" consequences.
When a computer plays chess, it is able to make any legal move possible in the game. It too is able to make good, bad, and stupid decisions. It's goal is, too, to win the game, and so it will always pick the move which it thinks will "best" accomplish that. It weighs up the consequences of all the possible moves, and picks the one that seems likely to result in the "best" consequences.
The computer's ability to pick the "best" move is entirely dependent on how "good" at chess it is, which itself is dependent on how it's software was programmed. A not-so-great chess computer can make stupid decisions just the same as a not-so-great human player can, although their aim (to win) is the same.
Seeing as the computer and the human are both playing the game and choosing their moves in pretty much the same way, I'm not sure where free will comes into it. They're both as free to select any given move as their opponent, and they're both making their judgement on the same criteria, with the same process behind the decision making.
So, is a human chess player not truly "thinking", because his free will is confined by the rules and goals of the game, or is the computer really "thinking" because it's following the same process as a good human player?
Private healthcare seems to have some disadvantages.
The First Amendment would definitely apply if those doctors were employees of the US government...
The GPL and BSD licenses fulfil completely different purposes, and attract different contributors because of it.
You can't declare either license the "winner" without first deciding what it is they're competing in. If you want the biggest, most widely used cross-platform free software, GPL wins- Linux's desktop share beats any of the *BSDs, and it has massive penetration in embedded devices, webservers and cross-platform applications. If you want the biggest, most widely used platform full stop, BSD wins- MacOSX has a colossally larger desktop share than Linux (but is of course mostly non-free), and BSD code can be found in almost any project you care to mention.
For people and big companies who want their free contributions to remain free, the GPL is far more attractive (just ask all those Linux vendors). For people who just want to see technology get out there and be used, BSD is the drawer.
The 2 camps can't both be pleased at the same time, and that's why the 2 licenses can exist side-by-side. Acting like the GPL is detrimental to Linux (or the same with BSD) is just plain ignoring the reality of the situation.
Assuming all the help files were re-written to be standards compliant, it'd be trivial enough to have them simply open in your default browser.
Yes, I know, Microsoft and standards, what am I thinking...
Indeed I was. Foreign if you're a Portuguese politician / citizen / campaigner, and foreign if you're in the European Commission.
The "so to speak" bit, incidentally, is mostly because they're not entirely foreign. Although like GP said, their HQ and most of their employees are in Redmond and the US, they're also pretty international. They employ a lot of people in Europe too, and bring in plenty of European tax revenue for their sales in the EU zone.
But like I said, mostly they're a foreign (non-European) company.
You're assuming the laws of the land don't apply to the internet.
If someone buys a website and dedicates it to making up nasty lies about you, you can take them to court for libel. In fact you probably don't need to do that- send a letter to their web-host informing them that you're going to sue them for libel, and they'll probably (happily) take it down.
Its exactly the same as someone publishing a book full of lies and slander about you, and the same laws apply. The internet is just cheaper.
If you don't want your boss to know about your nocturnal activities, don't post about them on the website. If you think belonging to the Stalinist Party might be a turn off for potential employers, don't join the Stalinist Party.
Without your Facebook / MySpace / YouTube page, and without anyone targeting you specifically, your employer won't find much. Sure there's still plenty of information out there to be found, but they're not going to dedicate all day to it...
On the other hand I think open source community is getting a little bit trigger happy with these kind of lawsuits (or whatever "a complaint to the European Commission" is).
The European Commission is the executive branch of the EU (a bit like the Cabinet in the US government). Among other things, it's their job to make sure the rules of the EU are carried out.
It's not uncommon for the government tenders to include some sort of requirement for proprietary formats, .pdf, .doc or whatever. How is this any different? Just use a PC to submit your bid, or as someone pointed out there are other options as well.
It's all very political really, isn't it. MS have been up for anti-trust cases in the EU quite a lot recently, and are not really top favourites in the upper echelons of government. They're also a foreign company (so to speak), who are notorious for vendor lock-in.
Making a government service compatible only with Microsoft products is just never going to pe popular in the circumstances.
It's clearly not going to be an anti-trust issue, and MS haven't done anything wrong here- they've just sold their product to someone fair and square, like they should do. But open standards in government is all the rage at the moment, and a "complaint to the European Commission" is a good way of grabbing the Portuguese government's attention.
Ah, but therein lies utopia!
You see, it's true that if you post that you've experimented with marijuana then everyone will be able to find that out forever. But that applies to everybody. It's estimated that 25% of adult Brits have experimented with drugs at some point- and that's based on a voluntary study (the real figure is liable to be higher). It'd be a lot more difficult for parliament to argue drug users are evil monsters if they know a quarter of them have tried it themselves (and can actually look up each other's names).
Same goes for everything. What the internet threatens to create is a society where you just plain can't lie anymore- a truly honest society! Not exactly by choice admittedly, but honest all the same...