OpenSSH? Apache? X11? Those are all licensed under BSD-style licenses and not GPL, and they are still widely used today, moreso than any proprietary version.
X11 was the typical example of BSD failure. X11 had an MIT license, got taken in by proprietary vendors who had their own X's all with cool features, most of which are still not in the X11 on Linux. There was no free usable X for Unixes for years. Essentially the XFree86 people had to start from scratch and this took years. Eventually XFree86 became the standard X, but only after the entire X model was outdated. The result of the BSD license was a disaster for free software one of the worst free software disasters ever.
I'd disagree. We know that lots of companies do run their own app stores, so it most certainly is practical for them to distribute their own software to literally millions of their users. It is practical. I actually think it would be practical for the FSF for example to run their own solution.
As for installing your own software... for someone capable of building iOS software the developer route is quite practical. It isn't practical for 3rd party distribution but that's a very difficult claim. If the FSF said something like, "there is no practical way for developers to sell software to non-corporate users outside the Apple store" that would be fair. But that's a far weaker claim than what they are saying.
And that's my point. At a certain point refuting an exaggeration isn't just nitpicking but rather the claim is simple false.
Their issue with JavaScript is effectively non-free JavaScript not so much the language itself. They are right now educated about JavaScript, how best to use it, so need for a replacement.
I think for the iPad Stallman would want Apple to open it more. From what I can figure essentially what he wants is some of the features in the enterprise SDK, which Apple distributes at below their cost. I attribute FSF's position on iOS to ignorance and principle and it is hard to distinguish. The FSF simply says too much that is just false when it comes to Apple for me to figure out what they want. Plus I've told them this and they've kept it up, so at this point they are lying not mistaken.
OK adjust to 2048 vs 128. The point was that you are saying as long as x86 is a far better fit for servers it will be used for servers. Well of course. The question is what happens as the ARM economy gets larger than the x86 economy and the advantages of ARM design techniques come to dominate. Obviously I can't see what's likely many years in the future so I don't know what that will look like. For laptop it is obvious that SOC / power drive the change. Lighter and thinner. Beyond that is gets opaque.
However the economics are daunting. With ARM selling 10-20x or more as many chips per year...
Absolutely. That's the idea. Different interfaces depending on the form factor but same binary. That way you plug your phone into a large tablet you get the large tablet version. Give it a mouse, large screen and keyboard you get the desktop version. Your example is correct.
But non touch laptops are completely different things from tablets, phones and touch laptops. It never made sense having the same interface for both.
That's correct. Which is why the whole Windows 8 idea was that the entire ecosystem of Windows laptops would move towards touch: capacitive resistive screens with hinges allowing for screen flexibility. Microsoft should have been killing off non-touch with Windows 8, probably by leaving them on Windows 7. And BTW for desktop something like a digitizing pad should have been mandatory.
it goes into the desktop and then opens it. Why?
Mostly because Windows 8 was a transitional operating system designed to help hardware and developers move from the old desktop to the newer interface. The end user stuff was less important. Not everything was done yet and there was a lot of inconsistency between desktop and Metro. That could have been corrected with time and would have been quickly. Getting something out the door to start the hardware revolution was the top priority and they were right to ship early.
BSD claims to create free software. It has a long proven track record of failure where systems that were once free become in practice proprietary and unfree even though there is some free almost worthless version hanging out under the BSD license. If you don't consider free software desirable then you can't argue there is anything wrong with the GPL's restrictions.
a) The ability to share and modify code is desirable (otherwise why BSD or GPL) b) These abilities are called software freedom (a definition) c) GPL does a better job protecting all the freedoms needed to share and modify code accept those freedoms needed to limit other's freedoms
You are just assuming what you are trying to prove with your rhetoric. The only freedom being restricted in GPL are those needed to directly or indirectly restrict other's freedom for software. Your first comment about freedom and capacity is meaningless. The only thing we are talking about when we talk about which copyright license to use is software freedom. So yes when you fail to give someone source code under this definition you have made them less free.
I've noticed that many of your claims regarding Apple and DRM in the various posts are simply false and I suspect this applies to other vendors. For example
blocking installation of software that comes from anywhere except the official Application Store -- false there are multiple ways to install software used routinely: developer's installation capabilities, enterprise and academic servers, 3rd party app stores included with cloud MDM agreements...
regulating every use of movies downloaded from iTunes -- I'm not sure if they mean the iTunes application or the iTunes cloud services. If they mean the application that's not true, there is nothing to prevent you from uploading your own movie to the application and downloading to a device. If they mean the cloud service they are distributor and have some responsibility but you can grant Apple permission for unlimited free distribution.
Do you think you should be fact checking your claims so that these don't get repeated and then refuted? How is it helpful for the FSF to word things in ways that lack nuance to the extent that they are just provably false?
For Flash they produce Gnasha free player Their anti-Facebook article lists recommend alternatives: GNU social, status.net, Crabgrass, Appleseed and Diaspora. I don't know what iBad is. As for TiVo they have two problems
a) Software licensing disagreement which they fixed with GPLv3 b) DRM which they can't do much about legally. That's arguably a whole new movement.
What criticisms do you see as being any different than the ones from over two decades ago? Given that Linux (a GPL product, with lots of GPL components) has become so standard that it arguably is becoming the very definition of UNIX and is far and away the most used operating on the planet how has copyleft been losing ground?
Nor can permissively licensed programs be made proprietary, you can make a proprietary derived work but that does not change the original.
So what? The version that anyone cares about is often not the original but the one in use. The GPL came into existence because of one of the cases the X-Windows code where the version used by the various UNIX companies was proprietary even though there was a free version no one could use. It was many years till the XFree86 project started to create a both usable and free version and then more years until they achieved it. Assume the original Linux kernel from the early 1990s was free but the ones in use today were proprietary.
Come on that's the typical BSD argument which essentially amounts to "how can I be free if I don't have the freedom to restrict other's freedom". This has been answered for decades. There can be individual restrictions on freedom which collectively create greater freedoms, not just greater goods.
Your loss of freedom to restrict others freedom whether by direct or indirect action increases not decreases freedom.
It can cause taint to the closed source software especially if the projects are similar.
Don't work on parts of the free system where ideas from the GPLed version are likely to seep into your commercial version. Or do things differently enough.
The FSF has taken a very harsh line on Apple considering their setup to offer essentially no freedom. I'll ask about specific claims in a separate question. Apple offers the ability to setup an enterprise server for $300 / yr (not per device) which iOS devices could register against and those devices would then have whatever policies the administrator wants. So for example there could be an open upload area that people could download directly from. Or the provisioning keys could be public and software could be side loaded. Why doesn't the FSF just run an open server and allow iOS devices from across the world to point to this and not the Apple servers?
Re:who cares? the market has made them irrelevant
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Android/IOS tablets do not count when measuring PC OS market share - they are not classified as "personal computers" and cannot be factored in to market share statics.
Actually some of the various agencies do count them. They also seem to have some level of substitution effect primarily decreasing usage and thus increasing length of the buying cycle. But we are have also seen something like 100m mostly stop using PCs, getting their needs met by tablets and phones.
But that just shrinks the overall market, it doesn't much change who dominates that market.
There are essentially 4 measures of dominance that are commonly used:
a) Unit market share b) Sales share (dollar weighted market share) c) profit share d) controlling the direction of the industry
(a) Android/iOS substitution is a serious threat. A huge number of people who would otherwise want newer PCs don't. (b) Is rapidly collapsing while and Microsoft may fall under Apple soon in the non-server market (c) Apple (OSX) has been dominant here forever ranging from 85-91% of profit share for $1k plus laptops and now has around the same margins for all end user PC sales. (d) I think its pretty clear Microsoft has lost this and is thrashing.
I don't see dominance.
For a car analogy, saying Android/IOS tablets sales are dethroning Windows is like stating a surge in bicycle sales is stealing market share from Ford pick-ups.
No it isn't. The average price on an iOS phone for example is approaching double the average price of a Windows PC and the unit volumes are getting close to equal. The analogy is more like Ford vs. Dodge pickups.
All statistics that you can find on various sites show that each of Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 individually hold more market share than all non-Windows OSes combined.
I don't know where you are getting that. Embedded Linux crushes Android and Android crushes Windows. iOS is getting close to Windows.
I can argue the Marlins are the dominant baseball team if I insist on only counting teams in Miami. But once I realize teams outside Miami play against the Miami team I have to deal with the complexity of the market. Windows right now is dominant in the niche of $250-700 keyboard based systems. Go either above or below price or drop the keyboard based and things look quite different.
Re:The OEM UEFI locked with M$ keys issue.
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I don't think that's true. Linux is a huge percentage of the x86 ecosystem. For example on Azure the cloud platform with far and away the most Microsoft depending on how you could Windows images are somewhere between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the total images. So even in Microsoft's own cloud they mostly sell Linux. An x86 standard that doesn't support Linux won't be an x86 standard. What it would be is a Microsoft hardware standard and that would at best fragment the x86 architecture. They remember how the Microsoft-Intel-Western Digital standard beat IBM's Microchannel, I suspect they don't want to make the same mistake.
Yes I think they would have. Enterprise users clearly use smart phones. They are heavy tablet consumers. They have lots of laptops. There is no reason that ubiquitous computing couldn't have been a superior model for them than buying lots of applications, data sharing, and worrying about compatibility as they undergo complex upgrade cycles for various devices:
Does version 6 of by web BI tool use the same data format as version 3.2 of my phone based BI tool, version 7.6 of my tablet based sales management tool and version 4.5 of my desktop tool? I want to upgrade my browser and that's going to force me to upgrade the web tool....
You can see how having one app across the board solves that. I think Steve Ballmer was absolutely right (heresy to say that on/. I know) in believing the alternative to ubiquitous computing wouldn't work for enterprise.
Many of the ideas are taken from XMonad which is also used by people who like it and at the same time is also an excellent example of how monadic window management works. LISP is like that, everything in LISP is just a DSL so it is scriptable.
You are right before that Linux is becoming professional. It has been far too successful in too many areas to want to keep the hacker culture that existed 20 years ago. Of course the BSDs still have that. But you like hacker OSes go with something much more interesting than a UNIX. House / HaLVM (also Haskell) are pretty cool extensions for the modern world.
As far as tiling window managers for Wayland they already exist and I'd assume will get more sophisticated with time: There is Velox which is a varient of XMonad and Orbment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It seems like as things currently stand most of the pieces to do this exist. X does remote display. PulseAudio does network audio (though I am struggling to make that work). There is USB over TCP/IP support in Linux but you have to go to the commandline and tell a client to share a specific USB device
Wayland does Audio and Video now and can keep them unified. usb device redirection is part of the protocol so GTK/Qt should be implementing controllers that work within their respective desktops.
Anyway, implementing all of this.. if remote support is fragmented across toolkits, possibly non-existent on some lesser used toolkits.. that sounds even harder than it has ever been!
No it is far far easier. GTK, Qt, wxWindows, Mono... all understand that USB and sound exist so no hacking. For example Gnome -> Gnome can pass off intelligent information about streaming and buffering so remote sound is both good and responsive even if the lots of jitter on the network. USB of course requires device driver virtualization and the toolkits, already support that. Etc... This all becomes almost trivial.
Once you start trying to use Wayland the way it is meant to be used this becomes easy.
I think there would be a lot to gain if thin-clients were to become more mainstream.
They are mainstream its called remote desktop. That is in 2015 people using thing clients aren't remoting the video but remoting the desktop. The reason is that is doesn't cost much to add some CPU and video to the local machine and it makes it much more responsive. So the local system has a thin base OS. It loads toolkit information from a server when it isn't being used. When it is being used the server just passes it specifics about what's running. This is the model that can go on top of RDP which is what Wayland is implementing.
Wayland doesn't make thin client less practical but rather makes it vastly more practical because you'll be able to thin the client down to something like an Android device and thus have the base OS built in. Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client, because of how naive is about toolkits.
Re:The OEM UEFI locked with M$ keys issue.
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I suspect the big change we'll see trusted computing. Features like Samsung Knox but for PC. Microsoft was too chicken to go all the way and take all the heat when they were leading the effort along with Intel. This way Intel and Microsoft have just enabled it, there will need to be other 3rd party software but it will be the hardware OEMs that actually deploy it. Lots of pieces and no one but the security vendors doing more than enabling.
As far as the general fear of blocking other OSes, I doubt it. Microsoft has been generous, supportive and and cooperative with Linux vendors in terms of getting keys to work. Those vendors have been supportive with more open players.
Re:who cares? the market has made them irrelevant
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How much does it rein supreme? The market has been falling in size in terms of units now for 6 years. At the same time another wave of APU falling is starting up. The upper end is firmly in the hands of Apple whose reach is expanding. The bottom end is being eaten by $75-150 Android tablets and by iPads. Mobile is decreasing usage as well. Losing ground rapidly above and below with the middle softening doesn't sound like reining supreme. That sounds like being rapidly displaced.
Your point is spot on. Apple wouldn't have cared and Linux would have done it both ways until people got used to the change. Microsoft's Windows 8 was supposed to be a transitional operating system with touch becoming an important and key part. All applications needed to have a reasonable touch mode. They ultimately have pulled back from touch which means they pulled back from ubiquitous computing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) Windows 8 was there last chance to prevent themselves from being a niche: the standard enterprise desktop product. Now that's still a huge niche but moving from the default everything to just one particular submarket is a big loss.
Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.
We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.
My.2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a.001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.
As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.
As for ROI... Remember where I started. 5 years to pay off the original investment (no profit) then Y years of profit. The goal of infrastructure is not to break even,. not to have an ROI of 0. Your $120 box is a perfect example. You are renting it at $5/mo which means a 24 mo breakeven point not 25 years. A 25 year payoff would be you renting the box for $.40 / mo, a 50 year payoff $.20/mo.
Ah.. but I thought remote access was a niche application, no longer relevant enough for developers to care about?
That's a bit much. I suspect what you are hearing is that Network Transparency is a niche application.... Remote access while vastly less important than it was 20 years ago is still used. Which is why Wayland supports it and supports it better than X11. This is what I keep saying you cannot confuse remote access which is far better with Wayland and X11's specific methods of remote access. BTW we know KDE and Gnome are going to support remote because they have been working with Wayland already.
I use Stumpwm along with the pager from Lxde.
LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system. As per the June 2013 announcement Hong Jen Yee (PCMAn) is waiting on the freedesktop guys to tell him the messy details are worked out, right now they've told him what not to use in Qt 5 if he wants to easily be on Wayland and along with Razor they are making sure that LXQt doesn't use that stuff some of which is being backported to LXDE. I suspect that LXDE will never be native Wayland. I do know they are ripping out X11 dependencies from the LXDE codebase to make such a port easier if they choose to go all the way but they don't intend to.
However getting to your use case: LXDE right now works beautifully with SOC configurations. That's why it is exist. So the kind of lighweight dumb system you are asking for now that you want it for LXDE become much easier. These are sold all over Asia using LXDE based distributions and they are cheap (generally under $200, often like $125). I'm not sure if they include additional languages or even test against English but even if this is not a "just go out and buy this" it certainly is a proof of concept. So there you go: If you want to use LXDE you will have terrific support and get an upgrade.
As far as Stumpwm none of the X11 windows managers will work with Wayland. Window management for most is a rewrite from scratch. You can use Stumpwm for X11 on Wayland of course. However Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP. So in theory you got lucky while someone is going to have to port it to Wayland, it very well might be pretty easy. However to complicate this under Wayland the display server, window manager and compositor are complied into one process there is no abstraction like there is in X11. So Stumpwm while getting to run native on Wayland is easy to do anything useful with it it is going to need to be hard paired with a display server and compositor. I don't see any evidence that Stump will go there. So let's assume Stumpwm as an end user product is gone even if it still exists as a teaching tool.
Moreover I'm not sure the culture is going to allow you to be able to just casually change window managers under Wayland. For example LXQt will only be tested against its own compositor which will be tuned to LXQt. You can run other applications but when you run LXQt (again the version of LXDE that will exist on Wayland) you have picked your GUI.
This BTW is where you get huge advantages. You LXDE top to bottom can be compiled for the SOC hardware (the way Android works today) so you will see huge increases in battery life and much better performance.
By texting I mean SMS. You have something that lets you do that from your computer?
Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android.
Why keep upping the hardware requirements when we have a working solution already? Aren't the landfills full enough?
We don't have a working solution already. X11 doesn't work. New OSes / features up hardware requirements. T
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X11 was the typical example of BSD failure. X11 had an MIT license, got taken in by proprietary vendors who had their own X's all with cool features, most of which are still not in the X11 on Linux. There was no free usable X for Unixes for years. Essentially the XFree86 people had to start from scratch and this took years. Eventually XFree86 became the standard X, but only after the entire X model was outdated. The result of the BSD license was a disaster for free software one of the worst free software disasters ever.
OK let me give you some more examples other than Linux;
MySQL and derived products
KDE
R language exploding
Blender
Sugar CRM
Darktable
Inkscape
And I could literally list hundreds that are comfortably being used.
I'd disagree. We know that lots of companies do run their own app stores, so it most certainly is practical for them to distribute their own software to literally millions of their users. It is practical. I actually think it would be practical for the FSF for example to run their own solution.
As for installing your own software... for someone capable of building iOS software the developer route is quite practical. It isn't practical for 3rd party distribution but that's a very difficult claim. If the FSF said something like, "there is no practical way for developers to sell software to non-corporate users outside the Apple store" that would be fair. But that's a far weaker claim than what they are saying.
And that's my point. At a certain point refuting an exaggeration isn't just nitpicking but rather the claim is simple false.
Their issue with JavaScript is effectively non-free JavaScript not so much the language itself. They are right now educated about JavaScript, how best to use it, so need for a replacement.
I think for the iPad Stallman would want Apple to open it more. From what I can figure essentially what he wants is some of the features in the enterprise SDK, which Apple distributes at below their cost. I attribute FSF's position on iOS to ignorance and principle and it is hard to distinguish. The FSF simply says too much that is just false when it comes to Apple for me to figure out what they want. Plus I've told them this and they've kept it up, so at this point they are lying not mistaken.
OK adjust to 2048 vs 128. The point was that you are saying as long as x86 is a far better fit for servers it will be used for servers. Well of course. The question is what happens as the ARM economy gets larger than the x86 economy and the advantages of ARM design techniques come to dominate. Obviously I can't see what's likely many years in the future so I don't know what that will look like. For laptop it is obvious that SOC / power drive the change. Lighter and thinner. Beyond that is gets opaque.
However the economics are daunting. With ARM selling 10-20x or more as many chips per year...
Absolutely. That's the idea. Different interfaces depending on the form factor but same binary. That way you plug your phone into a large tablet you get the large tablet version. Give it a mouse, large screen and keyboard you get the desktop version. Your example is correct.
That's correct. Which is why the whole Windows 8 idea was that the entire ecosystem of Windows laptops would move towards touch: capacitive resistive screens with hinges allowing for screen flexibility. Microsoft should have been killing off non-touch with Windows 8, probably by leaving them on Windows 7. And BTW for desktop something like a digitizing pad should have been mandatory.
Mostly because Windows 8 was a transitional operating system designed to help hardware and developers move from the old desktop to the newer interface. The end user stuff was less important. Not everything was done yet and there was a lot of inconsistency between desktop and Metro. That could have been corrected with time and would have been quickly. Getting something out the door to start the hardware revolution was the top priority and they were right to ship early.
It isn't propaganda.
BSD claims to create free software. It has a long proven track record of failure where systems that were once free become in practice proprietary and unfree even though there is some free almost worthless version hanging out under the BSD license. If you don't consider free software desirable then you can't argue there is anything wrong with the GPL's restrictions.
a) The ability to share and modify code is desirable (otherwise why BSD or GPL)
b) These abilities are called software freedom (a definition)
c) GPL does a better job protecting all the freedoms needed to share and modify code accept those freedoms needed to limit other's freedoms
You are just assuming what you are trying to prove with your rhetoric. The only freedom being restricted in GPL are those needed to directly or indirectly restrict other's freedom for software. Your first comment about freedom and capacity is meaningless. The only thing we are talking about when we talk about which copyright license to use is software freedom. So yes when you fail to give someone source code under this definition you have made them less free.
I've noticed that many of your claims regarding Apple and DRM in the various posts are simply false and I suspect this applies to other vendors. For example
https://www.fsf.org/news/ibad_...
blocking installation of software that comes from anywhere except the official Application Store -- false there are multiple ways to install software used routinely: developer's installation capabilities, enterprise and academic servers, 3rd party app stores included with cloud MDM agreements...
regulating every use of movies downloaded from iTunes -- I'm not sure if they mean the iTunes application or the iTunes cloud services. If they mean the application that's not true, there is nothing to prevent you from uploading your own movie to the application and downloading to a device. If they mean the cloud service they are distributor and have some responsibility but you can grant Apple permission for unlimited free distribution.
Do you think you should be fact checking your claims so that these don't get repeated and then refuted? How is it helpful for the FSF to word things in ways that lack nuance to the extent that they are just provably false?
They do that.
For Flash they produce Gnasha free player
Their anti-Facebook article lists recommend alternatives: GNU social, status.net, Crabgrass, Appleseed and Diaspora.
I don't know what iBad is. As for TiVo they have two problems
a) Software licensing disagreement which they fixed with GPLv3
b) DRM which they can't do much about legally. That's arguably a whole new movement.
What criticisms do you see as being any different than the ones from over two decades ago? Given that Linux (a GPL product, with lots of GPL components) has become so standard that it arguably is becoming the very definition of UNIX and is far and away the most used operating on the planet how has copyleft been losing ground?
So what? The version that anyone cares about is often not the original but the one in use. The GPL came into existence because of one of the cases the X-Windows code where the version used by the various UNIX companies was proprietary even though there was a free version no one could use. It was many years till the XFree86 project started to create a both usable and free version and then more years until they achieved it. Assume the original Linux kernel from the early 1990s was free but the ones in use today were proprietary.
Come on that's the typical BSD argument which essentially amounts to "how can I be free if I don't have the freedom to restrict other's freedom". This has been answered for decades. There can be individual restrictions on freedom which collectively create greater freedoms, not just greater goods.
Your loss of freedom to restrict others freedom whether by direct or indirect action increases not decreases freedom.
Don't work on parts of the free system where ideas from the GPLed version are likely to seep into your commercial version. Or do things differently enough.
The FSF has taken a very harsh line on Apple considering their setup to offer essentially no freedom. I'll ask about specific claims in a separate question. Apple offers the ability to setup an enterprise server for $300 / yr (not per device) which iOS devices could register against and those devices would then have whatever policies the administrator wants. So for example there could be an open upload area that people could download directly from. Or the provisioning keys could be public and software could be side loaded. Why doesn't the FSF just run an open server and allow iOS devices from across the world to point to this and not the Apple servers?
Actually some of the various agencies do count them. They also seem to have some level of substitution effect primarily decreasing usage and thus increasing length of the buying cycle. But we are have also seen something like 100m mostly stop using PCs, getting their needs met by tablets and phones.
There are essentially 4 measures of dominance that are commonly used:
a) Unit market share
b) Sales share (dollar weighted market share)
c) profit share
d) controlling the direction of the industry
(a) Android /iOS substitution is a serious threat. A huge number of people who would otherwise want newer PCs don't.
(b) Is rapidly collapsing while and Microsoft may fall under Apple soon in the non-server market
(c) Apple (OSX) has been dominant here forever ranging from 85-91% of profit share for $1k plus laptops and now has around the same margins for all end user PC sales.
(d) I think its pretty clear Microsoft has lost this and is thrashing.
I don't see dominance.
No it isn't. The average price on an iOS phone for example is approaching double the average price of a Windows PC and the unit volumes are getting close to equal. The analogy is more like Ford vs. Dodge pickups.
I don't know where you are getting that. Embedded Linux crushes Android and Android crushes Windows. iOS is getting close to Windows.
I can argue the Marlins are the dominant baseball team if I insist on only counting teams in Miami. But once I realize teams outside Miami play against the Miami team I have to deal with the complexity of the market. Windows right now is dominant in the niche of $250-700 keyboard based systems. Go either above or below price or drop the keyboard based and things look quite different.
I don't think that's true. Linux is a huge percentage of the x86 ecosystem. For example on Azure the cloud platform with far and away the most Microsoft depending on how you could Windows images are somewhere between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the total images. So even in Microsoft's own cloud they mostly sell Linux. An x86 standard that doesn't support Linux won't be an x86 standard. What it would be is a Microsoft hardware standard and that would at best fragment the x86 architecture. They remember how the Microsoft-Intel-Western Digital standard beat IBM's Microchannel, I suspect they don't want to make the same mistake.
So no I don't think its the laws.
Yes I think they would have. Enterprise users clearly use smart phones. They are heavy tablet consumers. They have lots of laptops. There is no reason that ubiquitous computing couldn't have been a superior model for them than buying lots of applications, data sharing, and worrying about compatibility as they undergo complex upgrade cycles for various devices:
Does version 6 of by web BI tool use the same data format as version 3.2 of my phone based BI tool, version 7.6 of my tablet based sales management tool and version 4.5 of my desktop tool? I want to upgrade my browser and that's going to force me to upgrade the web tool....
You can see how having one app across the board solves that. I think Steve Ballmer was absolutely right (heresy to say that on /. I know) in believing the alternative to ubiquitous computing wouldn't work for enterprise.
last line should read Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client because of how naive X11 is about toolkits.
Many of the ideas are taken from XMonad which is also used by people who like it and at the same time is also an excellent example of how monadic window management works. LISP is like that, everything in LISP is just a DSL so it is scriptable.
You are right before that Linux is becoming professional. It has been far too successful in too many areas to want to keep the hacker culture that existed 20 years ago. Of course the BSDs still have that. But you like hacker OSes go with something much more interesting than a UNIX. House / HaLVM (also Haskell) are pretty cool extensions for the modern world.
As far as tiling window managers for Wayland they already exist and I'd assume will get more sophisticated with time: There is Velox which is a varient of XMonad and Orbment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Wayland does Audio and Video now and can keep them unified. usb device redirection is part of the protocol so GTK/Qt should be implementing controllers that work within their respective desktops.
No it is far far easier. GTK, Qt, wxWindows, Mono... all understand that USB and sound exist so no hacking. For example Gnome -> Gnome can pass off intelligent information about streaming and buffering so remote sound is both good and responsive even if the lots of jitter on the network. USB of course requires device driver virtualization and the toolkits, already support that. Etc... This all becomes almost trivial.
Once you start trying to use Wayland the way it is meant to be used this becomes easy.
They are mainstream its called remote desktop. That is in 2015 people using thing clients aren't remoting the video but remoting the desktop. The reason is that is doesn't cost much to add some CPU and video to the local machine and it makes it much more responsive. So the local system has a thin base OS. It loads toolkit information from a server when it isn't being used. When it is being used the server just passes it specifics about what's running. This is the model that can go on top of RDP which is what Wayland is implementing.
Wayland doesn't make thin client less practical but rather makes it vastly more practical because you'll be able to thin the client down to something like an Android device and thus have the base OS built in. Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client, because of how naive is about toolkits.
I suspect the big change we'll see trusted computing. Features like Samsung Knox but for PC. Microsoft was too chicken to go all the way and take all the heat when they were leading the effort along with Intel. This way Intel and Microsoft have just enabled it, there will need to be other 3rd party software but it will be the hardware OEMs that actually deploy it. Lots of pieces and no one but the security vendors doing more than enabling.
As far as the general fear of blocking other OSes, I doubt it. Microsoft has been generous, supportive and and cooperative with Linux vendors in terms of getting keys to work. Those vendors have been supportive with more open players.
How much does it rein supreme? The market has been falling in size in terms of units now for 6 years. At the same time another wave of APU falling is starting up. The upper end is firmly in the hands of Apple whose reach is expanding. The bottom end is being eaten by $75-150 Android tablets and by iPads. Mobile is decreasing usage as well. Losing ground rapidly above and below with the middle softening doesn't sound like reining supreme. That sounds like being rapidly displaced.
Your point is spot on. Apple wouldn't have cared and Linux would have done it both ways until people got used to the change. Microsoft's Windows 8 was supposed to be a transitional operating system with touch becoming an important and key part. All applications needed to have a reasonable touch mode. They ultimately have pulled back from touch which means they pulled back from ubiquitous computing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) Windows 8 was there last chance to prevent themselves from being a niche: the standard enterprise desktop product. Now that's still a huge niche but moving from the default everything to just one particular submarket is a big loss.
Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.
We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.
My .2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a .001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.
As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.
As for ROI... Remember where I started. 5 years to pay off the original investment (no profit) then Y years of profit. The goal of infrastructure is not to break even,. not to have an ROI of 0. Your $120 box is a perfect example. You are renting it at $5/mo which means a 24 mo breakeven point not 25 years. A 25 year payoff would be you renting the box for $.40 / mo, a 50 year payoff $.20/mo.
That's a bit much. I suspect what you are hearing is that Network Transparency is a niche application.... Remote access while vastly less important than it was 20 years ago is still used. Which is why Wayland supports it and supports it better than X11. This is what I keep saying you cannot confuse remote access which is far better with Wayland and X11's specific methods of remote access. BTW we know KDE and Gnome are going to support remote because they have been working with Wayland already.
LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system. As per the June 2013 announcement Hong Jen Yee (PCMAn) is waiting on the freedesktop guys to tell him the messy details are worked out, right now they've told him what not to use in Qt 5 if he wants to easily be on Wayland and along with Razor they are making sure that LXQt doesn't use that stuff some of which is being backported to LXDE. I suspect that LXDE will never be native Wayland. I do know they are ripping out X11 dependencies from the LXDE codebase to make such a port easier if they choose to go all the way but they don't intend to.
However getting to your use case: LXDE right now works beautifully with SOC configurations. That's why it is exist. So the kind of lighweight dumb system you are asking for now that you want it for LXDE become much easier. These are sold all over Asia using LXDE based distributions and they are cheap (generally under $200, often like $125). I'm not sure if they include additional languages or even test against English but even if this is not a "just go out and buy this" it certainly is a proof of concept. So there you go: If you want to use LXDE you will have terrific support and get an upgrade.
As far as Stumpwm none of the X11 windows managers will work with Wayland. Window management for most is a rewrite from scratch. You can use Stumpwm for X11 on Wayland of course. However Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP. So in theory you got lucky while someone is going to have to port it to Wayland, it very well might be pretty easy. However to complicate this under Wayland the display server, window manager and compositor are complied into one process there is no abstraction like there is in X11. So Stumpwm while getting to run native on Wayland is easy to do anything useful with it it is going to need to be hard paired with a display server and compositor. I don't see any evidence that Stump will go there. So let's assume Stumpwm as an end user product is gone even if it still exists as a teaching tool.
Moreover I'm not sure the culture is going to allow you to be able to just casually change window managers under Wayland. For example LXQt will only be tested against its own compositor which will be tuned to LXQt. You can run other applications but when you run LXQt (again the version of LXDE that will exist on Wayland) you have picked your GUI.
This BTW is where you get huge advantages. You LXDE top to bottom can be compiled for the SOC hardware (the way Android works today) so you will see huge increases in battery life and much better performance.
Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android.
We don't have a working solution already. X11 doesn't work. New OSes / features up hardware requirements. T