Yes and no. Certainly QT has the whole KDE stack and GTK the Gnome stack. But many of the core open source applications like OpenOffice and Firefox use their own stacks and aren't integrated. Porting applications over to these stacks has stopped. Back when KDE first started they used to migrate apps over to use the KDE application framework, this isn't happening anymore. The idea of a common API has been abandoned.
That was my point. And I don't think FVWM95 was a joke, rather it was an attempt a first step to make Linux more attractive to Windows power users. I personally was (and arguably still am) a WindowMaker guy but it is important to understand what early steps look like.
I will agree that KDE was the first attempt to create a GUI rather than a desktop for Linux, to play the role of Sun's CDE.
Which incidentally is sort of what Nokia attempted with Meego, what Ubuntu is moving towards...
As far as the resources. When I was a fan of the GNU project back before there (meaningfully) was a Linux, the goal was to create a free desktop/workstation Unix for Unix users. That was accomplished partially by about 1994 and fully by about 2001.
The revised goal that came up in the 1990s was to build a system for power users better than Windows 95. That also has been accomplished. In the meanwhile Microsoft migrated their home user base over to their corporate OS (i.e. using the NT kernel across the entire Windows XP product line).
Linux has far surpassed its original goals. The commercial Unixes, with the exception of NeXTStep (OSX) are mostly dead. Linux is far superior to almost all of them in almost all categories (desktop I still have to give it to OSX). It is even overwhelmingly dominant in areas like supercomputing that were never considered.
And no I do think that's what we are talking about. What would an OS look like that had multiple GUIs? Well it would either have to have most of the complexity at layers other than the GUI. In the case of Linux when the multiple GUIs developed (and still mostly today) the CLI where the GUI is just a thin shell around the CLI like ti was for DOS. Or the complexity would be things that the end user doesn't control like in industrial use or phones.
Obviously you aren't going to have the complexity be in the GUI and have multiples. Which may have been your point but it is subtly different... that Linux is unlikely to develop a complex GUI culture (like Windows) as long as it has multiple GUIs. Which is likely true, Linux is likely to never develop a GUI culture where API's are built at the GUI level.
That's false. RedHat started out as a desktop. Certainly RedHat 4 and 5 were designed as workstations more than servers. But by version 6 they had started to shift their focus towards server as the competition for desktop customers willing to pay was intense and the market appeared small.
Whatever issues RedHat had on the desktop predate the existence of Gnome much less RedHat's strong support. RedHat's support for the Gnome foundation came from opposition to the OpenLinux initiative which was run by Caldera, Suse, TurboLinux and Connectiva, all competitors.
server people expect to have spend time doing configuration but want power consumer people expect software to work out of the box and are willing to have limitations
I want to run the program on someone else's box - I can't because that's distributing.
If you are the one running the program then you would have been committing the tort against yourself. You are unlikely to sue yourself.
___
As for your two layer approach I agree with you that this avoids the GPL most likely. Though better would be if the shim had at least one other function besides your closed code.
Baloney I've had driver problems on both. I have a Microsoft 4000 keyboard and if I load the standard drivers on OSX I get frequent kernel panics. I've had driver problems between Lexmark network printer and OSX.
Microsoft is excellent on drivers, but I've used Linux for not properly functioning hardware where Microsoft's driver approach (binary only and I can't break the steps apart nor manually control) is terrible.
There is absolutely no way given the diversity of PC hardware and the amount of money that Microsoft spends to maintain their driver library that Linux will ever compete on driver compatibility for consumer grade hardware. It costs a fortune to support that mess and Microsoft does an excellent job. I think it is fair and balanced to say that Linux does the 2nd best job, while acknowledging there is a huge spread between the gold and the silver. You are describing a lot of complex hardware. The way to get that to work is to bring up systems in command line and slowly add which is a PIA and is only worth doing if you are motivated.
Further, I'm not sure your install made sense like migrating emails from a generic installer. You sound a bit to knowledgeable to be doing that sort of thing. Also you were running some rather cutting edge software, why run debug KDE if you want stability?
As for your printer I've been using Unix printers since the 1980s. Always, always buy printers that support a generic interface like Postscript, IPDS, PCL... and you don't have to worry about subtle driver issues for printing. This applies equally to Windows, I can't tell you how many times generic drivers saved my butt even on commercial OSes. You still do have to worry about driver issues for things like management but most printers come with a web management service now which is better than the driver version anyway.
But basically the reason to use a Linux desktop is you want the best possible selection of Unix software. I use OSX as primary OS and while Darwinports is nice it doesn't hold a candle to what I can get on say RHES. So I have to sometimes boot an RHES.
Drivers are difficult with any Unix. PC hardware is incredibly diverse. You either are going to have to:
a) Do some work b) Get lucky c) Use an 2+ year old laptop d) Buy a laptop for Linux.
(d) is really a pretty good option. As for getting stuff done... if your stuff all lives on Windows it is hard to justify the switch to Linux. What drove me to use Linux in the 90s was needing Unix software that wasn't on Windows. And I can promise you the hardware problems were much worse 17 years ago.
That's why companies back when they cared about their infrastructure had a systems group distinct from the operations group. The systems guys had to document what they did because they had to pass it off to operations and operations was generally staffed by people without deep knowledge who used a procedures manual. The act of creating software, including systems software and then separately documenting it to another group was designed precisely to avoid the situation you faced.
I've paid several times for Solaris back in the 1990s so that ain't true. Further there were other Unixes like Apple Unix, Concurrent (which was about $250), OEM versions of SCO (like Dell Unix)...
Mac hardware is close enough to PC hardware you can price out the package. Used to be much easier before Apple had 90% of the over $1000 market on laptops. Given what a good quality equally warranted version of the system cost margin + OS + software +... was 20-30%.
Windows OEM prices are well known so easy enough to subtract off. It is bunded in the sense you don't see it most of the time but not in the sense that it ain't easy to price out and break apart if you wanted to.
It has not become a purchase. not until you are allowed to do anything you want with it. something current copyright law doesn't allow.
Well wait a minute. Under the copyright system you couldn't do anything you want with a book, at the same time they wouldn't replace a lost / stolen / damaged book free of charge or even for cost of media.
You want more regulation to stop it. I want less. reduce copyright law and let the free market take care of it.
The free market regulates the desirability of contracts between buyers and sellers. The government handles enforcement of contracts. There is nothing to stop a publisher from selling you an unlimited license, if they choose. But since they don't there needs to be a body of law dealing with enforcement for breach of your limited license, copyright law. There is no free market without enforcement of contract.
I'll skip the political stuff. We just disagree too much on policy to even make headway. When I supported Libertarianism I at least wanted it to accomplish the good. I don't see any reason in supporting libertarianism for its own sake.
Because of the lack of DRM? If so, how do you know this? Why should I care?
Because either:
a) Teen music listening patterns drastically changed for some unknown reason b) Teem music listening patters drastically changed because the market collapsed.
Free mattered a lot more in battling other Unix desktop OSes which were over $1k at the time. Windows on the desktop has always been cheap so against Windows it hasn't mattered much. If Windows were $1k per desktop OTOH...
How you could ever trust the government with such powers is beyond me.
I by nature of government have to entrust government to forcibly move people and put them in captivity. I by the nature of government have to entrust them to kill people and expose Americans to life threatening situation. I by the nature of government have to make them responsible for the safety of our public infrastructure. The power and responsibility for enforcing copyright doesn't even compare. What's the worst that happens, I have to buy stuff I want 3x to use it where I want?
Rather than saying correlation is causation, prove that shutting down a few websites occasionally is responsible for most people not resorting to piracy.
I can't give you firm proof. We don't get to run controlled experiments where we have 2 or 3 or 4 histories with various laws and then move society forwards seeing what the effects are. Instead we have to guess based on similar situations, modeling and analogies. That's the way all laws are argued for.
I don't know what kind of garbage DRM is in ebooks or movies, but music? I heard plenty of music is 100% DRM free. I guess the industry is dead, huh?
We are down to about a $6b market which is about 2/3rds or more smaller than it likely would have been without digital copying. The effect on mass music and culture has been tremendous.
It seems to me that you're one of those people who would support the TSA or the Patriot Act because they claim to protect us from all the big, evil terrorists.
Those are fair analogies. I don't support everything in the airline security act or the Patriot act because I don't think they are necessary. OTOH I don't question that both are the government doing their job even if I disagree with the particulars.
Yeah, well, I guess I'm not interested in supporting that:)
I get that. But IMHO that's what's required to create the interest for musicians to be able to sell in large numbers. Again think about what genres that don't have the celebrity culture look like... One of my favorite groups is Blackmore's Night which is sort of a modern Renaissance folk, and they make their money playing small faires to thousands of fans. That IMHO is what the music business looks like without music companies.
Clips4sale or Lifetime Television is what the movie business would like without the studios. iUniverse where selling 200 copies of a book to very interested readers and the authors losing money is what the book business would look like without the publishers.
I like music (and books, movies, etc) and so I buy into the copyright system to provide them. But when I see how inefficient it is and all of the additional burden it places on society, I have to wonder if copyright is the right way to achieve these goals.
I do to. My differences is I take the wider cultural context into account.
I just think that a "Joe Consumer" shouldn't need to be a JD in order to understand what he is and is not allowed to do with a product he bought from a store shelf.
Even a guy with a JD doesn't know. I think that's a short term problem caused by technology outstripping law. The law will catch up. I'd like to have a better regulatory regime with regulators acting quickly in the public interest which is why I vote Dem.
That's my point. I don't think we desire music in and of itself. Music in and of itself doesn't have large fan followings. What we seem to desire is the cultural experience connected with music: fandom, celebrity worship... a proxy religion. And that requires an infrastructure of which musicians are just a small part.
The proof of my views on the alternative is Asia. We have societies similar in technology to our own with widespread copyright infringement and a much weaker content creation industry as piracy has been normalized. Moreover it makes sense.
In terms of copying being less serious than jaywalking. Media represents hundreds of billions of dollars combined. The destruction of the US media industry would exceed many times the destruction on 9/11 in terms of economic value. It would exceed the worst natural disasters like Katrina many times over.
As for the rest your model doesn't make sense. Piracy is rampant but it doesn't have economic impact, there is nothing that can be done, but people don't do it.... It is very simple...
Anti piracy is working if most consumers are buying not stealing their content. If you think that is happening then anti-piracy is working.
Please tell me more about this magical DRM that places absolutely no restrictions upon the paying customer; I'd love to know more.
I didn't say magic or no restrictions. What I said was that the desire is to control the who. The mechanisms as they get better will restrict less and less as you can see already in ebooks, movies or music today vs. 5 years ago. This BTW is what I mean by absolutist and extreme. It is possible to have some restrictions or a few restrictions and that is different than total lockdown.
I agree with upping government subsidies for most music forms and I agree with shorter copyright.
But what I was saying is I don't think artists are the major component in popular / cultural music. I think it is the marketing guys and the cultural infrastructure (i.e. movie theaters or what used to be record stores). Artists by themselves don't create great music that impacts a culture.
Slashdot Mirror
RIMM currently has a unique technology an RTOS based phone. Why give up a unique advantage?
Yes and no. Certainly QT has the whole KDE stack and GTK the Gnome stack. But many of the core open source applications like OpenOffice and Firefox use their own stacks and aren't integrated. Porting applications over to these stacks has stopped. Back when KDE first started they used to migrate apps over to use the KDE application framework, this isn't happening anymore. The idea of a common API has been abandoned.
That was my point. And I don't think FVWM95 was a joke, rather it was an attempt a first step to make Linux more attractive to Windows power users. I personally was (and arguably still am) a WindowMaker guy but it is important to understand what early steps look like.
I will agree that KDE was the first attempt to create a GUI rather than a desktop for Linux, to play the role of Sun's CDE.
I'm not sure what the goal of Linux (kernel) was initially
To develop a monolithic kernel for Minix so as to allow Minix applications to have better performance at the expense of elegance of design.
Which incidentally is sort of what Nokia attempted with Meego, what Ubuntu is moving towards...
As far as the resources. When I was a fan of the GNU project back before there (meaningfully) was a Linux, the goal was to create a free desktop/workstation Unix for Unix users. That was accomplished partially by about 1994 and fully by about 2001.
The revised goal that came up in the 1990s was to build a system for power users better than Windows 95. That also has been accomplished. In the meanwhile Microsoft migrated their home user base over to their corporate OS (i.e. using the NT kernel across the entire Windows XP product line).
Linux has far surpassed its original goals. The commercial Unixes, with the exception of NeXTStep (OSX) are mostly dead. Linux is far superior to almost all of them in almost all categories (desktop I still have to give it to OSX). It is even overwhelmingly dominant in areas like supercomputing that were never considered.
The effort wasn't wasted.
Also good examples.
And no I do think that's what we are talking about. What would an OS look like that had multiple GUIs? Well it would either have to have most of the complexity at layers other than the GUI. In the case of Linux when the multiple GUIs developed (and still mostly today) the CLI where the GUI is just a thin shell around the CLI like ti was for DOS. Or the complexity would be things that the end user doesn't control like in industrial use or phones.
Obviously you aren't going to have the complexity be in the GUI and have multiples. Which may have been your point but it is subtly different... that Linux is unlikely to develop a complex GUI culture (like Windows) as long as it has multiple GUIs. Which is likely true, Linux is likely to never develop a GUI culture where API's are built at the GUI level.
Change from the GPL to the BSD/MIT/Apache family of licenses. This will attract real investment in real products.
There is more investment in the Linux kernel (GPL) then every other kernel on the planet combined including the Windows kernel.
Products like Firefox
As an aside Firefox is under a permissive license.
Well written post let me just correct you.
RedHat never tried to be desktop friendly
That's false. RedHat started out as a desktop. Certainly RedHat 4 and 5 were designed as workstations more than servers. But by version 6 they had started to shift their focus towards server as the competition for desktop customers willing to pay was intense and the market appeared small.
Whatever issues RedHat had on the desktop predate the existence of Gnome much less RedHat's strong support. RedHat's support for the Gnome foundation came from opposition to the OpenLinux initiative which was run by Caldera, Suse, TurboLinux and Connectiva, all competitors.
It is not so much amateur as
server people expect to have spend time doing configuration but want power
consumer people expect software to work out of the box and are willing to have limitations
Linux culture is a far better fit for server
I want to run the program on someone else's box - I can't because that's distributing.
If you are the one running the program then you would have been committing the tort against yourself. You are unlikely to sue yourself.
___
As for your two layer approach I agree with you that this avoids the GPL most likely. Though better would be if the shim had at least one other function besides your closed code.
Baloney I've had driver problems on both. I have a Microsoft 4000 keyboard and if I load the standard drivers on OSX I get frequent kernel panics. I've had driver problems between Lexmark network printer and OSX.
Microsoft is excellent on drivers, but I've used Linux for not properly functioning hardware where Microsoft's driver approach (binary only and I can't break the steps apart nor manually control) is terrible.
There is absolutely no way given the diversity of PC hardware and the amount of money that Microsoft spends to maintain their driver library that Linux will ever compete on driver compatibility for consumer grade hardware. It costs a fortune to support that mess and Microsoft does an excellent job. I think it is fair and balanced to say that Linux does the 2nd best job, while acknowledging there is a huge spread between the gold and the silver. You are describing a lot of complex hardware. The way to get that to work is to bring up systems in command line and slowly add which is a PIA and is only worth doing if you are motivated.
Further, I'm not sure your install made sense like migrating emails from a generic installer. You sound a bit to knowledgeable to be doing that sort of thing. Also you were running some rather cutting edge software, why run debug KDE if you want stability?
As for your printer I've been using Unix printers since the 1980s. Always, always buy printers that support a generic interface like Postscript, IPDS, PCL... and you don't have to worry about subtle driver issues for printing. This applies equally to Windows, I can't tell you how many times generic drivers saved my butt even on commercial OSes. You still do have to worry about driver issues for things like management but most printers come with a web management service now which is better than the driver version anyway.
But basically the reason to use a Linux desktop is you want the best possible selection of Unix software. I use OSX as primary OS and while Darwinports is nice it doesn't hold a candle to what I can get on say RHES. So I have to sometimes boot an RHES.
Drivers are difficult with any Unix. PC hardware is incredibly diverse. You either are going to have to:
a) Do some work
b) Get lucky
c) Use an 2+ year old laptop
d) Buy a laptop for Linux.
(d) is really a pretty good option. As for getting stuff done... if your stuff all lives on Windows it is hard to justify the switch to Linux. What drove me to use Linux in the 90s was needing Unix software that wasn't on Windows. And I can promise you the hardware problems were much worse 17 years ago.
That's why companies back when they cared about their infrastructure had a systems group distinct from the operations group. The systems guys had to document what they did because they had to pass it off to operations and operations was generally staffed by people without deep knowledge who used a procedures manual. The act of creating software, including systems software and then separately documenting it to another group was designed precisely to avoid the situation you faced.
How many OSes have even GUI environments? That's not exactly a large group.
But as far as successful OSes with different GUIs DOS had: Windows16, Many Dos shells particularly popular was WordPerfect's.
Sun had both NeWS and X.
Amiga had Workbench and Magellan
And JavaOS (dumb phones) which is possibly one of the most successful OSes of all time has more GUIs than I can even list.
I've paid several times for Solaris back in the 1990s so that ain't true. Further there were other Unixes like Apple Unix, Concurrent (which was about $250), OEM versions of SCO (like Dell Unix)...
Mac hardware is close enough to PC hardware you can price out the package. Used to be much easier before Apple had 90% of the over $1000 market on laptops. Given what a good quality equally warranted version of the system cost margin + OS + software +... was 20-30%.
Windows OEM prices are well known so easy enough to subtract off. It is bunded in the sense you don't see it most of the time but not in the sense that it ain't easy to price out and break apart if you wanted to.
It has not become a purchase. not until you are allowed to do anything you want with it. something current copyright law doesn't allow.
Well wait a minute. Under the copyright system you couldn't do anything you want with a book, at the same time they wouldn't replace a lost / stolen / damaged book free of charge or even for cost of media.
You want more regulation to stop it. I want less. reduce copyright law and let the free market take care of it.
The free market regulates the desirability of contracts between buyers and sellers. The government handles enforcement of contracts. There is nothing to stop a publisher from selling you an unlimited license, if they choose. But since they don't there needs to be a body of law dealing with enforcement for breach of your limited license, copyright law. There is no free market without enforcement of contract.
I'll skip the political stuff. We just disagree too much on policy to even make headway. When I supported Libertarianism I at least wanted it to accomplish the good. I don't see any reason in supporting libertarianism for its own sake.
Because of the lack of DRM? If so, how do you know this? Why should I care?
Because either:
a) Teen music listening patterns drastically changed for some unknown reason
b) Teem music listening patters drastically changed because the market collapsed.
(b) is vastly more likely.
Free mattered a lot more in battling other Unix desktop OSes which were over $1k at the time. Windows on the desktop has always been cheap so against Windows it hasn't mattered much. If Windows were $1k per desktop OTOH...
How you could ever trust the government with such powers is beyond me.
I by nature of government have to entrust government to forcibly move people and put them in captivity. I by the nature of government have to entrust them to kill people and expose Americans to life threatening situation. I by the nature of government have to make them responsible for the safety of our public infrastructure. The power and responsibility for enforcing copyright doesn't even compare. What's the worst that happens, I have to buy stuff I want 3x to use it where I want?
Rather than saying correlation is causation, prove that shutting down a few websites occasionally is responsible for most people not resorting to piracy.
I can't give you firm proof. We don't get to run controlled experiments where we have 2 or 3 or 4 histories with various laws and then move society forwards seeing what the effects are. Instead we have to guess based on similar situations, modeling and analogies. That's the way all laws are argued for.
I don't know what kind of garbage DRM is in ebooks or movies, but music? I heard plenty of music is 100% DRM free. I guess the industry is dead, huh?
No it is severely wounded.
http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4d5c3e1e4bd7c86216030000/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-1973-2009-feb-2011.jpg
We are down to about a $6b market which is about 2/3rds or more smaller than it likely would have been without digital copying. The effect on mass music and culture has been tremendous.
It seems to me that you're one of those people who would support the TSA or the Patriot Act because they claim to protect us from all the big, evil terrorists.
Those are fair analogies. I don't support everything in the airline security act or the Patriot act because I don't think they are necessary. OTOH I don't question that both are the government doing their job even if I disagree with the particulars.
Yeah, well, I guess I'm not interested in supporting that :)
I get that. But IMHO that's what's required to create the interest for musicians to be able to sell in large numbers. Again think about what genres that don't have the celebrity culture look like... One of my favorite groups is Blackmore's Night which is sort of a modern Renaissance folk, and they make their money playing small faires to thousands of fans. That IMHO is what the music business looks like without music companies.
Clips4sale or Lifetime Television is what the movie business would like without the studios. iUniverse where selling 200 copies of a book to very interested readers and the authors losing money is what the book business would look like without the publishers.
I like music (and books, movies, etc) and so I buy into the copyright system to provide them. But when I see how inefficient it is and all of the additional burden it places on society, I have to wonder if copyright is the right way to achieve these goals.
I do to. My differences is I take the wider cultural context into account.
I just think that a "Joe Consumer" shouldn't need to be a JD in order to understand what he is and is not allowed to do with a product he bought from a store shelf.
Even a guy with a JD doesn't know. I think that's a short term problem caused by technology outstripping law. The law will catch up. I'd like to have a better regulatory regime with regulators acting quickly in the public interest which is why I vote Dem.
That's my point. I don't think we desire music in and of itself. Music in and of itself doesn't have large fan followings. What we seem to desire is the cultural experience connected with music: fandom, celebrity worship... a proxy religion. And that requires an infrastructure of which musicians are just a small part.
The proof of my views on the alternative is Asia. We have societies similar in technology to our own with widespread copyright infringement and a much weaker content creation industry as piracy has been normalized. Moreover it makes sense.
In terms of copying being less serious than jaywalking. Media represents hundreds of billions of dollars combined. The destruction of the US media industry would exceed many times the destruction on 9/11 in terms of economic value. It would exceed the worst natural disasters like Katrina many times over.
As for the rest your model doesn't make sense. Piracy is rampant but it doesn't have economic impact, there is nothing that can be done, but people don't do it.... It is very simple...
Anti piracy is working if most consumers are buying not stealing their content. If you think that is happening then anti-piracy is working.
Please tell me more about this magical DRM that places absolutely no restrictions upon the paying customer; I'd love to know more.
I didn't say magic or no restrictions. What I said was that the desire is to control the who. The mechanisms as they get better will restrict less and less as you can see already in ebooks, movies or music today vs. 5 years ago. This BTW is what I mean by absolutist and extreme. It is possible to have some restrictions or a few restrictions and that is different than total lockdown.
I agree with upping government subsidies for most music forms and I agree with shorter copyright.
But what I was saying is I don't think artists are the major component in popular / cultural music. I think it is the marketing guys and the cultural infrastructure (i.e. movie theaters or what used to be record stores). Artists by themselves don't create great music that impacts a culture.