Well for the record, a lot of people have moaned about the retheming of KDE in the style of GNOME, so for many that is a problem.
And you didn't address the point that I, and many others, have risen which is that it is often custom to finish off code modifications before reintegrating them with the main codebase. In fact, in the article from which this thread began, the RedHat guy pointed out that they have created a new branch of the KDE cvs base fr the packages they are modifying.
The about boxes are not silly, because they are the primary means for a KDE application to notify a user of their legal rights with regards to the software. What good is Free Software if the user doesn't know it's Free?
Not exactly. There is still an "about" window for each application, and that still shows the license for that particular application. There is also still an "about KDE" about box somewhere that gives license information for KDE as a whole. So users will still know their legal rights with regards to the software.
So to summarise:
RedHat are giving back source modifications
RedHat are doing this in the customary way
RedHat are giving credit to the KDE project in their documentation, and in KDE itself (though perhaps a little less than is default in KDE)
RedHat are still displaying licenses in software
you have presented no valid case against them other than you personally believe them to be discourteous
The guy in charge is the guy who called KDE "crapland".
It strikes me that you would have the KDE Project produce proprietary software, to allow you the kind of control you want over it, if it didn't mean the death of the KDE Project.
One of the points of Free Software is that it allows people to do exactly what RedHat have done. Changing the look and feel of KDE to make it more similar to GNOME is their right, until the various licenses KDE uses. You may not like it, but so what? There's no discourteousness here, just you and other KDE people wanting KDE to look exactly as you'd have it, everywhere. Blimey, go to kde-look and whine at everyone who has gone to great lengths to make their set-up look like GNOME, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, etc. I repeat: "Gnomifying" KDE is their right. Leave them to it, or change your licenses.
The about dialogue boxes are, perhaps, a little silly. I can see it making things a little less confusing for the newbie, but then on the other hand I can't see them being that confusing in the first place. But if this is the main problem, lobby RedHat over it, and don't attack the whole idea.
So they haven't submitted code changes yet. Maybe they're not ready to? Maybe they're still in betaor alpha stages! What's that? You say this whole project is part of a still-in-beta distro? Oh, well there you go then. I'm sure that they will return the modified code *when they are done*. They have to upon request, but RedHat have usually been good to the community, so I don't see why they won't now. As I said on my original post, let's hope they find a good way of doing this, to help both the KDE and GNOME projects.
And please.... "they put john in charge of chess club when he's always preferred backgammon". You are so childish if you think it is disrespectful to put a GNOME guy in charge of making KDE more "gnomeish". If LinuxMall wanted to do that, then they can, and if they suceed, and beat the competition, then they've done a lot of good, both for themselves and the Free software community. I bet you didn't whine when Gentoo took FreeBSD's "portage" system, merged it with Debian's "apt", and extended them both to make their own portage system.
And for the record, I use KDE, I dislike the look and feel of GNOME, and also the default look of KDE;-) If I had theskill to screw around with the source to change certain things, I would too.
I agree with your point, and I think it's a difficult one. The problem is that there are two possible routes to a safe future regarding DRM: apply enough pressure to the public, government and corporations to ensure that DRM is kept open and a useful tool in the public interest, OR try to squash the whole idea altogether, until the former becomes more likely.
The question is: can we achieve the former, or the latter, and which one is our best bet? Personally I can see a lot of well-reasoned opposition to the idea that DRM should be wiped out completely, and I can see a lot less opposition to the idea that DRM should be reigned in in the public interest, but then I can also see corporations (who have a far louder voice in western societies than the public and NGOs) doing enough to reassure the powerful that they will address our fears whilst shoveling DRM through, such that any efforts on our behalf will be too late.
I don't really know which way to go. At the moment I think the best thing for anyone who is remotely concerned about the future to do is just to tell as many people as possible about it, get the word out, so that if something does happen, a larger proportion of the publis is aware and ready for it.
Well, yes, that would be great, because the DRM technologies would then be open.
The biggest problem with DRM is not the idea of protection in the first place, but the idea that if company x goes bust in y years, then all documents "protected" by their technology become inaccessible, as there is no escrow agreement in most laws that would protect DRM (like the DMCA and EUCD).
So if DRM could be done openly so that the technology couldn't be wielded by large media companies, then there would be less scope.for abuse. That said, there's still plenty of scope, just less;-)
We also need laws to protect the public from parties that might want to abuse DRM, like the RIAA, for example.
What RedHat have done is really pretty insignificant. They've create a new artwork set that is applied by default to both KDE and GNOME so they look similar by default, and they've modified some codee here and there so they behave in a more similar fashion. In effect, they have made the first step towards making the two major desktop environments more compatable.
Note: they have not taken away any user choices. You can still completely change your KDE/GNOME appearance, perhaps even back to the KDE/GNOME defaults. The only things that might bug users are the changes they've made to the code, but we don't yet know what they are, or how significant they are, so we'll have to wait and see.
I for one would welcome it. I'd change my themes straight away, because I've spent far too much boredom-time making my KDE3 desktop look exactly how I want it. But I also had to spend quite a while getting GNOME and GTK+ apps to look right so they almost blend in with my KDE3 apps and desktop.
The final goal here is of course compatability in themes. I.e. you download and install a KDE theme, and you can then make your GTK apps look identical, either with the same theme, or a mirror package. It's something even RMS has proposed, and something that will make life a lot more pleasant for those aesthetic pedants like myself, without taking away any of the choice we have in desktops and looks. Hopefully RedHat will find a constructive way of using these code modifications to help the KDE & GNOME projects achieve this "integration".
Yes, I've heard of the marshall plan, and that wasn't within the past 50 years. Brush up on your history, and look at all of the military ventures America has been involved in sincee 1952, then you might go some way towards understanding why a lot of people hate America (and not all of them are insane, a lot of them only let their hatred out in words, rather than mindless violence).
You can hardly attribute the UN and the fall of the USSR entirely to the USA. Hell, the USA didn't even support the League of Nations after Woodrow Wilson left the scene. Look also at the impact the IMF have had. Look also at the fact that the amount of aid the US has given as a percentage of its GNP has fallen consistently in the last 50 years.
The only way to explain every person in the world who dislikes or disagrees with various American policies by your argument is that they are insane. Surely that should make you reasses your argument?
You're quite right, except for your assertion that islamic extremists hate americans because of their freedom. If they did, they'd just try and come to america. They hate america because the american government has done so much harm to the rest of the world in the past 50 years, and it has done so little to help the rest of the world. That and they're insane:)
Who the hell would be dumb enough to buy one of these? Not people... companies? Possibly..
How about consumers who wouldn't know what DRM is, wouldn't know why copy-protection would affect them? You forget that the world at large is a lot more ignorant about these issues than you. Hence everyone who does know has an obligation to try and educate others. And I should think we'll see these products increase in number, as more and more hardware is produced with built-in copy protection, with lots of support from DRM kings Microsoft (becausee of course a machine with lots of copy-protection built into the hardware is far less likely to go on to run a Free operating system...). As they become widespread, unless educated about them, or unless they are inconvenienced significantly by them, the public are likely to accept them.
That said, I can see this as being a very good opportunity for some anti-DRM campaigning wherever these boxes are sold.
Re:Go enroll in Economics 101
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 2
Yes, congratulations, you've yet again expounded some theories from your economics classes, but you're still ignoring reality. Do you think we have a free market today, by the textbook definition? If you do, perhaps you should look again. Regulation is everywhere, and economists (nobel winners among them) have long recognised the need for light regulation and for a framework by which badly behaving regulators and companies can be brought to account, and countries and companies in trouble can, where appropriate, be rescued.
Look what happened in South East Asia when the government looked the other way and the market was left wide open - too much speculative investment, greed, and a government not yet sophisticated enough to handle such a sophisticated economy brought about one of the biggest economic collapses of the 20th century.
As for your assertion that any kind of planning is comparable with the North Korean, Chinese and Soviet Russian interpretations of communism, that just shows that you've probably studied no more economics than was in your holy "economics 101" course. What other solutions do you propose to solve the many urgent problems our planet faces, such as the massive over-consumption of the West, the huge human problems in developing nations caused by the massively unequal distribution of wealth, and the abuse of power on the behalf of governments, corporations and individuals that are exacerbating all of this? And if you say the free market, then I'll quit now and apologise that I have no answers that you will find in your textbook.
Where did I get the attitude that corporations are evil and dishonest? Well, not *all* of them are, but if you try doing a little research, you will find a LONG, LONG list of abuses of money and power on the behalf of corporations. If I were to say this about governments, you probably wouldn't disagree, so I don't see why you then assume some blind faith in corporations. Any organisation is able to abusee its power. The point is to balance the power of the state, the private sector, and the public at large. If left to their own devices, with no input from the state or the public, the private sector becomes just as malicious a regulator as the state. For a period we put too much faith in the state, until the problems were blown wide open. Now we put too much faith in the private sector, and the problems are all too obvious for those willing to look.
And no, if you must know I'm a capitalist of the Green persuasion, and I disagree with many of the ideas of Karl Marx and of the communists, socialists, anarchists and even many greens that have followed. I also happen to disagree with a lot of the neo-liberal free market bilge you spout.
And PLEASE... Adam Smith and Karl Marx are as hopelessly out of date as your ideas are simplistic.
I find is curious that people keep making this distinction, as though the two have little relation to one another. Surely the one of the tenets of the philosophy of Free Software is to allow users to have control over the source so they aren't forced to accept the word of one or more unaccountable parties? Is that not practical? Yet it is a philosophy. The more commentators keep making this bizarre seperation, the more people will be led to believe that the GPL is some pipedream license, not applicable in the "real world". It's time to realise that the GPL "is" practical, and that the philosophy is Free Software puts the practicality of using software high in its list of concerns, being inherently linked to the freedom of users.
Re:Go enroll in Economics 101
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 2
Ok, lets stand back from our economics text books for a moment and think. What conference is going on at the moment that is probably the most important conference in the last 10 years? The World Summit. And what is it all about? Equitable distribution of wealth generated by sustainable development without environmental damage. And why is it required? Because left to their own devices, companies and governments have done an awful job of this, and so we need a framework to ensure this does happen. Free markets are useless without regulation... it's not a paradox, something some people find hard to acknowledge.
Saying that criticism is not information, it is jut opinion, is ridiculous. Everything we say is opinion until we can prove it, and the only way to prove criticism against a company or government is through law or through having your criticism confirmed by the recipient, at which point it becomes information. So unless companies and governments suddenly decide to own up to all of their improprietries, or there is an international framework with which to bring governments and companies to account, criticism will always just be opinion, and there won't ever be any scope for independent information.
Now how else will you keep companies honest? I'd love to see the faces in the Shell boardroom if you went in and told them in a very stern face to be honest, so that we all have perfect information and a perfect free market (a pipedream if ever there was one) and can all live as happily as your textbooks suggest.
Funny, when I installed SuSE 7.2 and 7.3, and Mandrake 8.2, and Slackware 7.1 and 8.0, they all installed more than one of almost everything I wanted to use, and during the installation process, if I wanted, there was ample opportunity to choose many more. I'm not sure what distribution you're talking about here.
The world of soft drinks and the world of computing and the Internet are very different though. And I don't care what your country's antitrust law says or is about, I'm talking about my views here.
New soft drinks are launched fairly regularly, often from companies new to the scene. How can they do this? Well, they produce them, then sell them to the shops, and they appear on shelves and in adverts, and consumers see them, get the chance to try them, and reject or accept them based on their merit, and their image.
With software, if you've (or not you, but a normal old computer user) bought your new computer, and it has all this lovely stuff on it to do everything you need, you're not going to go out of your way to look for stuff you don't even know exists. And there is no shelf on which you will see competing products. When it comes to you, your computer and iWhatever, there is no perfect information about the marketplace. So competitors rely on consumers being motivated enough to look elsewhere.
I wasn't suggesting consumers should have to compile their software, far from it. I like to sometimes, but when there is an RPM available I usually use it - so much simpler and quicker. It would be fairly easy for Apple to start a database much like freshmeat which would serve as an easy starting point for OSX users to find the software they want. An icon on the desktop/dock, a bookmark in all the browsers, perhapos a helpful start page, a mention in the manuals, there are many ways of making it easy to people to find alternatives.
Yes, but GNU/Linux distributions offer miltuple choices wherever possible from different developers and companies, and so there is always scope for a new company or developer to spring up and produce an alternative that will, within a year if its good, be shipped with many distributions.
So a market with two competitors a little scope for others is better than a market with one player, but it is not correct according to the holy free market theory. There is no perfect competition there, and though you offer some choice to consumers, you don't offer choice to other software companies, and therefre you offer very little choice in software as compared with what you could.
Yes, they're certainly no way near as bad as Microsoft's bundling techniques, but I still worry for the creators of software like XMMS, Winamp, AIM, ICQ, Pixie, MPlayer, and any other software the i* suite replaces, especially those that are commercial enterprises.
Big difference to someone like you, yes, but not to the average consumer who will either buy a Mac with it all pre-installed, or will install MacOSX themselves and install it all because it is recommended and probably a very good thing for them. There's a technical difference, but not a very practical one.
Microsoft does (or has got as close as a company could). But this is a matter of principle, not of bashing the monopolists. What good is it in downsizing a monopoly, and replacing it with a monopoly run by two companies?
I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?
If you install your OS and get iChat, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync and whatever i* software they put in next:
a) are you going to look for/know of alternatives? b) are you going to use them, especially if they won't integrate as well with the OS and other apps as well as Apple's i* series will?
Surely the point of taking Microsoft to court for bundling IE and therefore slaying the browser market was not just to get at Microsoft, but to prevent OS vendors from dominating and killing off large sectors of the software market?
Re:Perhaps they got something right!
on
Linuxworld Fun
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· Score: 2
There's more to a flexibile OS than twiddling with colours and switching apps once in a while (though for those that use their computer regularly, it's nice to have that ability).
Flexibility also means that someone can set up your computer to be orientated towards your tasks, have nothing but the apps you need, the buttons and shortcuts you need, the functions you need, at hand. Having an OS as flexible as GNu/Linux lets you do stuff like that OEone desktop easily, securely, and quickly.
And I don't think it's entirely true to say that users don't want choice in their software. When you're talking about Windows (and, increasingly, MacOSX and perhaps even KDE), you're given most of the apps you need out of the box, so few feel the need or the motivation to look for different apps. But when you can select from the start the app that does what you want, it's a good thing and something a lot of people value. I can't tell you how many people got fed up of the power of Outlook2000, or the lack of modularity in MS Office when I worked as an IT trainer. I've also found people respond really well to being shown IE, Mozilla and Opera, and then choosing the one that best suits their needs.
It all depends on how flexibility is approached, from the kernel developers, to the app developers, to the marketers, right through to the people that set-up/sell the boxes and the training users get. I've always found Microsoft's one-size-fits-all attitude rather at odd with what people want. Afterall, look at how many different stereos you can get - consumers do want the choice, when properly presented.
If this article were advocating that people could go on "white-hat" vigilante attacks against people they didn't like, everyone would point out how ridiculous that would be. Well this is really pretty similar, because if you say that it is legal to crack computers causing problems to other computers, then you have all kinds of ways of weasling out of trouble for cracking. Script kiddies would be delighted!
As usual, this just sidesteps the more important issue which is that of secure software. If Microsoft tied up he bugs in Outlook and finally realised/admitted that secure by default is more important than snazzy and integrated by default, we wouldn't have half these problems. And if the software industry in general were really made to be more careful about its security, we could sit back and relax *a little*.
This sort of idea does little to prevent malicious scripts, and does a lot of encourage vigilantism, which is exactly the sort of nonsense that just makes things worse, and opens the legal doors to companies cracking into your computer to check if you've written about their products (y'never know lol).
Where did I concede that apple's rights were trampled on when windows copied the mac? When did I advocate communism? When did I claim that human rights don't exist?
You're just making up a lot of crap because you conveniently misinterpret everything I say to your advantage. I really can't be bothered with you, as you seem to enjoy just putting words into my mouth, and then branding me a communist. Your attitude towards this whole "debate" has been immature and smug, and I suggest you pick up a book by Lawrence Lessig and read it, because you at least are forced to read his many arguments through, without the ability to whine "communist" at everyone who disagrees with your particular brand of capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Was that intentionally ironic, or just a funny slip? ;-)
And you didn't address the point that I, and many others, have risen which is that it is often custom to finish off code modifications before reintegrating them with the main codebase. In fact, in the article from which this thread began, the RedHat guy pointed out that they have created a new branch of the KDE cvs base fr the packages they are modifying.
Not exactly. There is still an "about" window for each application, and that still shows the license for that particular application. There is also still an "about KDE" about box somewhere that gives license information for KDE as a whole. So users will still know their legal rights with regards to the software.
So to summarise:
And?
It strikes me that you would have the KDE Project produce proprietary software, to allow you the kind of control you want over it, if it didn't mean the death of the KDE Project.
;-) If I had theskill to screw around with the source to change certain things, I would too.
One of the points of Free Software is that it allows people to do exactly what RedHat have done. Changing the look and feel of KDE to make it more similar to GNOME is their right, until the various licenses KDE uses. You may not like it, but so what? There's no discourteousness here, just you and other KDE people wanting KDE to look exactly as you'd have it, everywhere. Blimey, go to kde-look and whine at everyone who has gone to great lengths to make their set-up look like GNOME, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, etc. I repeat: "Gnomifying" KDE is their right. Leave them to it, or change your licenses.
The about dialogue boxes are, perhaps, a little silly. I can see it making things a little less confusing for the newbie, but then on the other hand I can't see them being that confusing in the first place. But if this is the main problem, lobby RedHat over it, and don't attack the whole idea.
So they haven't submitted code changes yet. Maybe they're not ready to? Maybe they're still in betaor alpha stages! What's that? You say this whole project is part of a still-in-beta distro? Oh, well there you go then. I'm sure that they will return the modified code *when they are done*. They have to upon request, but RedHat have usually been good to the community, so I don't see why they won't now. As I said on my original post, let's hope they find a good way of doing this, to help both the KDE and GNOME projects.
And please.... "they put john in charge of chess club when he's always preferred backgammon". You are so childish if you think it is disrespectful to put a GNOME guy in charge of making KDE more "gnomeish". If LinuxMall wanted to do that, then they can, and if they suceed, and beat the competition, then they've done a lot of good, both for themselves and the Free software community. I bet you didn't whine when Gentoo took FreeBSD's "portage" system, merged it with Debian's "apt", and extended them both to make their own portage system.
And for the record, I use KDE, I dislike the look and feel of GNOME, and also the default look of KDE
I agree with your point, and I think it's a difficult one. The problem is that there are two possible routes to a safe future regarding DRM: apply enough pressure to the public, government and corporations to ensure that DRM is kept open and a useful tool in the public interest, OR try to squash the whole idea altogether, until the former becomes more likely.
The question is: can we achieve the former, or the latter, and which one is our best bet? Personally I can see a lot of well-reasoned opposition to the idea that DRM should be wiped out completely, and I can see a lot less opposition to the idea that DRM should be reigned in in the public interest, but then I can also see corporations (who have a far louder voice in western societies than the public and NGOs) doing enough to reassure the powerful that they will address our fears whilst shoveling DRM through, such that any efforts on our behalf will be too late.
I don't really know which way to go. At the moment I think the best thing for anyone who is remotely concerned about the future to do is just to tell as many people as possible about it, get the word out, so that if something does happen, a larger proportion of the publis is aware and ready for it.
The biggest problem with DRM is not the idea of protection in the first place, but the idea that if company x goes bust in y years, then all documents "protected" by their technology become inaccessible, as there is no escrow agreement in most laws that would protect DRM (like the DMCA and EUCD).
So if DRM could be done openly so that the technology couldn't be wielded by large media companies, then there would be less scope.for abuse. That said, there's still plenty of scope, just less ;-)
We also need laws to protect the public from parties that might want to abuse DRM, like the RIAA, for example.
Note: they have not taken away any user choices. You can still completely change your KDE/GNOME appearance, perhaps even back to the KDE/GNOME defaults. The only things that might bug users are the changes they've made to the code, but we don't yet know what they are, or how significant they are, so we'll have to wait and see.
I for one would welcome it. I'd change my themes straight away, because I've spent far too much boredom-time making my KDE3 desktop look exactly how I want it. But I also had to spend quite a while getting GNOME and GTK+ apps to look right so they almost blend in with my KDE3 apps and desktop.
The final goal here is of course compatability in themes. I.e. you download and install a KDE theme, and you can then make your GTK apps look identical, either with the same theme, or a mirror package. It's something even RMS has proposed, and something that will make life a lot more pleasant for those aesthetic pedants like myself, without taking away any of the choice we have in desktops and looks. Hopefully RedHat will find a constructive way of using these code modifications to help the KDE & GNOME projects achieve this "integration".
Yes, I've heard of the marshall plan, and that wasn't within the past 50 years. Brush up on your history, and look at all of the military ventures America has been involved in sincee 1952, then you might go some way towards understanding why a lot of people hate America (and not all of them are insane, a lot of them only let their hatred out in words, rather than mindless violence).
You can hardly attribute the UN and the fall of the USSR entirely to the USA. Hell, the USA didn't even support the League of Nations after Woodrow Wilson left the scene. Look also at the impact the IMF have had. Look also at the fact that the amount of aid the US has given as a percentage of its GNP has fallen consistently in the last 50 years.
The only way to explain every person in the world who dislikes or disagrees with various American policies by your argument is that they are insane. Surely that should make you reasses your argument?
You're quite right, except for your assertion that islamic extremists hate americans because of their freedom. If they did, they'd just try and come to america. They hate america because the american government has done so much harm to the rest of the world in the past 50 years, and it has done so little to help the rest of the world. That and they're insane :)
Yes, congratulations, you've yet again expounded some theories from your economics classes, but you're still ignoring reality. Do you think we have a free market today, by the textbook definition? If you do, perhaps you should look again. Regulation is everywhere, and economists (nobel winners among them) have long recognised the need for light regulation and for a framework by which badly behaving regulators and companies can be brought to account, and countries and companies in trouble can, where appropriate, be rescued.
Look what happened in South East Asia when the government looked the other way and the market was left wide open - too much speculative investment, greed, and a government not yet sophisticated enough to handle such a sophisticated economy brought about one of the biggest economic collapses of the 20th century.
As for your assertion that any kind of planning is comparable with the North Korean, Chinese and Soviet Russian interpretations of communism, that just shows that you've probably studied no more economics than was in your holy "economics 101" course. What other solutions do you propose to solve the many urgent problems our planet faces, such as the massive over-consumption of the West, the huge human problems in developing nations caused by the massively unequal distribution of wealth, and the abuse of power on the behalf of governments, corporations and individuals that are exacerbating all of this? And if you say the free market, then I'll quit now and apologise that I have no answers that you will find in your textbook.
Where did I get the attitude that corporations are evil and dishonest? Well, not *all* of them are, but if you try doing a little research, you will find a LONG, LONG list of abuses of money and power on the behalf of corporations. If I were to say this about governments, you probably wouldn't disagree, so I don't see why you then assume some blind faith in corporations. Any organisation is able to abusee its power. The point is to balance the power of the state, the private sector, and the public at large. If left to their own devices, with no input from the state or the public, the private sector becomes just as malicious a regulator as the state. For a period we put too much faith in the state, until the problems were blown wide open. Now we put too much faith in the private sector, and the problems are all too obvious for those willing to look.
And no, if you must know I'm a capitalist of the Green persuasion, and I disagree with many of the ideas of Karl Marx and of the communists, socialists, anarchists and even many greens that have followed. I also happen to disagree with a lot of the neo-liberal free market bilge you spout.
And PLEASE... Adam Smith and Karl Marx are as hopelessly out of date as your ideas are simplistic.
I find is curious that people keep making this distinction, as though the two have little relation to one another. Surely the one of the tenets of the philosophy of Free Software is to allow users to have control over the source so they aren't forced to accept the word of one or more unaccountable parties? Is that not practical? Yet it is a philosophy. The more commentators keep making this bizarre seperation, the more people will be led to believe that the GPL is some pipedream license, not applicable in the "real world". It's time to realise that the GPL "is" practical, and that the philosophy is Free Software puts the practicality of using software high in its list of concerns, being inherently linked to the freedom of users.
Saying that criticism is not information, it is jut opinion, is ridiculous. Everything we say is opinion until we can prove it, and the only way to prove criticism against a company or government is through law or through having your criticism confirmed by the recipient, at which point it becomes information. So unless companies and governments suddenly decide to own up to all of their improprietries, or there is an international framework with which to bring governments and companies to account, criticism will always just be opinion, and there won't ever be any scope for independent information.
Now how else will you keep companies honest? I'd love to see the faces in the Shell boardroom if you went in and told them in a very stern face to be honest, so that we all have perfect information and a perfect free market (a pipedream if ever there was one) and can all live as happily as your textbooks suggest.
Funny, when I installed SuSE 7.2 and 7.3, and Mandrake 8.2, and Slackware 7.1 and 8.0, they all installed more than one of almost everything I wanted to use, and during the installation process, if I wanted, there was ample opportunity to choose many more. I'm not sure what distribution you're talking about here.
The world of soft drinks and the world of computing and the Internet are very different though. And I don't care what your country's antitrust law says or is about, I'm talking about my views here.
New soft drinks are launched fairly regularly, often from companies new to the scene. How can they do this? Well, they produce them, then sell them to the shops, and they appear on shelves and in adverts, and consumers see them, get the chance to try them, and reject or accept them based on their merit, and their image.
With software, if you've (or not you, but a normal old computer user) bought your new computer, and it has all this lovely stuff on it to do everything you need, you're not going to go out of your way to look for stuff you don't even know exists. And there is no shelf on which you will see competing products. When it comes to you, your computer and iWhatever, there is no perfect information about the marketplace. So competitors rely on consumers being motivated enough to look elsewhere.
I wasn't suggesting consumers should have to compile their software, far from it. I like to sometimes, but when there is an RPM available I usually use it - so much simpler and quicker. It would be fairly easy for Apple to start a database much like freshmeat which would serve as an easy starting point for OSX users to find the software they want. An icon on the desktop/dock, a bookmark in all the browsers, perhapos a helpful start page, a mention in the manuals, there are many ways of making it easy to people to find alternatives.
Yes, but GNU/Linux distributions offer miltuple choices wherever possible from different developers and companies, and so there is always scope for a new company or developer to spring up and produce an alternative that will, within a year if its good, be shipped with many distributions.
So a market with two competitors a little scope for others is better than a market with one player, but it is not correct according to the holy free market theory. There is no perfect competition there, and though you offer some choice to consumers, you don't offer choice to other software companies, and therefre you offer very little choice in software as compared with what you could.
Ohhh stricly speaking it makes no sense, but the meaning was put across. What more do you want in a Slashdot comment?
Yes, they're certainly no way near as bad as Microsoft's bundling techniques, but I still worry for the creators of software like XMMS, Winamp, AIM, ICQ, Pixie, MPlayer, and any other software the i* suite replaces, especially those that are commercial enterprises.
Big difference to someone like you, yes, but not to the average consumer who will either buy a Mac with it all pre-installed, or will install MacOSX themselves and install it all because it is recommended and probably a very good thing for them. There's a technical difference, but not a very practical one.
Microsoft does (or has got as close as a company could). But this is a matter of principle, not of bashing the monopolists. What good is it in downsizing a monopoly, and replacing it with a monopoly run by two companies?
I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?
If you install your OS and get iChat, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync and whatever i* software they put in next:
a) are you going to look for/know of alternatives?
b) are you going to use them, especially if they won't integrate as well with the OS and other apps as well as Apple's i* series will?
Surely the point of taking Microsoft to court for bundling IE and therefore slaying the browser market was not just to get at Microsoft, but to prevent OS vendors from dominating and killing off large sectors of the software market?
There's more to a flexibile OS than twiddling with colours and switching apps once in a while (though for those that use their computer regularly, it's nice to have that ability).
Flexibility also means that someone can set up your computer to be orientated towards your tasks, have nothing but the apps you need, the buttons and shortcuts you need, the functions you need, at hand. Having an OS as flexible as GNu/Linux lets you do stuff like that OEone desktop easily, securely, and quickly.
And I don't think it's entirely true to say that users don't want choice in their software. When you're talking about Windows (and, increasingly, MacOSX and perhaps even KDE), you're given most of the apps you need out of the box, so few feel the need or the motivation to look for different apps. But when you can select from the start the app that does what you want, it's a good thing and something a lot of people value. I can't tell you how many people got fed up of the power of Outlook2000, or the lack of modularity in MS Office when I worked as an IT trainer. I've also found people respond really well to being shown IE, Mozilla and Opera, and then choosing the one that best suits their needs.
It all depends on how flexibility is approached, from the kernel developers, to the app developers, to the marketers, right through to the people that set-up/sell the boxes and the training users get. I've always found Microsoft's one-size-fits-all attitude rather at odd with what people want. Afterall, look at how many different stereos you can get - consumers do want the choice, when properly presented.
If this article were advocating that people could go on "white-hat" vigilante attacks against people they didn't like, everyone would point out how ridiculous that would be. Well this is really pretty similar, because if you say that it is legal to crack computers causing problems to other computers, then you have all kinds of ways of weasling out of trouble for cracking. Script kiddies would be delighted!
As usual, this just sidesteps the more important issue which is that of secure software. If Microsoft tied up he bugs in Outlook and finally realised/admitted that secure by default is more important than snazzy and integrated by default, we wouldn't have half these problems. And if the software industry in general were really made to be more careful about its security, we could sit back and relax *a little*.
This sort of idea does little to prevent malicious scripts, and does a lot of encourage vigilantism, which is exactly the sort of nonsense that just makes things worse, and opens the legal doors to companies cracking into your computer to check if you've written about their products (y'never know lol).
You're just making up a lot of crap because you conveniently misinterpret everything I say to your advantage. I really can't be bothered with you, as you seem to enjoy just putting words into my mouth, and then branding me a communist. Your attitude towards this whole "debate" has been immature and smug, and I suggest you pick up a book by Lawrence Lessig and read it, because you at least are forced to read his many arguments through, without the ability to whine "communist" at everyone who disagrees with your particular brand of capitalism.