I read this article earlier and submitted the story myself. What really caught my attention was this paragraph:
For the future, we are thinking about a "Mandrake Foundation" which would be a non-profit organization that focuses on developing the Mandrake Linux distribution exclusively. It would be financed partly by Club memberships and/or donations and/or by a "Street performer"-like system, and partly by companies that make money with Mandrake products, including MandrakeSoft. We think this approach would be much clearer for everyone to understand, and would also provide a more secure future for the Mandrake Linux distribution. It would also help MandrakeSoft become a more successful and profitable company by cutting most of its development costs.
Uou. That is to me some pretty cool idea. I am not sure this is the way to go, but it sounds promising. The other viable model for Mandrake would be to sell solutions (customized desktop environments plus support) to big companies, which is what redhat seems to be trying to do with their upcoming "corporate desktop" thing. Mandrake should go ahead in the same direction. They have a much more polished desktop product.
"Operating Systems Used to Access Google - July 2002"
Mac 4%
Linux 1%
Other 4%
the rest being windows.
I see at least 3 reasons why this figure is an underestimate:
Many people change their browser identification as IE in Win* to be able to read moronic web pages (they shouldn't do this BTW)
It is likely that given the variety of browsers and Linux flavors, many Linux visitors to Google are not counted properly
People using computers in wealthy countries have both the money to pay M$ licenses and surf the web more frequently. Google's stats give a higher statistical weight to these users.
I still think giving a figure for Linux' market share with no data to back it up is vapor. But I am pretty sure Google's figure is an underestimate.
And by the way, the article gives a very nice overview of Linux on the desktop today, success stories included, from a mainstream media point of view. By far, the less interesting bit of the article is this 3.9 Market share figure for Linux...
I was really happy when I saw this bit in the press release:
KDE usability.
The
KDE Usability Project has
improved the KDE User Interface Guidelines
compliance of almost all applications. Additional usability enhancements were made to
the panel (Kicker), the desktop calculator (KCalc)
and the screenshot utility (KSnapshot).
This is really cool. They are following very clear GUI Guidelines (see link above) and they have the Usability team checking that every application follows these guidelines. IMHO Usability (more than Features) is the only major missing link in the GNU/Linux desktop. I am really looking forward to KDE 3.1...
Very nice and refreshing interview, I wish TheKompany the best. The only part that was really shocking to me was the following:
The other way we differ [from Evolution] is that we didn't set out to make an Outlook clone, as a matter of fact the UI designer has never even seen Outlook
He is talking about Aethera, and comparing it to Ximian's Evolution. It really strikes me that their User Interface designer has never seen Outlook, the most used email client. He should IMHO. I heartly agree on not having to clone Outlook, but you need to take a look at what people are used to, just as a reference. And a lot of the potential users of Aethera are now using Outlook.
That said, I should probably add that I have never seen Outlook myself but I am not a UI designer for an email client;-)
Telstra simply evaluate the alternatives. That's normal business procedure.
Exactly. GNU/Linux has gotten big enough (with IBM's, HP and now SUN support) in bussiness to make it irrelevant to post a story telling us that some big corporation is considering deployment of Linux desktops. What's the point ?. Help this company negotiate with M$ ?. Slashdot editors, please, post the story if it happens, not if it might happen. No news here...
Microsoft has shown through its history that they do whatever it takes to maintain or increase their market share. In the government sector they have everything to loose. How do you explain a tax-payer that her/his money is used for paying huge license costs to run microsoft software, when similar (and in many cases better) software is available for f***g free ?. And, in particular, in the US, how do you explain that this money goes to the company proved to be a monoply by yourself (the government) ?.(there are several other excellent reasons for a government switch to free software which are perhaps harder to explain to an average -as opposed to geek- person).
Microsoft know all of this and will do whatever it takes to keep their grip in the government. Expect more "donations", cost cuts, etc. They will not just sit there and see how their empire falls down...
Thank you Bruce
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I thought I should say this loud. Bruce Perens is becoming one of the public persons I respect the most. He is resigning from a comfortable position at HP in order to be able to be more active in politics, and he wants to be politically active in order to defend the public interest, and ideals like freedom.
Most people have unfortunately ethics a posteriori. They (we) do whatever benefits them (us), and then find an ethical justification for whatever we do or we are. He is going the other around.
Bruce, let me just say thank you. People like you make this world a little nicer:-)
The single greatest consequence of a unified document format for all the Linux office suites is the economy in filter code. One single filter would be enough to go from, say, M$ Word 97(or whatever they call it) to the XML word-processing format, and would work for _all_ GNU/Linux office suites.
That in turn would allow cooperation between all of these projects on getting just one filter but get it right, thus avoiding unnecessary multiplication of efforts. In short, I hope this idea goes through, everybody (but M$) wins...
A primary objective was to stabilize the C++ ABI; we believe that the interface to the compiler and the C++ standard library are now stable.
Hopefully they will freeze the C++ interface for a long time and linux/bsd distributions will not have backward compatibility issues when upgrading GCC. THANK YOU SO MUCH to al the GCC developers/contributors.
Shouldn't the WWW Consortium (W3C), instead of the big corporations, be proposing Web standards?. I haven't seen any mention to them in the PDF document from Intel.
I seemed to feel a tone of 'manifest destiny' in the article. Is it just me who believes that philosophy is completely irrelevant to Linux?
It is just you:-) Let me put it this way, while people like Linus himself consider Linux mostly a "fun activity", people like Stallman and the like have a philosophical approach to free software. The whole thing we call Free Software, including the GNU utilities, Linux kernel, KDE/GNOME, etc., represent to some of us more than simply a technical choice. It is a philosophical, ethical choice. We LOVE FREEDOM, and that's why we support Free Software. It is also a social model: would you rather have a world with a huge monopolistic corporation deciding everything for you ?. Or would you rather have a world with tens of thousands of little companies/consultants. Free Software favors the latter. If any company gets ugly, the customers are not locked to use this company.
When I "show" Linux or help someone to use it, I tell them about the Linux community, Linux history, philosophy and all. And many people love it and use it just because of that. Even if some times things are a little more tricky (still) under GNU/Linux systems. Things will get better. It's just a matter of keeping a mature, adult advocacy (as opposed to childish bashing), and keep writting code, docs, translations, testing and reporting bugs. We can all help.
The article is (intentionally? ) misleading about the focus of open source software. It is all about
the freedom to change/customize/see the source code. Not about freeware.
From the article:
Soon, open source proponents argued, PC users would be liberated from the burden of paying for software. The Linux operating system, and other "open source" alternatives written by devoted bands of volunteer programmers, would be available to anyone for the cost of a download.
This is very unfair. They are putting in our mouse things we (open source advocates) never said. Nobody has a problem with people making money out of open source/free software.
It implies more competition, better wealth distribution, and less likelyhood of a vendor-level monopoly (than it would be in case big vendors dominated the market)
M$ Tax: M$ bullies the big vendors, and forces them to sell Windows-only PCs. But they cannot go after the thousands of small, independent vendors.
Half percent of the US market is out of their monopolic hands in
this sense.
I bet the numbers are even more favorable to white-box vendors in the rest of the world. At least my feeling is that in poorer countries most of the PC sells are white-box type.
First of all, thank you so much for providing the most useful site on the net.
I understand part of the success of Google has to do with the efficient use of open source/free software. How about in-house software development?. Do you folks develop open source software as a way of giving back to the community ?. What are your thoughts on free software ?
IDG: Nine states and the District of Columbia, in their pursuit of tough antitrust remedies on Microsoft that go beyond what the company agreed to in its proposed settlement with the Department of Justice ( news - web sites), have fought to force Microsoft to give away the code to Internet Explorer. If the judge approves that remedy proposal, do you see any benefit to users and developers?
Andreessen: Generally, Microsoft is a partner of Loudcloud, and we work really well with them at Loudcloud because we support their technology and we have a bunch of customers running on Windows. So we don't take formal positions on remedies or lawsuits.
So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.
A lot of posters are concerned about the possible negative PR this could bring for Linux if people get frustrated. I think that Lindows prestige is at stake, not Linux'.
If you follow the link to wal-mart in the article, it just reads:
These computers do not ship with Microsoft Windows. They ship with an exciting new UNIX based Operating System (OS) named Lindows. This exciting new OS delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs. These computer systems are a perfect low cost alternative to computers preloaded with Microsoft Windows.
That is: no mention at all of Linux.They sell "Lindows" as "Easy UNIX". Having people try alternative OSs is a good thing anyway. Let's see how it turns out, it looks exciting to me so far.
I guess many of you are not aware (please correct me if I am wrong) that even if two RPM based distros follow the LSB 100%, their binary RPMS may not be compatible. The reason is that different distros use different names for packages, or group software in different packages. So, when you install a package for distro X, you need to solve the dependencies according to the packaging scheme for distro X.
Having four distros choosing a standard for packaging (among other things) is great. Now, I hope they realize the enemy is not RedHat, but M$. This is going to be good for GNU, Linux and FS (if it works). I hope Mandrake and Red Hat also join in, so that they can all focus on selling support, documentation, services and boxed versions of their OS, but the end user will have an easier life keeping up to date... and they will have an easier life keeping users happy:-)
As much as competitive pricing is a good thing, I hope there's some margin left at the end of the day or this market will turn into a winner take all for whoever's got the motivation and money to stick it out.
And we all know who the winner will be. M$ is already a huge monopoly in other markets, they can afford to lose some money for a while here, get the competitors out of business, and then raise the prices again as high as they want.:-(
It's fast and stable, and yet it sucks? What more could you want? Uhhh, hello! CDE is NOT Solaris. It's merely a front-end, much like Gnome, KDE, et al are front-ends. You can put Gnome on Solaris and suddenly it's just as shiny as Linux. Moron.
I cannot disagree more. Both with the contents of what you say and with the tone of your response (there is no need to say moron simply because you dissagree). The point is: DO YOU REALLY THINK Gnome and KDE are FRONT ENDS ?. This is not the case. The desktop environments are NOT front ends to the kernel. They run on top of it, which is a different thing. Some of the software distributed with in these environments could qualify as front-end (for example CD burners, which are mainly front ends to cdrecord), but please !.
( As for whoever moderated your message: someone insulting another poster should be modded as flamebait)
Some of the followups to that article mention that a working version of the modem driver can be obtained from http://www.heby.de/ltmodem
Yes, but there is a later post by the author of the article, insisting that it is not supported: "Well, I opened the ltmodem source kit and started doing some investigating. It appears that this chipset is unsupported by the ltmodem driver. The scanPCI program does not find a supported card and lspci shows an ID that indicates it is this chipset: http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/agere/ager e_SV92P.ht ml I pulled the card and inspected the chips. It uses the SV92P chip. It is unsupported."
This is a real issue, and it seems to be still open, so I ask: has anyone really GOTTEN THIS MODEM TO WORK with the lt driver ?. If not, walmart will be pissing people off unnecessarily. There are plenty of cheap but supported winmodems.
Given this, it would be nice if someone could put together a complete linux distro (complete with the OpenOffice suite, etc.) ready-to-run on this box. Heck, maybe we could even convince Wal-Mart to give it away with every box!
As many people pointed out in the linuxtoday followup, Wal-Mart wants you to do-it-yourself because:
They want to make a clear point: it is for geeks
They do not want to have to invest in support
But that raises another question: why do the distro sellers not sell preinstalled machines ?. They could ship the machine with the CDs, and offer you support for some extra bucks. It's a win-win, they sell the soft + the hard + optional support. I cannot understand WHY they do not do it (except for lycoris, but they sell you dual boot plus I don't trust them). I would love to go to mandrake.com or suse.com ot redhat.com or whatever, click, configure my deskop, and buy. Of course, I would expect competitive price and no M$ Tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Uou. That is to me some pretty cool idea. I am not sure this is the way to go, but it sounds promising. The other viable model for Mandrake would be to sell solutions (customized desktop environments plus support) to big companies, which is what redhat seems to be trying to do with their upcoming "corporate desktop" thing. Mandrake should go ahead in the same direction. They have a much more polished desktop product.
-
Many people change their browser identification as IE in Win* to be able to read moronic web pages (they shouldn't do this BTW)
-
It is likely that given the variety of browsers and Linux flavors, many Linux visitors to Google are not counted properly
-
People using computers in wealthy countries have both the money to pay M$ licenses and surf the web more frequently. Google's stats give a higher statistical weight to these users.
I still think giving a figure for Linux' market share with no data to back it up is vapor. But I am pretty sure Google's figure is an underestimate.And by the way, the article gives a very nice overview of Linux on the desktop today, success stories included, from a mainstream media point of view. By far, the less interesting bit of the article is this 3.9 Market share figure for Linux ...
The LinuxToday article originates in an interview in L@ Red (Spanish only). Nice read.
This is really cool. They are following very clear GUI Guidelines (see link above) and they have the Usability team checking that every application follows these guidelines. IMHO Usability (more than Features) is the only major missing link in the GNU/Linux desktop. I am really looking forward to KDE 3.1 ...
He is talking about Aethera, and comparing it to Ximian's Evolution. It really strikes me that their User Interface designer has never seen Outlook, the most used email client. He should IMHO. I heartly agree on not having to clone Outlook, but you need to take a look at what people are used to, just as a reference. And a lot of the potential users of Aethera are now using Outlook.
That said, I should probably add that I have never seen Outlook myself but I am not a UI designer for an email client ;-)
Exactly. GNU/Linux has gotten big enough (with IBM's, HP and now SUN support) in bussiness to make it irrelevant to post a story telling us that some big corporation is considering deployment of Linux desktops. What's the point ?. Help this company negotiate with M$ ?. Slashdot editors, please, post the story if it happens, not if it might happen. No news here ...
Microsoft know all of this and will do whatever it takes to keep their grip in the government. Expect more "donations", cost cuts, etc. They will not just sit there and see how their empire falls down ...
I thought I should say this loud. Bruce Perens is becoming one of the public persons I respect the most. He is resigning from a comfortable position at HP in order to be able to be more active in politics, and he wants to be politically active in order to defend the public interest, and ideals like freedom.
:-)
Most people have unfortunately ethics a posteriori. They (we) do whatever benefits them (us), and then find an ethical justification for whatever we do or we are. He is going the other around.
Bruce, let me just say thank you. People like you make this world a little nicer
The single greatest consequence of a unified document format for all the Linux office suites is the economy in filter code. One single filter would be enough to go from, say, M$ Word 97(or whatever they call it) to the XML word-processing format, and would work for _all_ GNU/Linux office suites.
...
That in turn would allow cooperation between all of these projects on getting just one filter but get it right, thus avoiding unnecessary multiplication of efforts. In short, I hope this idea goes through, everybody (but M$) wins
Hopefully they will freeze the C++ interface for a long time and linux/bsd distributions will not have backward compatibility issues when upgrading GCC. THANK YOU SO MUCH to al the GCC developers/contributors.
Shouldn't the WWW Consortium (W3C), instead of the big corporations, be proposing Web standards?. I haven't seen any mention to them in the PDF document from Intel.
For those of you not familiar with the US emergency system ;-)
911 is a phone number used in the US to report emergencies (police, medical, etc)
Oh my friend, is that perhaps because you live in the US, and Turbolinux is strong in the Asian Market ?
Cheers,
Don Inodoro
It is just you :-) Let me put it this way, while people like Linus himself consider Linux mostly a "fun activity", people like Stallman and the like have a philosophical approach to free software. The whole thing we call Free Software, including the GNU utilities, Linux kernel, KDE/GNOME, etc., represent to some of us more than simply a technical choice. It is a philosophical, ethical choice. We LOVE FREEDOM, and that's why we support Free Software. It is also a social model: would you rather have a world with a huge monopolistic corporation deciding everything for you ?. Or would you rather have a world with tens of thousands of little companies/consultants. Free Software favors the latter. If any company gets ugly, the customers are not locked to use this company.
When I "show" Linux or help someone to use it, I tell them about the Linux community, Linux history, philosophy and all. And many people love it and use it just because of that. Even if some times things are a little more tricky (still) under GNU/Linux systems. Things will get better. It's just a matter of keeping a mature, adult advocacy (as opposed to childish bashing), and keep writting code, docs, translations, testing and reporting bugs. We can all help.
First of all, thank you so much for providing the most useful site on the net.
I understand part of the success of Google has to do with the efficient use of open source/free software. How about in-house software development?. Do you folks develop open source software as a way of giving back to the community ?. What are your thoughts on free software ?
So, Andreessen is saying: we are partners of M$, we have to kiss M$'s ass. Can we trust his opinion on browser wars ?.
That is: no mention at all of Linux.They sell "Lindows" as "Easy UNIX". Having people try alternative OSs is a good thing anyway. Let's see how it turns out, it looks exciting to me so far.
Cheers,
Don Inodoro
The IDG overview does not mention Argentina. There is a fairly big movement, and a new bill has been introduced to congress (the old one expired).
I guess many of you are not aware (please correct me if I am wrong) that even if two RPM based distros follow the LSB 100%, their binary RPMS may not be compatible. The reason is that different distros use different names for packages, or group software in different packages. So, when you install a package for distro X, you need to solve the dependencies according to the packaging scheme for distro X.
... and they will have an easier life keeping users happy :-)
Having four distros choosing a standard for packaging (among other things) is great. Now, I hope they realize the enemy is not RedHat, but M$. This is going to be good for GNU, Linux and FS (if it works). I hope Mandrake and Red Hat also join in, so that they can all focus on selling support, documentation, services and boxed versions of their OS, but the end user will have an easier life keeping up to date
Great idea, but at 1 buck per song, a whole album would cost plus than 10 dollars, I think it is a little expensive ...
And we all know who the winner will be. M$ is already a huge monopoly in other markets, they can afford to lose some money for a while here, get the competitors out of business, and then raise the prices again as high as they want.
I cannot disagree more. Both with the contents of what you say and with the tone of your response (there is no need to say moron simply because you dissagree). The point is: DO YOU REALLY THINK Gnome and KDE are FRONT ENDS ?. This is not the case. The desktop environments are NOT front ends to the kernel. They run on top of it, which is a different thing. Some of the software distributed with in these environments could qualify as front-end (for example CD burners, which are mainly front ends to cdrecord), but please !.
( As for whoever moderated your message: someone insulting another poster should be modded as flamebait)
Yes, but there is a later post by the author of the article, insisting that it is not supported: "Well, I opened the ltmodem source kit and started doing some investigating. It appears that this chipset is unsupported by the ltmodem driver. The scanPCI program does not find a supported card and lspci shows an ID that indicates it is this chipset:
http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/agere/age
I pulled the card and inspected the chips. It uses the SV92P chip.
It is unsupported."
This is a real issue, and it seems to be still open, so I ask: has anyone
really GOTTEN THIS MODEM TO WORK with the lt driver ?. If not, walmart will be pissing people off unnecessarily. There are plenty of cheap but supported winmodems.
As many people pointed out in the linuxtoday followup, Wal-Mart wants you to do-it-yourself because:
But that raises another question: why do the distro sellers not sell preinstalled machines ?. They could ship the machine with the CDs, and
offer you support for some extra bucks. It's a win-win, they sell the soft + the hard + optional support. I cannot understand WHY they do not do it (except for lycoris, but they sell you dual boot plus I don't trust them).
I would love to go to mandrake.com or suse.com ot redhat.com or whatever, click, configure my deskop, and buy. Of course, I would expect competitive price and no M$ Tax.