As a note of dissent, while I thought the rotoscoping in Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" was profoundly annoying, it seems a lot of people concentrate on that to the exclusion of things like, oh, the script--which, at least in my dim recollection, was pretty first-rate. It was adapted for the screen by Peter Beagle, the author of "The Last Unicorn" and an amazing writer in his own right--as well as the guy who wrote the introduction to the first American publication of LotR.
Ironically, "The Last Unicorn" was made into an animated movie produced by Rankin/Bass. (The actual animation house that did 'Unicorn' was a Japanese studio whose animators later became the core of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.)
I'm glad I'm not the only other person who thinks that way. What we need isn't an "Internet Appliance," it's a "Convergent Appliance."
Our hypothetical CA should have all the features of an IA, plus the ability to actually handle documents, where "documents" can be audio, video and text files. When people (hi, TSW!) say that computers are too hard to use and IAs will be successful because they're not, they're making the implicit assumption that you can't make something that's as easy to use as an IA unless it's as limited as an IA. This assumption needs to be challenged. Computers are difficult to use for the "non-geek" because, objectively, they have terrible user interfaces.
CAs will happen when companies apply some of the IA paradigms to more general functions. In practice, "one device for one function" only succeeds when it's not convenient and logical to combine functions. For most people, a component home stereo system doesn't include separate boxes for amplifier, pre-amplifier and tuner--it includes one box that combines all those functions. And most people don't have separate word processors, grammar checkers and spelling checkers. As a general rule, consumers prefer convergence to "best of breed" when the combination makes sense.
Having said that, I think BeOS/BeIA is in a great position to be the foundation for such a "convergent appliance." (Not to say that other systems couldn't do quite well at it.) While I'd like to have seen 2000 have been the year BeOS on the desktop blossomed rather than wilted, I still hope Be is successful as a company.
My problem with this response is that it denies the possibility that competent people could be interested in expanding their skill sets and meeting new challenges, but not interested in management.
Just because we're not in a field where we customarily work in isolation doesn't mean that we all have a desire to manage others in our field after we reach a certain level of development. Why do you feel a lack of interest in a management career path equates to a lack of interest in all professional development?
Furthermore, you're probably aware of the "Peter Principle"--essentially the argument that the typical career track moves people ahead until they're in a position that they're not quite competent in, and strands them there. In practice, this usually manifests itself as moving people who are brilliant workers out of their field and into positions where they are managing the workers in their field.
Can you say for sure that Don Knuth, Linus Torvalds or Dennis Ritchie would be great managers? I certainly can't. And I don't think that that "lack" would be a true weakness on their part. If someone is interested in more of a development and research role, that's what they should be looking for. Perhaps their "track" should lead them not to group management as such, but to development director, strategic planner or senior researcher. But moving into a role they're not comfortable with doesn't benefit either them or the company, does it?
In this particular case, accepting the position might not be a bad thing politically--but getting out of it as quickly as possible would be the next logical goal, whether it was a move within that company or out.
When you get a smudge on your windshield do you trade your car in for a new one?
You mean there's another way?
Besides, I might want to try a BSD car rather than a GPL car--there's less engine knocking, I hear, and I'm not concerned with the possibility of people reselling my spark plugs. And... oh, wait, the analogy just broke. Never mind.
I don't think I used the phrase "publicly controlled"--a network, regardless of funding, is going to be controlled by the people in charge of it. (I may have an anarchist streak in me, but not enough of one to suggest organizations don't need someone, or a group of someones, setting direction.)
For the most part we probably don't disagree, except perhaps on whether the government can (or should) be used as a collection and funding agency for a public broadcasting network. I don't find anything intrinsically wrong with that use--but I don't find it intrinsically better than so-called community broadcasting, where the audience does directly pay for the programming.
And, yes, NPR's sponsors are pretty much guilty of everything I accused commercial advertisers of. There's a book about that called 'Made Possible By': The Death of Public Broadcasting in America. Sure to not be a bonus gift for your contribution to your NPR station in their next fundraising drive!
Setting aside the specifics of NPR, this is missing the point of public broadcasting.
The utility of a market is dependent on the consumer-producer interaction, right? In the commercial TV market, the network is the producer and the advertiser is the consumer. The product is not TV shows, it is advertisement delivery. I don't think most people who talk about the media really get that basic fact. Viewers are part of the equation in that they are who the advertisements are being delivered to, but they are not direct inputs into the market system.
In practice, this means that network content is tailored more toward what will please the advertiser than what will please the viewer--networks want to please viewers, of course, but only because that increases their ratings, and thus increases the money they can command for advertisements. The problem here is that there is nothing inherent in the system which supports broadcasts which are not deemed commercial. This doesn't mean "unpopular": it can simply mean controversial.
The way around that is to have the audience support the broadcast directly. Virtually all industrialized countries have some mechanism by which government money is given to a broadcasting institution, ideally with a "firewall" of some sort to prevent government interference (a critical piece that American public broadcasting lacks).
Personally, I'm neutral on the subject; if public broadcasting can get by without any money from government, that's fine. But to me--crazy liberal that I am--the function of government is to reflect the core values of the people it governs. Being informed is, I would submit, a worthy core value.
Of course, being a really crazy liberal, I'd have that government funding come from FCC license fees to commercial broadcast stations. The public owns the airwaves, and the FCC is ostensibly our property manager; I think it's high time they started charging rent. A very minimal license fee could bring enough revenue to not only keep PBS and NPR gonig, but probably enough to sweep away all need for corporate sponsorship (something that largely defeats the purpose of having public broadcasting to start with).
Yes, actually people have adopted Be, and the Slashdot users who don't sit around in front of computers all the time may well have been to a theatrical show or amusement attraction whose audio is being run by Level Control Systems' BeOS-based gear. It's been out for years, has won several major industry awards... you can "see" it on Broadway ("Ragtime," "Fosse"), Las Vegas (Cirque de Soleil, both shows), and in odder places (Disney's Cirque de Soleil, the MGM Indiana Jones show, the Sony Metreon in San Francisco).
Adamation's systems run the ZEUM in San Francisco as well. Edirol recently announced the DV-7 nonlinear video editing system, which runs, you guessed it, BeOS. A forthcoming "hospitality industry" version of Compaq's iPad runs BeIA. And, of course, there's the obligatory weird startup (Qubit) and the "what were they thinking" project (Whirlpool's prototype BeIA-based refrigerator). These are just the announced projects, of course.
Look, folks, I'm an archetypal disillusioned BeOS user--it's still my favorite desktop OS, but I don't think it has much of a future on the desktop. And it didn't die when Apple chose NeXT, it died--well, became undead, more accurately--when Be decided that focusing on the appliance market required them to publicly gut their desktop effort.
To paraphrase Al "Totem Pole" Gore, "I strongly disagree with their decision, but I accept it." From everything I've heard, BeIA is getting a lot of positive attention within the industry, particularly because of their management services, which are evidently significantly ahead of anybody else's comparable offerings.
With all due respect, having access to the source is not the only consideration most businesses will have in evaluating options, and licensing fees are only one component in development cost. And, just because Be is being quiet about things doesn't mean they're not doing anything--we've all seen companies which were much louder and weren't, when all was said and done, doing anything. Conversely, we've seen Transmeta....
In practice, many people are "Linux is great because it's free" types of guys. Linux has been attracting attention over the last year or so because it's being presented--marketed, if you will--as a viable alternative to NT: perhaps harder to use, but substantially more robust and with an extremely low cost of ownership. Being able to get "under the hood" and hack is, to most non-hackers, something that's interesting but only relevant to them if they know--or in a business context, employ--the Unix-savvy.
When push comes to shove, people want software that does what they need. Many people have been attracted to Linux (and FreeBSD and cousins) because they can get the software that does what they need here for free--and I absolutely mean free in the sense of "free beer."
Suppose the GPL requested a monetary donation to the FSF from anyone who used Gnu software without making other contributions (i.e., code, documentation, or bug reports). Perfectly reasonable from a "free speech" standpoint; how many users do you think would actually send in that money? I suspect it would be fewer people, proportionately, than those who register fully functional shareware.
I don't think people "abandoned the goal of free software for the nebulous, hazy goals of the 'open source' movement," because I think most people who are using Linux were never concerned with free software in the RMS sense to start with.
I suspect many don't understand that with the current development there will be no software development related jobs in ten years or so. The free software movement will kill the whole industry. And please...spare me the bull about service and support alternative...
Well, I think the service and support alternative is greatly exaggerated--but a lot of software developers in the country are working on "in-house" software. The estimates I've seen are about 70% of developers are employed working on "products" that never leave the company, because they're for internal use.
Also, programs that address "vertical markets" are also largely immune to competition from free software; the more limited the market is, the less space there is for competitors, free or otherwise. Few hackers have a compelling interest in making a GPL construction management program or a records management system tailored to the needs of hospitals (and for that matter, few hospitals would move their systems to a non-trusted vendor; "if patients die, you have the source code to see what went wrong" just doesn't carry a lot of weight). Even a "semi-vertical market" program like Nota Bene, the word processor for academics built around XyWrite, isn't likely to face serious competition from free software companies: if they're getting people to pay $400 for a word processor now (and they are), price obviously isn't the overriding concern for their customers.
The only real question is the future for shrink-wrap software of the kind that you pick up at Best Buy or CompUSA (and the same kinds of software when delivered electronically, of course), and by proxy, the future for software developers working on such projects. If a typical office application meets the goal of being user-friendly and having an effective, self-contained help system, it doesn't need people to supply service and support for it (particularly if the Internet community can supply free help through newsgroups, websites and mailing lists); the profit potential lies in the software itself, future upgrades and potential "add-on" modules.
I think both points here are valid. There are a lot of people who'll choose the free equivalent if it's available, and most of them will not choose it for philosophical reasons; they'll choose it because it's cheaper.
Having said that, though, if a commercial program offers you a specific feature that you absolutely must have, or a significant performance jump in features that you use regularly, you'll more than likely buy the commercial program. I played with StarOffice a bit and while I was impressed with it in some ways, it was a true performance pig--and in my work I'm regularly dealing with spreadsheets that have 20,000 rows or more. I can literally open the file, make a couple changes and close it again in Excel while StarOffice is still loading the document. (I think I may well have killed StarOffice after it had been trying for fifteen minutes.)
Realistically, I don't think we're going to see the Linux community stop "competing" against commercial alternatives. For better and worse, the hacker mindset is different now than it was a decade ago; the idea of the cottage software house has given way to the "gift culture," a shift from direct (financial) reward to indirect rewards--partially the ego boost of name recognition, and to some degree the possibility of parlaying that recognition into employment in a field you presumably love (although probably not in a job whose success depends on selling commercial software, of course).
There's probably an interesting sociological thesis lurking in there somewhere. Much of the "open source" movement is strongly--some might say excessively--libertarian, yet it's friendly only to certain types of entrepeneurship. It's downright inimical to "traditional" methods of selling software, despite the fact that it's a proven business model and that the proposed alternative--shifting software to a service-based and "value added" commodity business--is still largely theoretical. (There are software companies that derive a significant portion of their income through support contracts, I believe, but they're still selling proprietary software--and would have no compelling business reason to become open.)
True--I should have been more clear. By "commercial use" I was thinking of redistribution, and more specifically of OEMs incorporating Ghostscript into their products, which does require a license.
I've played around with LyX and find it more awkward to use than frame-based DTP systems (I confess I've used PageMaker 6.5 much more than QuarkXpress, and Xpress more than FrameMaker); defining master page layouts, for instance, is nearly as easy in any of those DTP programs as it is in a reasonably good word processor. Defining new styles is also more complex in LyX. After hacking around for a while I ended up going back vim and LaTeX directly. Of course, since these are all basically interface issues, they can be addressed eventually (although a graphic way to set up master pages will be a bit of a challenge).
PostScript wasn't designed for onscreen output, it was designed for resolution-independent printing, in effect moving the equivalent of MetaFont (and more) into the printer, so application programs--in theory--shouldn't have to worry about what they're printing to, as long as it's PostScript compatible.
And in practice, PostScript has done tremendously well. HP succeeded in fending it off from the low end of the market when they brought scalable fonts into PCL, but any laser printer that's more than $600 or so is going to be using Postscript or a compatible interpreter. (If it's a higher-end printer or typesetter, it's virtually guaranteed to be real Adobe Postscript.)
PDF was basically designed as a special application Postscript; a primary point was that it stores font metrics even when it doesn't store fonts, so a PDF reader can use a "master font" to recreate the document in a reasonably correct facsimile even if the fonts aren't available on the reading end. The bitch someone had about Adobe PDFs not embedding the fonts in them now is a valid complaint in one sense, but utterly misses the point in another--embedded fonts are supposed to be optional.
Also, PDF is not PostScript. PostScript is a programming language; PDF is a document format, with no support for programming constructs but with support for hyperlinks, bookmarks, and so on. It's more accurately compared to TeX's DVI format.
And, lastly, if people don't like PDF--hey, this is the open source world. Make your own alternative. But it better do everything that PDF 1.3 does, at least everything that people actually use, or it's not going to go anywhere. Of course, the PDF spec is open and fully documented--so, hell, make your own PDF writer that doesn't have an option for not embedding fonts. If XPDF doesn't handle master fonts, add handling for 'em, or make your own comparable solution--the PDF file won't care how it's getting rendered, after all.
Actually, I think this argues that publishing is not heading toward commodity status; the "problem" may well be that Linux isn't making significant inroads into the publishing industry. A perceived lack of demand for a commercial DTP solution on Linux does not equate to a perceived lack of demand for commercial DTP solutions. Your perception of "bleeding edge" is likely quite different from that of a professional prepress operator, or a manager in HP's documentation division.
Say you have a 500-page manual to get out, that has to draw in chapters written by two dozen different contributors. 19 are in Word format, 4 are in WordPerfect format, and the one from the crusty weird engineer who rants about mainframes all the time is in XyWrite III+ format. Most of the chapters have graphics, generally in TIFF or EPS format. Obviously, the entire book has to be in a consistent style. And, of course, you need to have a table of contents, a list of illustrations, an index, and cross-references.
So which solution is cheaper--LaTeX, or FrameMaker? In terms of time spent doing the work, FrameMaker will win hands down. It'll convert all the document formats (even XyWrite) automatically and won't require you to pepper the document with TeXisms ("---" instead of "--", changing straight quotes to open/close, commands for formatting, etc.)--even if you come up with a script to help automate that process, it'll be much slower. Even an expert TeXnician will have trouble creating a set of style macros as quickly as style sheets could be built. And we haven't even gotten to the speed differences in index markup and image handling. These speed differences could mean weeks off the schedule--and that pays for FrameMaker every time you use it on a project like this.
And that--speed saved in work time--is really what commands premium pricing, I think. ESR's observation makes sense, but it can lead people to the wrong conclusions. Linux is a commodity solution because it's free--it's not free because it's a commodity. Distribution packagers can make money, ironically, for the same reason that FrameMaker can be sold even with free alternatives: people are paying them to cut down on the time and effort it would take to install a full Linux-based OS if you had to do everything yourself.
Ultimately FrameMaker's "competition" in the Linux market isn't another program, it's an attitude--that there's always a free alternative, and that the free alternative is always preferable. In point of fact, there are alternatives but there is nothing similar to FrameMaker in the free software world. The closest to it is LyX. I like LyX (although after playing with it I decided I liked straight LaTeX better), but there are things FrameMaker can do that will always be difficult or even impossible for LyX to do, because TeX's concept of a document doesn't include frames. (KWord's concept of a document does, but it doesn't include everything else that FrameMaker does.)
This isn't terribly surprising--FrameMaker may not quite be in a vertical market, but it's close. The front page article describing it as a "word processor" is perhaps the biggest hint as to why Adobe gave up--it's not a word processor, it's a book publishing system. There are a lot of companies using it internally for documentation and technical manuals. Many of O'Reilly's books are produced with FrameMaker. Could you do all those things with LaTeX? Sure, given enough time--but this is one of those fields where a good GUI saves you an immense amount of work. I've done layout for magazines in the past, and I can assure you that even something like LyX would be an utter nightmare compared even to Microsoft Publisher, let alone PageMaker or Xpress.
I know there are Linux fans who won't use any non-free software on principle; while I'm not one of them, I respect that. But I'm sure Adobe knew about them and obviously wasn't targeting them. If they've backed away from this it's because, I would surmise, they feel that the people who are using Linux who aren't gung-ho "free as in speech" types are "free as in beer" types. They've adopted the rhetoric of the free software movement mostly because they like the idea of having a lot of software they don't have to pay for. I can't be too critical of this--I like the idea of having a lot of software I don't have to pay for, too.
But I don't think that the perception of a "we won't pay for it if there's a free alternative that's kind of close" attitude being rampant in the Linux community is a harbinger of the impending death of shrinkwrap software. But it might be a sign of why commercial companies doing personal and "workstation" software probably aren't going to get real enthusiastic about Linux. We'll see commercial offerings from companies that expect to be selling support contracts, or that are looking at their Linux products as loss leaders; beyond that you see companies expecting to make money entirely from services (like Eazel and Helix Code, who despite being "partners" seem to be developing the same service model, which could lead to much hilarity down the road--but we digress).
There's a couple exceptions out there, like ApplixWare, and of course Night Of The Living Corel. But they're going to have to not merely be better than their free counterparts, they're going to have to virtually blow them out of the water, with reasonable pricing and enough unduplicated features that a reasonable percentage of the audience wants them. And that'll be increasingly difficult. (I'm more impressed by AbiSource's ambition than their product, but Ted--which doesn't get the recognition it deserves--absolutely rocks.)
This does beg a question. How does a company that's selling personal software, rather than the support for the software, make money in the Linux world? This isn't just an idle curiosity; some people think Linux is going to lead the world into a software renaissance, and while that's not impossible, there needs to be space for cottage software companies to actually make money and take off. So far the only ones that have done that seem to be ones that are selling Linux itself. Will AbiSource, for example, ever make money? That seems to be their goal, but nobody needs a support contract for a spreadsheet program--and by choosing to be GPL, they can't take the Ghostscript route of being "free for non-commercial use" and charge business licenses. (This would seem to me to be a workable approach, but some would argue--with justification--it's not in the spirit of open source if you have a commercial limitation like that.)
Nicholas Petreley is perhaps responsible, more than any other person, for helping to move Linux into the mainstream. The effects of having a champion at Infoworld during Linux's formative years, a journalist who was able to not only regularly write columns about Windows but to influence the magazine to actually get front cover stories about this unknown OS--when the rest of the IT world was working diligently to collar itself to Microsoft's leash--cannot be overestimated. As far as I know, Petreley was instrumental in there being a Linuxworld.com in the first place. He's put his financial livelihood on the line for Linux. Can you say the same?
Some Slashdot followers really need to get the "all journalists are fools" stick out of their asses. All history tends to be forgotten if the writer says one thing they don't like, don't believe or--heaven forbid--is actually a mistake. News flash: journalists are humans, with not only the capacity to make mistakes, but with opinions they'll occasionally express. One may, in fact, argue that they're getting paid to express those opinions. That doesn't obligate you to like them or respect them (I have no measurable respect for Fred Moody, for example), but it behooves you to get half a clue yourself before you start slagging them.
As of Mozilla M18, actually, it didn't support XHTML correctly. My website was done entirely in XHTML and CSS, but really bone-simple things like image and blockquote elements weren't displaying. (Not "weren't displaying correctly," they just disappeared.) It's my understanding that Mozilla/NS6 uses a separate XML parser for XHTML files, and the XML parser isn't quite there yet. I'd like to think that's been fixed for the final Netscape 6, but I'm not optimistic--the bug fixes related to this didn't appear to be marked with a real high priority.
...actually, I had Sun's JRE already installed and it automatically picked it up and used that. You may have to actually run the installer to get this effect (rather than a nightly build which is just the files you unpack yourself).
Not to be too sharply critical of your criticism, but the article says "It's interesting to note that, as befits the NeXT heritage of NetInfo, many of the NetInfo-related man pages are dated 1989." And the article contains a link to Apple's tech note on NetInfo.
Please, do read the student's writing completely before criticizing him for not doing his homework.:)
Well, we'll see. Be's position on the "desktop or not?" matter is more or less officially schizophrenic (I know both the Be engineers and marketers would take offense at that characterization, but it seems true enough in practice). At this point, QNX is sending mildly mixed signals that aren't unfamiliar: engineers being involved out of a sense of geek love, but a corporate stance which appears to have only marginal interest in the matter.
In the long term, who's more committed? Maybe it is QNX. Again, the signals from Be are schizophrenic; while their developer support for the desktop is less enthusiastic than QSSL's, you can't walk into Best Buy and buy a boxed RtP set with a printed manual. Despite Be's stated future direction, BeOS is their only currently available product, and QSSL hasn't (to my knowledge) announced any plans for a retail equivalent to BeOS 5 Pro--being in the retail channel is a measurable commitment that hasn't been made with Neutrino yet. (And it's one that could suggest Be is, characteristically, hedging their bets for next year's Annual Focus Shift. In 2001, Be will be repositioned as... oh, I'm sure anything I say won't be as humorous as whatever their marketing gurus come up with, right?)
My more serious concern (about both platforms) is this. If the OS's growth and direction are controlled by a for-profit company, and they have made business choices that do not depend in any substantial way on the OS succeeding on the desktop, there's only so much external "community" forces can do to force that success. I'm sure QNX RtP will gain a cult following... but it remains to be seen whether that'll be enough to break out of the Geek Toy Ghetto that BeOS is in, i.e., a product everyone likes but few people actually bother running. QNX has the advantage of running Linux apps, granted, but a cynic might say that just gives it a little OS/2 mixed in with its touch of Be.
Bizarrely enough, the only new-yet-closed OS company I see really agitating in the way I think will be needed for success is Bill McEwen's new new new new new no we really mean new this time Amiga. Amy the Squirrel may yet have the last laugh.
A comment from "(Mike)(duh)" further on down claims the difference between BeOS and Neutrino is that the latter is attracting developers and BeOS isn't. This is highly misleading. But, I'm not sure Ars-Fartsica is 100% on target, either.
BeOS did have a lot of announced commercial support this time last year--from companies that to date still have shown no interest in Linux. While there are some quantifiable advantages BeOS has in media performance over Linux (and, I would submit, over QNX as well), the difference wasn't technology--nor was it that the companies didn't "trust" open source, as some BeOS cheerleaders claim. It's that Be had strong developer support. These companies wanted somebody there able to offer immediate, detailed support and corporate evangelism. Linux can come close to this sometimes, but it definitionally can't match it, simply because there is no "Linux Company" that gives you access to nearly all the great developers. "It's open, you can make the changes yourself" isn't as good an answer as "we've tracked down that bug and fixed it for you," if (and it's a big if) there's a group able and willing to do the latter. This marketplace reality is why companies target specific Linux distributions--it's because Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera are trying to do for Linux what Be was doing for BeOS. A company may feel comfortable porting to "Red Hat Linux" because they're not doing the port alone, they're doing it with Red Hat's technical--and possibly even financial--support.
So what happened to BeOS? Be stopped providing that support for the desktop, shifting nearly all their DTS resources to BeIA.
I've looked at QNX RtP, and sure, it's pretty neat. But it is in the same position on the deskop that BeOS is--the desktop incarnation of a closed operating system whose company intends to focus their resources on the "appliance" market.
Look at the business and marketing FAQs on get.qnx.com. Do you see anything about their plans for the alternative desktop market? "It's uniquely positioned to become the premier platform for embedded devices." When they're comparing it to Linux, they're talking about its advantages to embedded systems developers:
QNX provides OEMs with a large suite of applications and OS components that are thoroughly tested and highly optimized for embedded use. No re-engineering required. This gives developers a head start: Instead of losing time on low-level kernel issues (and spending money on OS maintenance teams), they can focus right away on creating unique features and applications for their embedded device.
QNX RtP isn't intended to be a desktop OS contender: it's been released as a "self-hosted development environment" for RtP-based appliances, as well as a demonstration to potential partners of what the system can do.
Just like BeOS is for BeIA now. Rah, rah, focus shift.
QNX is a bunch of great guys, from what I can tell, but don't kid yourself, folks. This is not the next great alternative OS; no operating system is going to be without serious pushing from a corporate developer.
Opening the source helps with developer mindshare, sure, but I'm not sure it'd help much; there'll be enough hackers porting Unix stuff over without it, and it's a rare profit-driven company that gives a fig about such issues--they just want to sell their products and/or services, and that requires a userbase. (If BeOS had a few million users, Corel would have been there porting already. Whether we'd want them there is another question, of course, but I digress.)
In any case, the source isn't going to be completely open in either case; both companies see their kernels as their prized product. In practice, they could use a license like the Aladdin Ghostscript one (essentially, free for most use, but commercial redistribution requires a license), but let's not hold our breath.
... other than the minor technicality that the page you linked to doesn't say anything of the sort, you make a great case.
What Nader is against is giving corporations direct access to the schools as a captive audience to market to. You see, us commie pinko radicals have the crazy notion that schools are for learning more important things than what cola brand to drink and what shoe brand makes you cool. What we're worried about may just be the idea that if an organization starts funding a program, they're going to want to influence its content. I bet you'd scream like a pig stuck with a hot poker if you found out your school was using a lesson plan on agriculture sponsored by PETA, and you wouldn't buy the defense "they're just paying for it, they're not writing it." It hasn't possibly occurred to you that if the lesson plan was sponsored by "Supermarket to the World" ADM, it might have a bias, too?
What Nader's website actually says on that page you linked to is, "It is easy to point the finger at the Marilyn Mansons. But they are merely instruments. Speaker Hastert and Senate majority leader Lott ought to focus on the deeper problems. Behind every Marilyn Manson are corporations and corporate executives who cynically draw their large compensation packages from the fruits of such work." Woo.
Brin makes a good observation in his article (the personality traits that make someone a good gadfly aren't necessarily the ones that you want in a political leader), and the page has a lot of political grandstanding (maybe Nader has some of the qualifications we evidently look for in leaders after all--whoops, I'm being cynical). But pulling a column which is on marketing to children (you know, the page on Nader's site that you found it on puts in a category called "Marketing to Children") and pointing it to say, "Ooh, look, those nasty liberals want to censor everything!" is disingenous at best. Us nasty liberals have our faults, but failing to support free speech and civil liberties is, by and large, not one of them.
The other presidential candidates want the burning issue of this election to be: Who is best qualified to lead the nation?
I want the issue to be: How quickly can we restore all the liberty you've lost to arrogant politicians?
In other words: Don't mind the fact that I have no public experience whatsoever, 'cause it doesn't take any qualifications to destroy things!
I think most Libertarians are perfectly well-meaning, and their perception that government is horribly broken is dead-on. But it's as if the nation was a great mansion with a leaky roof, and they're telling us, "Hey, if we remove the roof entirely we won't have to worry about leaks anymore!" Well, yeah, but....
BeOS's first biggest drawback for this sort of thing right now is no hardware OpenGL support. That should be fixed by the end of the year, if not sooner.
The second drawback is the perception of support. If you set back the clocks 12-18 months you'll find a whole raft of commercial companies pledging support for BeOS, most of whom still haven't pledged support for Linux (although some are coming around). Why? Because Be was out there doing serious evangelizing and making their developers accessible for support to third parties. When Be announced their "focus shift" at the beginning of this year, the evangelism for desktop and media applications completely stopped, and the developer support became... spotty, at best. And the support from companies that needed a corporate face behind the OS evaporated.
This is a kind of alien mindset to the Linux world--but it's the explanation, I think, for why a lot of commercial software does specify a distribution, particularly Red Hat. It's because Red Hat is out there doing that evangelism, and provides what is, for practical purposes, a developer point of contact for the operating system. (I think HelixCode and Eazel both may develop into other such points of contact--the key is the aggregation of informed developers who actually influence the kernel or an API under one roof.)
So: yes, this sort of thing would be right up Be's alley. But a port from Irix to Linux isn't as much of a stretch as a port from Irix to BeOS. Linux provides hardware graphics support that BeOS doesn't yet, which would make developing such a port now impractical. BeOS has maybe 5% of the installed userbase as Linux does, and probably doesn't have the vertical market penetration that Linux does in A/V fields, simply because the applications aren't there.
BeOS is where Linux was three or four years ago. A year ago, I'd have said BeOS was on the track for surpassing it in these vertical markets, but Be, Inc. pretty effectively derailed it. And, without either a commercial company actively developing the API for those markets (how likely is hardware support for high-end OpenGL cards from Be?) or a development model that allows third-party developers to propel the kernel and API themselves (i.e., more open source than it is now), I'm not sure I see it getting back on those rails.
...the computers were only "not ready for prime time" because Xerox management didn't care about making consumer models. Everyone working there, down to the secretaries, had desktop computers with GUIs in the mid-'70s. There's a lot of overstatement on both sides about the relationship of the Mac UI to the Altos UI. The Mac definitely innovated, not just imitated, but at the same time it's disingenuous to imply that the PARC designers were just doodling in the dark until the Macintosh project came along. If Xerox's management had shown even the level of clue that Tandy's management did when Steve Leininger came to them with the TRS-80 (one of the only times "Tandy management" and "clue" could be used together), the computing landscape today might have been very, very different.
While I agree with some of your comments and feelings, Mike, Beatware is not a great example to use. They changed their focus as often as Be did. First they were going to be a productivity company, with BeBasics (Sum-It and Beatware Writer) and BeStudio. They never delivered BeStudio for the Intel platform, then dropped both it and BeBasics and proclaimed they were an Internet applications company, with development work of e-Picture going on as a "web graphics" program.
Then they delivered e-Picture, which was obviously a bet-the-farm kind of operation; as cool as e-Picture is in concept, the fact is that in practice the BeOS release was buggier than a South American jungle. I'd been saving up to buy it on the assumption that the final release would fix the bugs in the preview releases. No such luck. It didn't help things that e-Picture was more expensive than any other BeOS program--to me that wasn't a big issue, but the crashing was. The BeOS release was unusable.
And what was Beatware's response? Not a single bugfix.
All the resources at Beatware have been devoted to the Mac release. From a pragmatic standpoint, that's wise; Mac users consider a $150 vector-based graphics program a bargain, while Be users seemed to be looking for reasons to dismiss it as a "GIF animator". (Beatware's insistence on marketing it as, well, a GIF animator rather than a vector-based graphics program didn't help, of course.) But anyone who was thinking of buying the Be release when it was bug-free was left out in the cold.
This is essentially the same argument I made through the middle of last year about Adamation's ImageElements and AudioElements. There may be a host of good reasons they haven't delivered them on the Intel platform yet, but the cold hard truth is that if the program isn't available nobody's going to buy it. Nearly the same thing is true with Pe for Intel. Maarten Hekkelman could hardly have worked less at promoting the damn thing; he didn't even upload the demo to BeBits until last month--after he'd already announced he didn't see enough demand for it to continue development. (Gosh, Maarten, if people didn't have to already know it existed to go hunting for it, d'ya think there might have been a little demand? Possibly?)
As for Spellswell--hey. I'm very impressed by Word Services and if I was implementing an editor, I'd have used it. But virtually nobody else has. That reduces its value. You needed a network effect for it to take off, and the network effect never happened. Standalone spelling/grammar checkers are a tough sell these days. I worked very briefly at RightSoft, the makers of RightWriter (the only useful grammar checker I've ever seen); they shut down when WordPerfect chose to buy Grammatik as their built-in grammar checker. There was no market for them. Even on the Mac, where Word Services has been successful, it's difficult to find a word processor that doesn't have a spelling checker built into it.
I'm not convinced the BeOS commercial software market is ever going to exist, and I think some of the fault does lie with Be. But I'm not convinced they're alone. There are better and worse choices to make for a program in that market. A low-cost MIDI sequencer might be a good choice; an office package was obviously a good choice for Gobe. But, say, porting a high-end SQL database server to BeOS is painting a big fat target on your ass, because all you can do is hope a handful of developers will want to develop front ends for it (or add front-end capability to their existing products)--if you're really lucky, this gives you a total market of, oh, two or three until (and if) their client software comes out. A stand-alone spelling checker with an API people need to explicitly support (albeit a simple one) may be less of a gamble, but it's still a relatively high-risk product--like the SQL database, it's entirely dependent on the "market leaders" deigning to offer support.
Good luck with your future endeavors, wherever they end up taking you.
Slashdot Mirror
As a note of dissent, while I thought the rotoscoping in Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" was profoundly annoying, it seems a lot of people concentrate on that to the exclusion of things like, oh, the script--which, at least in my dim recollection, was pretty first-rate. It was adapted for the screen by Peter Beagle, the author of "The Last Unicorn" and an amazing writer in his own right--as well as the guy who wrote the introduction to the first American publication of LotR. Ironically, "The Last Unicorn" was made into an animated movie produced by Rankin/Bass. (The actual animation house that did 'Unicorn' was a Japanese studio whose animators later became the core of Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.)
I'm glad I'm not the only other person who thinks that way. What we need isn't an "Internet Appliance," it's a "Convergent Appliance."
Our hypothetical CA should have all the features of an IA, plus the ability to actually handle documents, where "documents" can be audio, video and text files. When people (hi, TSW!) say that computers are too hard to use and IAs will be successful because they're not, they're making the implicit assumption that you can't make something that's as easy to use as an IA unless it's as limited as an IA. This assumption needs to be challenged. Computers are difficult to use for the "non-geek" because, objectively, they have terrible user interfaces.
CAs will happen when companies apply some of the IA paradigms to more general functions. In practice, "one device for one function" only succeeds when it's not convenient and logical to combine functions. For most people, a component home stereo system doesn't include separate boxes for amplifier, pre-amplifier and tuner--it includes one box that combines all those functions. And most people don't have separate word processors, grammar checkers and spelling checkers. As a general rule, consumers prefer convergence to "best of breed" when the combination makes sense.
Having said that, I think BeOS/BeIA is in a great position to be the foundation for such a "convergent appliance." (Not to say that other systems couldn't do quite well at it.) While I'd like to have seen 2000 have been the year BeOS on the desktop blossomed rather than wilted, I still hope Be is successful as a company.
My problem with this response is that it denies the possibility that competent people could be interested in expanding their skill sets and meeting new challenges, but not interested in management.
Just because we're not in a field where we customarily work in isolation doesn't mean that we all have a desire to manage others in our field after we reach a certain level of development. Why do you feel a lack of interest in a management career path equates to a lack of interest in all professional development?
Furthermore, you're probably aware of the "Peter Principle"--essentially the argument that the typical career track moves people ahead until they're in a position that they're not quite competent in, and strands them there. In practice, this usually manifests itself as moving people who are brilliant workers out of their field and into positions where they are managing the workers in their field.
Can you say for sure that Don Knuth, Linus Torvalds or Dennis Ritchie would be great managers? I certainly can't. And I don't think that that "lack" would be a true weakness on their part. If someone is interested in more of a development and research role, that's what they should be looking for. Perhaps their "track" should lead them not to group management as such, but to development director, strategic planner or senior researcher. But moving into a role they're not comfortable with doesn't benefit either them or the company, does it?
In this particular case, accepting the position might not be a bad thing politically--but getting out of it as quickly as possible would be the next logical goal, whether it was a move within that company or out.
You mean there's another way?
Besides, I might want to try a BSD car rather than a GPL car--there's less engine knocking, I hear, and I'm not concerned with the possibility of people reselling my spark plugs. And... oh, wait, the analogy just broke. Never mind.
I don't think I used the phrase "publicly controlled"--a network, regardless of funding, is going to be controlled by the people in charge of it. (I may have an anarchist streak in me, but not enough of one to suggest organizations don't need someone, or a group of someones, setting direction.)
For the most part we probably don't disagree, except perhaps on whether the government can (or should) be used as a collection and funding agency for a public broadcasting network. I don't find anything intrinsically wrong with that use--but I don't find it intrinsically better than so-called community broadcasting, where the audience does directly pay for the programming.
And, yes, NPR's sponsors are pretty much guilty of everything I accused commercial advertisers of. There's a book about that called 'Made Possible By': The Death of Public Broadcasting in America. Sure to not be a bonus gift for your contribution to your NPR station in their next fundraising drive!
Setting aside the specifics of NPR, this is missing the point of public broadcasting.
The utility of a market is dependent on the consumer-producer interaction, right? In the commercial TV market, the network is the producer and the advertiser is the consumer. The product is not TV shows, it is advertisement delivery. I don't think most people who talk about the media really get that basic fact. Viewers are part of the equation in that they are who the advertisements are being delivered to, but they are not direct inputs into the market system.
In practice, this means that network content is tailored more toward what will please the advertiser than what will please the viewer--networks want to please viewers, of course, but only because that increases their ratings, and thus increases the money they can command for advertisements. The problem here is that there is nothing inherent in the system which supports broadcasts which are not deemed commercial. This doesn't mean "unpopular": it can simply mean controversial.
The way around that is to have the audience support the broadcast directly. Virtually all industrialized countries have some mechanism by which government money is given to a broadcasting institution, ideally with a "firewall" of some sort to prevent government interference (a critical piece that American public broadcasting lacks).
Personally, I'm neutral on the subject; if public broadcasting can get by without any money from government, that's fine. But to me--crazy liberal that I am--the function of government is to reflect the core values of the people it governs. Being informed is, I would submit, a worthy core value.
Of course, being a really crazy liberal, I'd have that government funding come from FCC license fees to commercial broadcast stations. The public owns the airwaves, and the FCC is ostensibly our property manager; I think it's high time they started charging rent. A very minimal license fee could bring enough revenue to not only keep PBS and NPR gonig, but probably enough to sweep away all need for corporate sponsorship (something that largely defeats the purpose of having public broadcasting to start with).
Yes, actually people have adopted Be, and the Slashdot users who don't sit around in front of computers all the time may well have been to a theatrical show or amusement attraction whose audio is being run by Level Control Systems' BeOS-based gear. It's been out for years, has won several major industry awards... you can "see" it on Broadway ("Ragtime," "Fosse"), Las Vegas (Cirque de Soleil, both shows), and in odder places (Disney's Cirque de Soleil, the MGM Indiana Jones show, the Sony Metreon in San Francisco).
Adamation's systems run the ZEUM in San Francisco as well. Edirol recently announced the DV-7 nonlinear video editing system, which runs, you guessed it, BeOS. A forthcoming "hospitality industry" version of Compaq's iPad runs BeIA. And, of course, there's the obligatory weird startup (Qubit) and the "what were they thinking" project (Whirlpool's prototype BeIA-based refrigerator). These are just the announced projects, of course.
Look, folks, I'm an archetypal disillusioned BeOS user--it's still my favorite desktop OS, but I don't think it has much of a future on the desktop. And it didn't die when Apple chose NeXT, it died--well, became undead, more accurately--when Be decided that focusing on the appliance market required them to publicly gut their desktop effort.
To paraphrase Al "Totem Pole" Gore, "I strongly disagree with their decision, but I accept it." From everything I've heard, BeIA is getting a lot of positive attention within the industry, particularly because of their management services, which are evidently significantly ahead of anybody else's comparable offerings.
With all due respect, having access to the source is not the only consideration most businesses will have in evaluating options, and licensing fees are only one component in development cost. And, just because Be is being quiet about things doesn't mean they're not doing anything--we've all seen companies which were much louder and weren't, when all was said and done, doing anything. Conversely, we've seen Transmeta....
In practice, many people are "Linux is great because it's free" types of guys. Linux has been attracting attention over the last year or so because it's being presented--marketed, if you will--as a viable alternative to NT: perhaps harder to use, but substantially more robust and with an extremely low cost of ownership. Being able to get "under the hood" and hack is, to most non-hackers, something that's interesting but only relevant to them if they know--or in a business context, employ--the Unix-savvy.
When push comes to shove, people want software that does what they need. Many people have been attracted to Linux (and FreeBSD and cousins) because they can get the software that does what they need here for free--and I absolutely mean free in the sense of "free beer."
Suppose the GPL requested a monetary donation to the FSF from anyone who used Gnu software without making other contributions (i.e., code, documentation, or bug reports). Perfectly reasonable from a "free speech" standpoint; how many users do you think would actually send in that money? I suspect it would be fewer people, proportionately, than those who register fully functional shareware.
I don't think people "abandoned the goal of free software for the nebulous, hazy goals of the 'open source' movement," because I think most people who are using Linux were never concerned with free software in the RMS sense to start with.
Well, I think the service and support alternative is greatly exaggerated--but a lot of software developers in the country are working on "in-house" software. The estimates I've seen are about 70% of developers are employed working on "products" that never leave the company, because they're for internal use.
Also, programs that address "vertical markets" are also largely immune to competition from free software; the more limited the market is, the less space there is for competitors, free or otherwise. Few hackers have a compelling interest in making a GPL construction management program or a records management system tailored to the needs of hospitals (and for that matter, few hospitals would move their systems to a non-trusted vendor; "if patients die, you have the source code to see what went wrong" just doesn't carry a lot of weight). Even a "semi-vertical market" program like Nota Bene, the word processor for academics built around XyWrite, isn't likely to face serious competition from free software companies: if they're getting people to pay $400 for a word processor now (and they are), price obviously isn't the overriding concern for their customers.
The only real question is the future for shrink-wrap software of the kind that you pick up at Best Buy or CompUSA (and the same kinds of software when delivered electronically, of course), and by proxy, the future for software developers working on such projects. If a typical office application meets the goal of being user-friendly and having an effective, self-contained help system, it doesn't need people to supply service and support for it (particularly if the Internet community can supply free help through newsgroups, websites and mailing lists); the profit potential lies in the software itself, future upgrades and potential "add-on" modules.
I think both points here are valid. There are a lot of people who'll choose the free equivalent if it's available, and most of them will not choose it for philosophical reasons; they'll choose it because it's cheaper.
Having said that, though, if a commercial program offers you a specific feature that you absolutely must have, or a significant performance jump in features that you use regularly, you'll more than likely buy the commercial program. I played with StarOffice a bit and while I was impressed with it in some ways, it was a true performance pig--and in my work I'm regularly dealing with spreadsheets that have 20,000 rows or more. I can literally open the file, make a couple changes and close it again in Excel while StarOffice is still loading the document. (I think I may well have killed StarOffice after it had been trying for fifteen minutes.)
Realistically, I don't think we're going to see the Linux community stop "competing" against commercial alternatives. For better and worse, the hacker mindset is different now than it was a decade ago; the idea of the cottage software house has given way to the "gift culture," a shift from direct (financial) reward to indirect rewards--partially the ego boost of name recognition, and to some degree the possibility of parlaying that recognition into employment in a field you presumably love (although probably not in a job whose success depends on selling commercial software, of course).
There's probably an interesting sociological thesis lurking in there somewhere. Much of the "open source" movement is strongly--some might say excessively--libertarian, yet it's friendly only to certain types of entrepeneurship. It's downright inimical to "traditional" methods of selling software, despite the fact that it's a proven business model and that the proposed alternative--shifting software to a service-based and "value added" commodity business--is still largely theoretical. (There are software companies that derive a significant portion of their income through support contracts, I believe, but they're still selling proprietary software--and would have no compelling business reason to become open.)
True--I should have been more clear. By "commercial use" I was thinking of redistribution, and more specifically of OEMs incorporating Ghostscript into their products, which does require a license.
I've played around with LyX and find it more awkward to use than frame-based DTP systems (I confess I've used PageMaker 6.5 much more than QuarkXpress, and Xpress more than FrameMaker); defining master page layouts, for instance, is nearly as easy in any of those DTP programs as it is in a reasonably good word processor. Defining new styles is also more complex in LyX. After hacking around for a while I ended up going back vim and LaTeX directly. Of course, since these are all basically interface issues, they can be addressed eventually (although a graphic way to set up master pages will be a bit of a challenge).
Um, no. :)
PostScript wasn't designed for onscreen output, it was designed for resolution-independent printing, in effect moving the equivalent of MetaFont (and more) into the printer, so application programs--in theory--shouldn't have to worry about what they're printing to, as long as it's PostScript compatible.
And in practice, PostScript has done tremendously well. HP succeeded in fending it off from the low end of the market when they brought scalable fonts into PCL, but any laser printer that's more than $600 or so is going to be using Postscript or a compatible interpreter. (If it's a higher-end printer or typesetter, it's virtually guaranteed to be real Adobe Postscript.)
PDF was basically designed as a special application Postscript; a primary point was that it stores font metrics even when it doesn't store fonts, so a PDF reader can use a "master font" to recreate the document in a reasonably correct facsimile even if the fonts aren't available on the reading end. The bitch someone had about Adobe PDFs not embedding the fonts in them now is a valid complaint in one sense, but utterly misses the point in another--embedded fonts are supposed to be optional.
Also, PDF is not PostScript. PostScript is a programming language; PDF is a document format, with no support for programming constructs but with support for hyperlinks, bookmarks, and so on. It's more accurately compared to TeX's DVI format.
And, lastly, if people don't like PDF--hey, this is the open source world. Make your own alternative. But it better do everything that PDF 1.3 does, at least everything that people actually use, or it's not going to go anywhere. Of course, the PDF spec is open and fully documented--so, hell, make your own PDF writer that doesn't have an option for not embedding fonts. If XPDF doesn't handle master fonts, add handling for 'em, or make your own comparable solution--the PDF file won't care how it's getting rendered, after all.
Actually, I think this argues that publishing is not heading toward commodity status; the "problem" may well be that Linux isn't making significant inroads into the publishing industry. A perceived lack of demand for a commercial DTP solution on Linux does not equate to a perceived lack of demand for commercial DTP solutions. Your perception of "bleeding edge" is likely quite different from that of a professional prepress operator, or a manager in HP's documentation division.
Say you have a 500-page manual to get out, that has to draw in chapters written by two dozen different contributors. 19 are in Word format, 4 are in WordPerfect format, and the one from the crusty weird engineer who rants about mainframes all the time is in XyWrite III+ format. Most of the chapters have graphics, generally in TIFF or EPS format. Obviously, the entire book has to be in a consistent style. And, of course, you need to have a table of contents, a list of illustrations, an index, and cross-references.
So which solution is cheaper--LaTeX, or FrameMaker? In terms of time spent doing the work, FrameMaker will win hands down. It'll convert all the document formats (even XyWrite) automatically and won't require you to pepper the document with TeXisms ("---" instead of "--", changing straight quotes to open/close, commands for formatting, etc.)--even if you come up with a script to help automate that process, it'll be much slower. Even an expert TeXnician will have trouble creating a set of style macros as quickly as style sheets could be built. And we haven't even gotten to the speed differences in index markup and image handling. These speed differences could mean weeks off the schedule--and that pays for FrameMaker every time you use it on a project like this.
And that--speed saved in work time--is really what commands premium pricing, I think. ESR's observation makes sense, but it can lead people to the wrong conclusions. Linux is a commodity solution because it's free--it's not free because it's a commodity. Distribution packagers can make money, ironically, for the same reason that FrameMaker can be sold even with free alternatives: people are paying them to cut down on the time and effort it would take to install a full Linux-based OS if you had to do everything yourself.
Ultimately FrameMaker's "competition" in the Linux market isn't another program, it's an attitude--that there's always a free alternative, and that the free alternative is always preferable. In point of fact, there are alternatives but there is nothing similar to FrameMaker in the free software world. The closest to it is LyX. I like LyX (although after playing with it I decided I liked straight LaTeX better), but there are things FrameMaker can do that will always be difficult or even impossible for LyX to do, because TeX's concept of a document doesn't include frames. (KWord's concept of a document does, but it doesn't include everything else that FrameMaker does.)
This isn't terribly surprising--FrameMaker may not quite be in a vertical market, but it's close. The front page article describing it as a "word processor" is perhaps the biggest hint as to why Adobe gave up--it's not a word processor, it's a book publishing system. There are a lot of companies using it internally for documentation and technical manuals. Many of O'Reilly's books are produced with FrameMaker. Could you do all those things with LaTeX? Sure, given enough time--but this is one of those fields where a good GUI saves you an immense amount of work. I've done layout for magazines in the past, and I can assure you that even something like LyX would be an utter nightmare compared even to Microsoft Publisher, let alone PageMaker or Xpress.
I know there are Linux fans who won't use any non-free software on principle; while I'm not one of them, I respect that. But I'm sure Adobe knew about them and obviously wasn't targeting them. If they've backed away from this it's because, I would surmise, they feel that the people who are using Linux who aren't gung-ho "free as in speech" types are "free as in beer" types. They've adopted the rhetoric of the free software movement mostly because they like the idea of having a lot of software they don't have to pay for. I can't be too critical of this--I like the idea of having a lot of software I don't have to pay for, too.
But I don't think that the perception of a "we won't pay for it if there's a free alternative that's kind of close" attitude being rampant in the Linux community is a harbinger of the impending death of shrinkwrap software. But it might be a sign of why commercial companies doing personal and "workstation" software probably aren't going to get real enthusiastic about Linux. We'll see commercial offerings from companies that expect to be selling support contracts, or that are looking at their Linux products as loss leaders; beyond that you see companies expecting to make money entirely from services (like Eazel and Helix Code, who despite being "partners" seem to be developing the same service model, which could lead to much hilarity down the road--but we digress).
There's a couple exceptions out there, like ApplixWare, and of course Night Of The Living Corel. But they're going to have to not merely be better than their free counterparts, they're going to have to virtually blow them out of the water, with reasonable pricing and enough unduplicated features that a reasonable percentage of the audience wants them. And that'll be increasingly difficult. (I'm more impressed by AbiSource's ambition than their product, but Ted--which doesn't get the recognition it deserves--absolutely rocks.)
This does beg a question. How does a company that's selling personal software, rather than the support for the software, make money in the Linux world? This isn't just an idle curiosity; some people think Linux is going to lead the world into a software renaissance, and while that's not impossible, there needs to be space for cottage software companies to actually make money and take off. So far the only ones that have done that seem to be ones that are selling Linux itself. Will AbiSource, for example, ever make money? That seems to be their goal, but nobody needs a support contract for a spreadsheet program--and by choosing to be GPL, they can't take the Ghostscript route of being "free for non-commercial use" and charge business licenses. (This would seem to me to be a workable approach, but some would argue--with justification--it's not in the spirit of open source if you have a commercial limitation like that.)
Nicholas Petreley is perhaps responsible, more than any other person, for helping to move Linux into the mainstream. The effects of having a champion at Infoworld during Linux's formative years, a journalist who was able to not only regularly write columns about Windows but to influence the magazine to actually get front cover stories about this unknown OS--when the rest of the IT world was working diligently to collar itself to Microsoft's leash--cannot be overestimated. As far as I know, Petreley was instrumental in there being a Linuxworld.com in the first place. He's put his financial livelihood on the line for Linux. Can you say the same?
Some Slashdot followers really need to get the "all journalists are fools" stick out of their asses. All history tends to be forgotten if the writer says one thing they don't like, don't believe or--heaven forbid--is actually a mistake. News flash: journalists are humans, with not only the capacity to make mistakes, but with opinions they'll occasionally express. One may, in fact, argue that they're getting paid to express those opinions. That doesn't obligate you to like them or respect them (I have no measurable respect for Fred Moody, for example), but it behooves you to get half a clue yourself before you start slagging them.
As of Mozilla M18, actually, it didn't support XHTML correctly. My website was done entirely in XHTML and CSS, but really bone-simple things like image and blockquote elements weren't displaying. (Not "weren't displaying correctly," they just disappeared.) It's my understanding that Mozilla/NS6 uses a separate XML parser for XHTML files, and the XML parser isn't quite there yet. I'd like to think that's been fixed for the final Netscape 6, but I'm not optimistic--the bug fixes related to this didn't appear to be marked with a real high priority.
...actually, I had Sun's JRE already installed and it automatically picked it up and used that. You may have to actually run the installer to get this effect (rather than a nightly build which is just the files you unpack yourself).
Not to be too sharply critical of your criticism, but the article says "It's interesting to note that, as befits the NeXT heritage of NetInfo, many of the NetInfo-related man pages are dated 1989." And the article contains a link to Apple's tech note on NetInfo.
Please, do read the student's writing completely before criticizing him for not doing his homework. :)
Well, we'll see. Be's position on the "desktop or not?" matter is more or less officially schizophrenic (I know both the Be engineers and marketers would take offense at that characterization, but it seems true enough in practice). At this point, QNX is sending mildly mixed signals that aren't unfamiliar: engineers being involved out of a sense of geek love, but a corporate stance which appears to have only marginal interest in the matter.
In the long term, who's more committed? Maybe it is QNX. Again, the signals from Be are schizophrenic; while their developer support for the desktop is less enthusiastic than QSSL's, you can't walk into Best Buy and buy a boxed RtP set with a printed manual. Despite Be's stated future direction, BeOS is their only currently available product, and QSSL hasn't (to my knowledge) announced any plans for a retail equivalent to BeOS 5 Pro--being in the retail channel is a measurable commitment that hasn't been made with Neutrino yet. (And it's one that could suggest Be is, characteristically, hedging their bets for next year's Annual Focus Shift. In 2001, Be will be repositioned as... oh, I'm sure anything I say won't be as humorous as whatever their marketing gurus come up with, right?)
My more serious concern (about both platforms) is this. If the OS's growth and direction are controlled by a for-profit company, and they have made business choices that do not depend in any substantial way on the OS succeeding on the desktop, there's only so much external "community" forces can do to force that success. I'm sure QNX RtP will gain a cult following... but it remains to be seen whether that'll be enough to break out of the Geek Toy Ghetto that BeOS is in, i.e., a product everyone likes but few people actually bother running. QNX has the advantage of running Linux apps, granted, but a cynic might say that just gives it a little OS/2 mixed in with its touch of Be.
Bizarrely enough, the only new-yet-closed OS company I see really agitating in the way I think will be needed for success is Bill McEwen's new new new new new no we really mean new this time Amiga. Amy the Squirrel may yet have the last laugh.
A comment from "(Mike)(duh)" further on down claims the difference between BeOS and Neutrino is that the latter is attracting developers and BeOS isn't. This is highly misleading. But, I'm not sure Ars-Fartsica is 100% on target, either.
BeOS did have a lot of announced commercial support this time last year--from companies that to date still have shown no interest in Linux. While there are some quantifiable advantages BeOS has in media performance over Linux (and, I would submit, over QNX as well), the difference wasn't technology--nor was it that the companies didn't "trust" open source, as some BeOS cheerleaders claim. It's that Be had strong developer support. These companies wanted somebody there able to offer immediate, detailed support and corporate evangelism. Linux can come close to this sometimes, but it definitionally can't match it, simply because there is no "Linux Company" that gives you access to nearly all the great developers. "It's open, you can make the changes yourself" isn't as good an answer as "we've tracked down that bug and fixed it for you," if (and it's a big if) there's a group able and willing to do the latter. This marketplace reality is why companies target specific Linux distributions--it's because Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera are trying to do for Linux what Be was doing for BeOS. A company may feel comfortable porting to "Red Hat Linux" because they're not doing the port alone, they're doing it with Red Hat's technical--and possibly even financial--support.
So what happened to BeOS? Be stopped providing that support for the desktop, shifting nearly all their DTS resources to BeIA.
I've looked at QNX RtP, and sure, it's pretty neat. But it is in the same position on the deskop that BeOS is--the desktop incarnation of a closed operating system whose company intends to focus their resources on the "appliance" market.
Look at the business and marketing FAQs on get.qnx.com. Do you see anything about their plans for the alternative desktop market? "It's uniquely positioned to become the premier platform for embedded devices." When they're comparing it to Linux, they're talking about its advantages to embedded systems developers:
QNX RtP isn't intended to be a desktop OS contender: it's been released as a "self-hosted development environment" for RtP-based appliances, as well as a demonstration to potential partners of what the system can do.
Just like BeOS is for BeIA now. Rah, rah, focus shift.
QNX is a bunch of great guys, from what I can tell, but don't kid yourself, folks. This is not the next great alternative OS; no operating system is going to be without serious pushing from a corporate developer.
Opening the source helps with developer mindshare, sure, but I'm not sure it'd help much; there'll be enough hackers porting Unix stuff over without it, and it's a rare profit-driven company that gives a fig about such issues--they just want to sell their products and/or services, and that requires a userbase. (If BeOS had a few million users, Corel would have been there porting already. Whether we'd want them there is another question, of course, but I digress.)
In any case, the source isn't going to be completely open in either case; both companies see their kernels as their prized product. In practice, they could use a license like the Aladdin Ghostscript one (essentially, free for most use, but commercial redistribution requires a license), but let's not hold our breath.
... other than the minor technicality that the page you linked to doesn't say anything of the sort, you make a great case.
What Nader is against is giving corporations direct access to the schools as a captive audience to market to. You see, us commie pinko radicals have the crazy notion that schools are for learning more important things than what cola brand to drink and what shoe brand makes you cool. What we're worried about may just be the idea that if an organization starts funding a program, they're going to want to influence its content. I bet you'd scream like a pig stuck with a hot poker if you found out your school was using a lesson plan on agriculture sponsored by PETA, and you wouldn't buy the defense "they're just paying for it, they're not writing it." It hasn't possibly occurred to you that if the lesson plan was sponsored by "Supermarket to the World" ADM, it might have a bias, too?
What Nader's website actually says on that page you linked to is, "It is easy to point the finger at the Marilyn Mansons. But they are merely instruments. Speaker Hastert and Senate majority leader Lott ought to focus on the deeper problems. Behind every Marilyn Manson are corporations and corporate executives who cynically draw their large compensation packages from the fruits of such work." Woo.
Brin makes a good observation in his article (the personality traits that make someone a good gadfly aren't necessarily the ones that you want in a political leader), and the page has a lot of political grandstanding (maybe Nader has some of the qualifications we evidently look for in leaders after all--whoops, I'm being cynical). But pulling a column which is on marketing to children (you know, the page on Nader's site that you found it on puts in a category called "Marketing to Children") and pointing it to say, "Ooh, look, those nasty liberals want to censor everything!" is disingenous at best. Us nasty liberals have our faults, but failing to support free speech and civil liberties is, by and large, not one of them.
Quoting from his web site:
In other words: Don't mind the fact that I have no public experience whatsoever, 'cause it doesn't take any qualifications to destroy things!
I think most Libertarians are perfectly well-meaning, and their perception that government is horribly broken is dead-on. But it's as if the nation was a great mansion with a leaky roof, and they're telling us, "Hey, if we remove the roof entirely we won't have to worry about leaks anymore!" Well, yeah, but....
BeOS's first biggest drawback for this sort of thing right now is no hardware OpenGL support. That should be fixed by the end of the year, if not sooner.
The second drawback is the perception of support. If you set back the clocks 12-18 months you'll find a whole raft of commercial companies pledging support for BeOS, most of whom still haven't pledged support for Linux (although some are coming around). Why? Because Be was out there doing serious evangelizing and making their developers accessible for support to third parties. When Be announced their "focus shift" at the beginning of this year, the evangelism for desktop and media applications completely stopped, and the developer support became... spotty, at best. And the support from companies that needed a corporate face behind the OS evaporated.
This is a kind of alien mindset to the Linux world--but it's the explanation, I think, for why a lot of commercial software does specify a distribution, particularly Red Hat. It's because Red Hat is out there doing that evangelism, and provides what is, for practical purposes, a developer point of contact for the operating system. (I think HelixCode and Eazel both may develop into other such points of contact--the key is the aggregation of informed developers who actually influence the kernel or an API under one roof.)
So: yes, this sort of thing would be right up Be's alley. But a port from Irix to Linux isn't as much of a stretch as a port from Irix to BeOS. Linux provides hardware graphics support that BeOS doesn't yet, which would make developing such a port now impractical. BeOS has maybe 5% of the installed userbase as Linux does, and probably doesn't have the vertical market penetration that Linux does in A/V fields, simply because the applications aren't there.
BeOS is where Linux was three or four years ago. A year ago, I'd have said BeOS was on the track for surpassing it in these vertical markets, but Be, Inc. pretty effectively derailed it. And, without either a commercial company actively developing the API for those markets (how likely is hardware support for high-end OpenGL cards from Be?) or a development model that allows third-party developers to propel the kernel and API themselves (i.e., more open source than it is now), I'm not sure I see it getting back on those rails.
...the computers were only "not ready for prime time" because Xerox management didn't care about making consumer models. Everyone working there, down to the secretaries, had desktop computers with GUIs in the mid-'70s. There's a lot of overstatement on both sides about the relationship of the Mac UI to the Altos UI. The Mac definitely innovated, not just imitated, but at the same time it's disingenuous to imply that the PARC designers were just doodling in the dark until the Macintosh project came along. If Xerox's management had shown even the level of clue that Tandy's management did when Steve Leininger came to them with the TRS-80 (one of the only times "Tandy management" and "clue" could be used together), the computing landscape today might have been very, very different.
While I agree with some of your comments and feelings, Mike, Beatware is not a great example to use. They changed their focus as often as Be did. First they were going to be a productivity company, with BeBasics (Sum-It and Beatware Writer) and BeStudio. They never delivered BeStudio for the Intel platform, then dropped both it and BeBasics and proclaimed they were an Internet applications company, with development work of e-Picture going on as a "web graphics" program.
Then they delivered e-Picture, which was obviously a bet-the-farm kind of operation; as cool as e-Picture is in concept, the fact is that in practice the BeOS release was buggier than a South American jungle. I'd been saving up to buy it on the assumption that the final release would fix the bugs in the preview releases. No such luck. It didn't help things that e-Picture was more expensive than any other BeOS program--to me that wasn't a big issue, but the crashing was. The BeOS release was unusable.
And what was Beatware's response? Not a single bugfix.
All the resources at Beatware have been devoted to the Mac release. From a pragmatic standpoint, that's wise; Mac users consider a $150 vector-based graphics program a bargain, while Be users seemed to be looking for reasons to dismiss it as a "GIF animator". (Beatware's insistence on marketing it as, well, a GIF animator rather than a vector-based graphics program didn't help, of course.) But anyone who was thinking of buying the Be release when it was bug-free was left out in the cold.
This is essentially the same argument I made through the middle of last year about Adamation's ImageElements and AudioElements. There may be a host of good reasons they haven't delivered them on the Intel platform yet, but the cold hard truth is that if the program isn't available nobody's going to buy it. Nearly the same thing is true with Pe for Intel. Maarten Hekkelman could hardly have worked less at promoting the damn thing; he didn't even upload the demo to BeBits until last month--after he'd already announced he didn't see enough demand for it to continue development. (Gosh, Maarten, if people didn't have to already know it existed to go hunting for it, d'ya think there might have been a little demand? Possibly?)
As for Spellswell--hey. I'm very impressed by Word Services and if I was implementing an editor, I'd have used it. But virtually nobody else has. That reduces its value. You needed a network effect for it to take off, and the network effect never happened. Standalone spelling/grammar checkers are a tough sell these days. I worked very briefly at RightSoft, the makers of RightWriter (the only useful grammar checker I've ever seen); they shut down when WordPerfect chose to buy Grammatik as their built-in grammar checker. There was no market for them. Even on the Mac, where Word Services has been successful, it's difficult to find a word processor that doesn't have a spelling checker built into it.
I'm not convinced the BeOS commercial software market is ever going to exist, and I think some of the fault does lie with Be. But I'm not convinced they're alone. There are better and worse choices to make for a program in that market. A low-cost MIDI sequencer might be a good choice; an office package was obviously a good choice for Gobe. But, say, porting a high-end SQL database server to BeOS is painting a big fat target on your ass, because all you can do is hope a handful of developers will want to develop front ends for it (or add front-end capability to their existing products)--if you're really lucky, this gives you a total market of, oh, two or three until (and if) their client software comes out. A stand-alone spelling checker with an API people need to explicitly support (albeit a simple one) may be less of a gamble, but it's still a relatively high-risk product--like the SQL database, it's entirely dependent on the "market leaders" deigning to offer support.
Good luck with your future endeavors, wherever they end up taking you.