Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.
Funny how Microsoft tried this in 1998 (remember the original Active Desktop?) and everyone hated it. Now that RSS is here, Microsoft has to get on the bandwagon, because the open world did it right.
So much for Microsoft's assertions that our side does not innovate.
Everyone's read ESR's open letters, but the real, convincing, extremely well-written case was done by Ganesh Prashad in a Linux Today editorial yesterday. Ganesh lays it out in terms Sun can understand, without ESR's controversial style. This article is a must read for us, but it's also something that should be absolutely wallpapered in Scott McNealy's office, and maybe his home too.
Ganesh very clearly demonstrates how Sun will lose J2EE's 'lingua franca of business logic' status to.NET if they don't let the community galvanize and help out, and the only way to do that is to open source the Java core.
It is called cross-licensing. They are saying if you want to use this technology, then you agree that you are not going to come back and sue Microsoft
That's all well and good, and Microsoft will even "generously" give you a free license. But it's poison anyway. Here's why.
Their "free" license is only "free as in beer." It specifically prohibits you from sublicensing it to someone else. This means you can't use Microsoft's "freely licensed" technology in any project whose license meets the Open Source Definition.
Convenient for them, isn't it? They get to say "look, we're open, we're free, competitiors can use our technology at no charge" while they've quietly locked out the only real competition they have these days.
No thanks. I'll take SPF over "MS Caller ID" any day.
They aren't tracking YOU, they are tracking the beer. Unless I'm missing something, they have no way of connecting any one person with any one beer.
Ah, but just wait 'till they brew RFID tags directly into the beer! Then they'll not only connect you with the beer, but with every beer you've ever consumed! And they'll know about everything else you do, buy, consume, etc. because those RFID tags will bury their way into your stomach lining and scream "LOOK AT ME, I AM A NUMBER!" forevermore.
(It's funny. Laugh. Or be paranoid and don't... who knows?)
Seriously. This is not a troll, so hear me out here. I love Linux and I won't use anything else, including on my desktop.
The real problem here is Linus's stubborn refusal to freeze the driver API's. At the very least, the driver API's should be frozen during each major release cycle; i.e. a driver which loads on 2.6.0 should continue to work properly on 2.6.999. If there are big new exciting things that force an API change, it should wait until 2.8.0.
I say that this is Linus's fault because it's well-documented that the moving-target API's are his clear decision. And it's a bad decision. If he wants large-scale adoption of Linux at the end-user level, he's going to have to realize that most end-users aren't smart enough to do their own driver integration -- but they might be able to download a driver off the 'net or from a CD, and see "Gruntle FOOset driver for Linux 2.6" and expect that it'll work on any Linux distribution that includes a 2.6 kernel.
Until the driver API is stabilized, Linux is going to have a hard time finding users outside the hacker set.
Actually, 300mm is the size of the factory itself. It's so expensive because it has to be staffed by nanites instead of people. Even the Keebler Elves are too big to fit inside.
Intel is pushing its agenda with BTX, seemingly with blatant disregard for everyone else. Unfortunately, the world will fall in line, because the world is populated by idiots.
What I'd really like to see from Intel is a standard form factor for "blade" servers. Every manufacturer who does blades has its own chassis with its own proprietary form factor, and that's one reason blade systems aren't really selling too well -- they're not future-proof because you're at the whim of one manufacturer's potentially changing designs.
If Intel were to specify a "BladeTX" (or whatever) form factor, any manufacturer's blades could go in any manufacturer's chassis. Imagine having Sun and IBM blades in the same box! Imagine buying a blade server chassis and actually being able to find blades for it twelve months later!
C'mon Intel, use your form factor dictating clout to do something useful instead of forcing everyone to load up the landfills with ATX just because you can't keep your power consumption and heat dissipation down.
With the way games are written these days (requiring massive amounts of time and money), game development will have to undergo some pretty radical changes
Not so fast.
How many games do you know of, that run only on one architecture?
There are a lot of games out there that run on PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, and PC/Windows... and maybe the occasional Mac port. They're using portability frameworks to make sure they can reach all markets. In some sense, this could mean that the games world is actually ahead of the productivity apps world in making sure they've got portable code out there to work with.
If your game engine is already portable, it's not a monumental effort to make a Linux port available if someone decides there's a reasonable sized market for it.
This is fantastic news. AMD 64's are outselling Itanics by a huge margin. CPU buyers are demonstrating quite clearly that they want a good migration path. Itanic was such an inferior design that Intel is now forced to build a chip that is compatible with AMD's instructions.
This means that we now will have another generation of chips from Intel and AMD whose instruction sets are compatible with each other. Prices will remain reasonable because there is competition. And in the 64-bit world, computers will remain inexpensive -- unless you buy that OS and office suite that end up costing more than the hardware, but you wouldn't do that because you know better, right?:)
This kind of keystroke is called SAK (Secure Attention Key), as it's not specific to Windows NT.
SAK is an keystroke (or other event, for example sending "break" on a Sun serial port) that the OS guarantees only the Operating System can ever handle.
And this is rather pathetic, because IBM put the SysRq key on their keyboards ever since the original PCfor exactly that purpose. Leave it to Microsoft to completely ignore the way things are supposed to be and play in their own, Not-Invented-Here universe instead.
So... DoubleClick says it's coming up with a way to evade the pop-up blocker.
I'd imagine it looks something like what sites like www.tek-tips.com are doing. Instead of a top-level window, they do some fancy CSS that slides a box in front of the viewable content on the screen. Tek-Tips is using it as part of their content, because they want to bring something to your attention, but I could easily see this method being abused by annoying ad campaigns e.g. DoubleClick.
That'll be a lot harder to block, but it'll be blocked eventually. *sigh* just like spam vs. spam blocking, it's going to be another arms race.
Here in the New York area, the power company (Con Edison) has a broadband network. You know how they did it?
They used the fact that they already own the poles, to string up their own fiber optic cable.
This, to me, is the primary indication that broadband over power lines just isn't going to happen. When even the power company doesn't believe in it, you know it's a dud.
On its face this is a great announcement, but we must have all the usual concerns. Will it work in Linux? Are the hardware API's going to be published, so someone can write Linux drivers? Or is this going to be the next Centrino, needlessly obfuscated to give Intel's friends in Redmond yet another unfair advantage?
I'm also concerned that a new audio hardware API may introduce way too many opportunities for things like Digital Restrictions Management. Long term, doing that is of course futile because someone will find a way around it, but that doesn't stop some hardware makers from setting out the legal minefield anyway.
It's a sad state of affairs when politics and litigation are at the forefront of geeks' minds when technology ought to be.
Applications moving behind the glass. Any application accessible from any location, without having to load it on "your" computer first. Basically, it's a return to mainframe-like computing, but without the green screens.
Well-designed hosting environments can make this happen. Portable API's such as those available in Unix/Linux and in Java help make it happen, and help make the apps relocatable. Truly transparent network filesystems like NFS allow for application and server load balancing. Transparent graphics systems like X11 help make the apps truly independent of the display they're viewed on -- applications moving to the Web is a big piece, too.
This was the original vision of "network computing" and it's still a good idea -- it's still being worked on and there are places where it's being deployed. The reason why the original McNealy/Ellison vision of network computing failed is because they required everyone to move exclusively to pure Java applications. In reality, most environments can't make that big of a move that quickly.
So what we're seeing is a gradual shift of applications off the desktop and back into the data center. For the time being, most users are still using a fat PC to access them, but IT organizations will wake up one morning and suddenly realize that everything has moved behind the glass and they really are in a utility computing environment. If they've done it right, they will then be able to move applications and storage resources around the data center without an impact on the users. This is the promise of utility computing and it's a good idea.
And for organizations that don't want the expense of running their own data center, they can enlist the services of a hosting company that specializes in this type of thing -- IT keeps control of its applications, while someone else keeps the air conditioners, UPS's, and routers running.
Providing a way to run Unix apps on Windows isn't exactly a threatening proposition. In fact, the open source community has done the same thing -- Cygwin has been around for years.
If anything, putting Unix API's on Windows provides one more way to write cross-platform applications. Remember, the Unix API's are open standards, so if you write your software to run on them, you've got something that now runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I personally have used Cygwin (SFU would work too) to avoid writing Windows native software. Just load Cygwin, bring over the standard build, tune, and ship.
Microsoft SFU also provides NFS and NIS implementations on Windows, which I have found useful for introducing Linux and Unix into previously Windows-only environments.
The point I am trying to make here is that I have had nothing but bad experiences with RealPlayer. With RealAlternative, I can watch.RM files in Windows Media player without issue, and WMP is one of the few Microsoft products that I have to give kudos to. There just aren't many out there that are any better.
People said that about Internet Explorer 5, too. Back before Microsoft finished off Netscape. Now that they have a near-monopoly in web browsers, Internet Explorer is languishing in disrepair. The new version of Mozilla kicks its ass in every way, but IE still has the lion's share of the market, thanks to Microsoft's anticompetitive business practices.
Do you want that to happen in the digital media world as well? It is your responsibility, given a choice of WMP and RealMedia links on any web site, to select the RealMedia version. Not doing so will eventually cause webmasters to only offer WMP. That's when Real goes out of business, Microsoft gets a monopoly on digital media, DRM shows up everywhere, and the Microsoft Everything lock-in perpetuates for another decade or more.
I, for one, do not want that to happen. That's why I absolutely never select a Windows Media link when other formats are available. And when it's the only format available, I complain to the webmaster.
Mozilla is as useful as it is because the Web standardized on HTML, an open standard, before Microsoft entered the game. There is no such widely accepted open standard for media. Yes, the Ogg suite of protocols and codecs is both open and very good, but it isn't yet a widely deployed standard -- and it'll never become one if all of you Slashbots complain about Real while clicking on Windows Media links.
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software?
I didn't say that we shouldn't care about free software. We should. I do. You do too, evidently.
I'm saying that most people don't, and I don't expect that to change. That's why free software uncoincidentally began succeeding when it actually became a better value to more users, instead of simply having freedom as an end in itself.
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software?
I didn't say that we shouldn't care about free software. We should. I do. You do too, evidently.
I'm saying that most people don't, and I don't expect that to change. That's why free software uncoincidentally began succeeding when it actually became a better value to more users, instead of simply having freedom as an end in itself.
Software is a tool to get a job done. People do not turn on their computers to experience freedom. They turn on their computers to write, communicate, calculate, or whatever.
Any given set of software will succeed in the marketplace when it presents a greater value proposition than all the other options. Linux has been growing like gangbusters in the server space because it represents a better value than proprietary Unix, and more recently, Windows servers. Linux is starting to make inroads on the corporate desktop for the same reason: customers are beginning to see the lack of value in Microsoft's offering (think ratio of price to functionality), so as free software's value proposition continues to become more attractive, more customers will make the jump.
RMS seems to think that computer users will suddenly say "oh, I want to be liberated from the chains of proprietary software!" and make the jump because they value freedom. In the end, they don't care. They just want to get their work done with the least amount of effort required. This is why Open Source PR campaigns have succeeded where RMS's efforts have failed: the message was presented in terms of value to the user rather than as a philosophical abstract that your typical IT manager simply doesn't care about.
Yes, there are people who value software freedom as an end in itself. I happen to be one of them. But unless Microsoft starts slaughtering puppies or something, there aren't going to be enough of us to make a difference. Software freedom, for the rest of the world, is a means to an end: that end being "software that doesn't suck" (as ESR once put it), and that lack of suckage is being brought on by the benefits of collaborative development we already know about.
RMS was a visionary. He started the free software movement, and he contributed a brilliantly built compiler suite and a bunch of other tools. But his PR has been a 20 year disaster, and it is definitely time for him to step down.
Would the sotry submitter agree with the (equivalently valid) statement that "Microsoft Windows is set to become the basis for just about every form of personal computing, according to Bill Gates, and he should know what he is talking about"?
Except that Bill Gates had nothing to do with the invention of personal computers, so your analogy falls apart right away there. You could credit personal computing to Edmund Berkeley (who conceptualized the "Simon" plans) or maybe some folks at Heathkit, Altair, etc. who designed and built the first mass-market personal computers. Bill Gates was, as he continues to be to this day, merely someone who plays the "me too, and now that I'm here, the rest of you can get lost" game very effectively.
Calling Bill Gates the father of personal computing would be about as accurate as calling him the father of the Internet (a term which Vint Cerf doesn't like -- but it's basically true).
Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.
That's pretty much exactly what SuSE did with their Openexchange server. Instead of attempting to build a product that works on any Linux distribution, they just attached a purpose-specific Linux distribution to it. You don't install this product on top of your out-of-the-box Linux; you instead boot from the CD and you install it all at once.
This is not in regard to quality (I think it's shoddy, but that's irrelevant). This is in regard to the amount of damage it will do to the computer industry. The number of competing products which will never see the light of day because of unfair competition. The millions of man-hours which will be spent in 2004 fixing its problems. Windows 2003 is my vote for the worst of 2003.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully this bill will prevent abusive patents from making it out the gates.
Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.
Funny how Microsoft tried this in 1998 (remember the original Active Desktop?) and everyone hated it. Now that RSS is here, Microsoft has to get on the bandwagon, because the open world did it right.
So much for Microsoft's assertions that our side does not innovate.
Everyone's read ESR's open letters, but the real, convincing, extremely well-written case was done by Ganesh Prashad in a Linux Today editorial yesterday. Ganesh lays it out in terms Sun can understand, without ESR's controversial style. This article is a must read for us, but it's also something that should be absolutely wallpapered in Scott McNealy's office, and maybe his home too.
.NET if they don't let the community galvanize and help out, and the only way to do that is to open source the Java core.
Ganesh very clearly demonstrates how Sun will lose J2EE's 'lingua franca of business logic' status to
It is called cross-licensing. They are saying if you want to use this technology, then you agree that you are not going to come back and sue Microsoft
That's all well and good, and Microsoft will even "generously" give you a free license. But it's poison anyway. Here's why.
Their "free" license is only "free as in beer." It specifically prohibits you from sublicensing it to someone else. This means you can't use Microsoft's "freely licensed" technology in any project whose license meets the Open Source Definition.
Convenient for them, isn't it? They get to say "look, we're open, we're free, competitiors can use our technology at no charge" while they've quietly locked out the only real competition they have these days.
No thanks. I'll take SPF over "MS Caller ID" any day.
They aren't tracking YOU, they are tracking the beer. Unless I'm missing something, they have no way of connecting any one person with any one beer.
... who knows?)
Ah, but just wait 'till they brew RFID tags directly into the beer! Then they'll not only connect you with the beer, but with every beer you've ever consumed! And they'll know about everything else you do, buy, consume, etc. because those RFID tags will bury their way into your stomach lining and scream "LOOK AT ME, I AM A NUMBER!" forevermore.
(It's funny. Laugh. Or be paranoid and don't
Seriously. This is not a troll, so hear me out here. I love Linux and I won't use anything else, including on my desktop.
The real problem here is Linus's stubborn refusal to freeze the driver API's. At the very least, the driver API's should be frozen during each major release cycle; i.e. a driver which loads on 2.6.0 should continue to work properly on 2.6.999. If there are big new exciting things that force an API change, it should wait until 2.8.0.
I say that this is Linus's fault because it's well-documented that the moving-target API's are his clear decision. And it's a bad decision. If he wants large-scale adoption of Linux at the end-user level, he's going to have to realize that most end-users aren't smart enough to do their own driver integration -- but they might be able to download a driver off the 'net or from a CD, and see "Gruntle FOOset driver for Linux 2.6" and expect that it'll work on any Linux distribution that includes a 2.6 kernel.
Until the driver API is stabilized, Linux is going to have a hard time finding users outside the hacker set.
Actually, 300mm is the size of the factory itself. It's so expensive because it has to be staffed by nanites instead of people. Even the Keebler Elves are too big to fit inside.
Intel is pushing its agenda with BTX, seemingly with blatant disregard for everyone else. Unfortunately, the world will fall in line, because the world is populated by idiots.
What I'd really like to see from Intel is a standard form factor for "blade" servers. Every manufacturer who does blades has its own chassis with its own proprietary form factor, and that's one reason blade systems aren't really selling too well -- they're not future-proof because you're at the whim of one manufacturer's potentially changing designs.
If Intel were to specify a "BladeTX" (or whatever) form factor, any manufacturer's blades could go in any manufacturer's chassis. Imagine having Sun and IBM blades in the same box! Imagine buying a blade server chassis and actually being able to find blades for it twelve months later!
C'mon Intel, use your form factor dictating clout to do something useful instead of forcing everyone to load up the landfills with ATX just because you can't keep your power consumption and heat dissipation down.
With the way games are written these days (requiring massive amounts of time and money), game development will have to undergo some pretty radical changes
Not so fast.
How many games do you know of, that run only on one architecture?
There are a lot of games out there that run on PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, and PC/Windows... and maybe the occasional Mac port. They're using portability frameworks to make sure they can reach all markets. In some sense, this could mean that the games world is actually ahead of the productivity apps world in making sure they've got portable code out there to work with.
If your game engine is already portable, it's not a monumental effort to make a Linux port available if someone decides there's a reasonable sized market for it.
This is fantastic news. AMD 64's are outselling Itanics by a huge margin. CPU buyers are demonstrating quite clearly that they want a good migration path. Itanic was such an inferior design that Intel is now forced to build a chip that is compatible with AMD's instructions.
:)
This means that we now will have another generation of chips from Intel and AMD whose instruction sets are compatible with each other. Prices will remain reasonable because there is competition. And in the 64-bit world, computers will remain inexpensive -- unless you buy that OS and office suite that end up costing more than the hardware, but you wouldn't do that because you know better, right?
This kind of keystroke is called SAK (Secure Attention Key), as it's not specific to Windows NT. SAK is an keystroke (or other event, for example sending "break" on a Sun serial port) that the OS guarantees only the Operating System can ever handle.
And this is rather pathetic, because IBM put the SysRq key on their keyboards ever since the original PC for exactly that purpose. Leave it to Microsoft to completely ignore the way things are supposed to be and play in their own, Not-Invented-Here universe instead.
So... DoubleClick says it's coming up with a way to evade the pop-up blocker.
I'd imagine it looks something like what sites like www.tek-tips.com are doing. Instead of a top-level window, they do some fancy CSS that slides a box in front of the viewable content on the screen. Tek-Tips is using it as part of their content, because they want to bring something to your attention, but I could easily see this method being abused by annoying ad campaigns e.g. DoubleClick.
That'll be a lot harder to block, but it'll be blocked eventually. *sigh* just like spam vs. spam blocking, it's going to be another arms race.
Here in the New York area, the power company (Con Edison) has a broadband network. You know how they did it?
They used the fact that they already own the poles, to string up their own fiber optic cable.
This, to me, is the primary indication that broadband over power lines just isn't going to happen. When even the power company doesn't believe in it, you know it's a dud.
On its face this is a great announcement, but we must have all the usual concerns. Will it work in Linux? Are the hardware API's going to be published, so someone can write Linux drivers? Or is this going to be the next Centrino, needlessly obfuscated to give Intel's friends in Redmond yet another unfair advantage?
I'm also concerned that a new audio hardware API may introduce way too many opportunities for things like Digital Restrictions Management. Long term, doing that is of course futile because someone will find a way around it, but that doesn't stop some hardware makers from setting out the legal minefield anyway.
It's a sad state of affairs when politics and litigation are at the forefront of geeks' minds when technology ought to be.
Applications moving behind the glass. Any application accessible from any location, without having to load it on "your" computer first. Basically, it's a return to mainframe-like computing, but without the green screens.
Well-designed hosting environments can make this happen. Portable API's such as those available in Unix/Linux and in Java help make it happen, and help make the apps relocatable. Truly transparent network filesystems like NFS allow for application and server load balancing. Transparent graphics systems like X11 help make the apps truly independent of the display they're viewed on -- applications moving to the Web is a big piece, too.
This was the original vision of "network computing" and it's still a good idea -- it's still being worked on and there are places where it's being deployed. The reason why the original McNealy/Ellison vision of network computing failed is because they required everyone to move exclusively to pure Java applications. In reality, most environments can't make that big of a move that quickly.
So what we're seeing is a gradual shift of applications off the desktop and back into the data center. For the time being, most users are still using a fat PC to access them, but IT organizations will wake up one morning and suddenly realize that everything has moved behind the glass and they really are in a utility computing environment. If they've done it right, they will then be able to move applications and storage resources around the data center without an impact on the users. This is the promise of utility computing and it's a good idea.
And for organizations that don't want the expense of running their own data center, they can enlist the services of a hosting company that specializes in this type of thing -- IT keeps control of its applications, while someone else keeps the air conditioners, UPS's, and routers running.
OK, is backup/archive solution, but 5 to 8 hours to transfer all disk, how do you back this up? :-)
:)
Easy. You buy a second one.
Providing a way to run Unix apps on Windows isn't exactly a threatening proposition. In fact, the open source community has done the same thing -- Cygwin has been around for years.
If anything, putting Unix API's on Windows provides one more way to write cross-platform applications. Remember, the Unix API's are open standards, so if you write your software to run on them, you've got something that now runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I personally have used Cygwin (SFU would work too) to avoid writing Windows native software. Just load Cygwin, bring over the standard build, tune, and ship.
Microsoft SFU also provides NFS and NIS implementations on Windows, which I have found useful for introducing Linux and Unix into previously Windows-only environments.
The point I am trying to make here is that I have had nothing but bad experiences with RealPlayer. With RealAlternative, I can watch .RM files in Windows Media player without issue, and WMP is one of the few Microsoft products that I have to give kudos to. There just aren't many out there that are any better.
People said that about Internet Explorer 5, too. Back before Microsoft finished off Netscape. Now that they have a near-monopoly in web browsers, Internet Explorer is languishing in disrepair. The new version of Mozilla kicks its ass in every way, but IE still has the lion's share of the market, thanks to Microsoft's anticompetitive business practices.
Do you want that to happen in the digital media world as well? It is your responsibility, given a choice of WMP and RealMedia links on any web site, to select the RealMedia version. Not doing so will eventually cause webmasters to only offer WMP. That's when Real goes out of business, Microsoft gets a monopoly on digital media, DRM shows up everywhere, and the Microsoft Everything lock-in perpetuates for another decade or more.
I, for one, do not want that to happen. That's why I absolutely never select a Windows Media link when other formats are available. And when it's the only format available, I complain to the webmaster.
Mozilla is as useful as it is because the Web standardized on HTML, an open standard, before Microsoft entered the game. There is no such widely accepted open standard for media. Yes, the Ogg suite of protocols and codecs is both open and very good, but it isn't yet a widely deployed standard -- and it'll never become one if all of you Slashbots complain about Real while clicking on Windows Media links.
Unfortunately, this only gives them another excuse to shift the Office file formats to something that is encrypted, DRM'ed, patented, etc.
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software?
I didn't say that we shouldn't care about free software. We should. I do. You do too, evidently.
I'm saying that most people don't, and I don't expect that to change. That's why free software uncoincidentally began succeeding when it actually became a better value to more users, instead of simply having freedom as an end in itself.
Tell me, then, why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software?
I didn't say that we shouldn't care about free software. We should. I do. You do too, evidently.
I'm saying that most people don't, and I don't expect that to change. That's why free software uncoincidentally began succeeding when it actually became a better value to more users, instead of simply having freedom as an end in itself.
Software is a tool to get a job done. People do not turn on their computers to experience freedom. They turn on their computers to write, communicate, calculate, or whatever.
Any given set of software will succeed in the marketplace when it presents a greater value proposition than all the other options. Linux has been growing like gangbusters in the server space because it represents a better value than proprietary Unix, and more recently, Windows servers. Linux is starting to make inroads on the corporate desktop for the same reason: customers are beginning to see the lack of value in Microsoft's offering (think ratio of price to functionality), so as free software's value proposition continues to become more attractive, more customers will make the jump.
RMS seems to think that computer users will suddenly say "oh, I want to be liberated from the chains of proprietary software!" and make the jump because they value freedom. In the end, they don't care. They just want to get their work done with the least amount of effort required. This is why Open Source PR campaigns have succeeded where RMS's efforts have failed: the message was presented in terms of value to the user rather than as a philosophical abstract that your typical IT manager simply doesn't care about.
Yes, there are people who value software freedom as an end in itself. I happen to be one of them. But unless Microsoft starts slaughtering puppies or something, there aren't going to be enough of us to make a difference. Software freedom, for the rest of the world, is a means to an end: that end being "software that doesn't suck" (as ESR once put it), and that lack of suckage is being brought on by the benefits of collaborative development we already know about.
RMS was a visionary. He started the free software movement, and he contributed a brilliantly built compiler suite and a bunch of other tools. But his PR has been a 20 year disaster, and it is definitely time for him to step down.
Would the sotry submitter agree with the (equivalently valid) statement that "Microsoft Windows is set to become the basis for just about every form of personal computing, according to Bill Gates, and he should know what he is talking about"?
Except that Bill Gates had nothing to do with the invention of personal computers, so your analogy falls apart right away there. You could credit personal computing to Edmund Berkeley (who conceptualized the "Simon" plans) or maybe some folks at Heathkit, Altair, etc. who designed and built the first mass-market personal computers. Bill Gates was, as he continues to be to this day, merely someone who plays the "me too, and now that I'm here, the rest of you can get lost" game very effectively.
Calling Bill Gates the father of personal computing would be about as accurate as calling him the father of the Internet (a term which Vint Cerf doesn't like -- but it's basically true).
Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.
That's pretty much exactly what SuSE did with their Openexchange server. Instead of attempting to build a product that works on any Linux distribution, they just attached a purpose-specific Linux distribution to it. You don't install this product on top of your out-of-the-box Linux; you instead boot from the CD and you install it all at once.
VMware ESX Server does the same thing.
This is not in regard to quality (I think it's shoddy, but that's irrelevant). This is in regard to the amount of damage it will do to the computer industry. The number of competing products which will never see the light of day because of unfair competition. The millions of man-hours which will be spent in 2004 fixing its problems. Windows 2003 is my vote for the worst of 2003.