The difference between this and road regulations, is that breaking the road rules can result in people being killed or seriously injured, as well as significant costs to individuals. Copyright infringement on the other hand, typically only harms large corporations, and the actual level of harm it does is often massively overstated (most people would never have bought all the media they copied, simply due to cost if nothing else).
But it will filter down, people want their home computers to run the same as they have at work, so the more OSS takes off in large businesses the more it will filter down to home users. Of course in an OSS world the corporate desktop software can be used as a base for the consumer desktop, and the rest of the cost can be rolled in with the price of hardware, this model seems to work for Apple.
OSX branched from OS9, which started long before Linux and has always had a higher market share. Apple started with a known brand and a strong existing presence in certain markets... Apple is a single known supplier while Linux is fragmented... OSX has been available pre-installed on hardware from the very beginning. OSX has benefitted from the market success of the iPod and to a lesser extent other Apple products. The iPod is the market leader and serves to significantly increase Apple's brand recognition.
OSS simply serves to render obsolete the business model of selling shrink wrap software. Such a business has been artificially profitable by regularly charging customers massively more than the actual value of the work gone into producing the software. OSS simply represents better value for the users, and users far outnumber those who work for shrink-wrap software companies, who are the only ones that will lose out.
Or you could reach a situation where the work itself isn't valuable, but what you can do *with* the work is... That's where OSS makes money, by providing services using OSS (eg google) and providing support services based around OSS (eg RedHat).
There will always be a need for developers, there just won't be a need for developers of shrink wrap software. Your job will be the same, the company you work for will just use the code you write for a different purpose... RedHat employ lots of developers, and most of the code they write is published for free, but it's designed to sit alongside their support offerings. Who better to provide top level support for a product than one of the original developers?
Also most developers these days are employed to do bespoke development inside organizations, and development of this kind is likely to increase... Larger or more technical companies have their own internal applications, and with more prevalent open source companies will be more able to modify existing applications to better suit their needs.
With software the development cost is up front and not ongoing... If competition gets too intense, a vendor can quite easily give their software away for free to push a competitor out, and if the competitor is smaller they are likely to die first (look at netscape). Once they're gone, the vendor can now make minor (ie cheap) changes to their product which break compatibility and start charging again, only now the barrier of entry is much higher for someone else who would have to start from scratch and thus you end up with a highly profitable captive market, commercial competitors stand no chance because the entry costs are too high, and the only thing you have to worry about is OSS which will usually develop slowly giving you many profitable years before it either kills your business model or you're forced to start competing again.
Depends on the competitors... Look at Internet Explorer vs Netscape... Netscape was a paid product, IE was given away for free for the sole purpose of pushing Netscape out of the market. If you are competing against large companies like MS or IBM then they can afford to give their product away for free, market it heavily and tie it in to other products they own which already have significant user bases. You don't stand much of a chance against a commercial competitors like that. OSS on the other hand can give the product away for free, but probably can't market it or tie it to existing products.
OSX is a very good desktop when you just want everything to work, coupled with apple hardware you're guaranteed fully compatibility...
On the other hand, you can buy a lot of machines with linux pre-installed these days, making it just as likely to work out of the box as vista (ie just one step behind apple). dell have a bunch of ubuntu machines for instance, as do several other vendors.
Yes, if you choose to assign copyright for your contributions to sun (they require this to keep things simple, the FSF do exactly the same too)... Or you can just take the open source code and fork it, look at novell's version of openoffice, and neooffice.
When OpenSolaris first came out, there were some binary components required as part of the install... Over this 3 and a half years they've been rewriting these bits, because something required at runtime affects everyone... Give them time, and the build time dependencies will be removed too. Also consider, solaris is built using sun's compiler because it generally produces faster code than gcc, especially on sparc.
Yes, and to this of us with a technical background this business model is about optimal... You can use it yourself, for free, you're free to learn about it and use it all you want for yourself... You can sell if to your boss because it has commercial support... In the future you may be able to save money by reducing the support...
Don't get me wrong, i don't like flash any more than you do... Sites which depend on it are usually pretty awful, and it's usually used totally frivolously (like stupid and pointless click through splash pages)... And yes, most things could be done with dhtml and ajax, however... Producing such things in flash is much easier, doing it in dhtml/ajax is a lot more work, not least of all because of how far msie is behind other browsers when it comes to these things, also the performance is seriously lacking (again, primarily in microsoft's antiquated browser)...
Flash is open enough now, Macromedia published the specs years ago with restrictions, Adobe have now lifted the restriction prohibiting you from producing a player using the specs... It would make sense to embrace flash, which already has a sizable market, a published spec and many development tools.
Alcohol, if used irresponsibly, can harm consumers and often as a side effect harm innocent bystanders who didn't drink any alcohol themselves. There are plenty of people who become ill from alcohol poisoning, or are suffering from the actions of a drunk driver for instance.
Things like time shifting on the other hand, provide purely benefits and no negative side effects whatsoever for the end user. It is only a small cartel of companies who want to stop such activity, not because it harms anyone but because they're greedy and want to wring every last cent out of their paying customers (pirates will always pirate or just do without).
Of course, excessive greed has shown that it can explode in the face of big business, so let's hope the same thing happens here.
The user experiences is in many ways more intuitive, but that's not the issue... What people say "intuitive" they actually mean "familiar". They are familiar with the old interface, and don't want to change to the new one even if it is better. They use the same argument against linux or mac too.
Only on hardware that doesn't have XP drivers (or a misconfigure xp since it has very few drivers out of the box)... Once you have the proper drivers for your hardware XP just walks all over vista on any machine.
No, and Linux/OSX would behave in a similar way, ie asking for your password when trying to do such tasks...
On the other hand, many windows apps do try to do such things, because that is the way previous versions were designed. And the issue is that OSX and Linux did not suffer such poor design decisions in the first place.
Because if they don't, it takes away a perceived level of control from the user, and users like at least having the feeling that they're in control.
Also there are often false positives, and it would be extremely annoying to be unable to install something useful because it's mistakenly detected as a virus.
From the perspective of malware authors tho, microsoft taking over the anti malware market and driving all the other competitors out of business is the best possible outcome. You now only have one anti malware program to test your malware with (ie ensure it doesn't get detected) and one anti malware program that your malware needs to disable.
Please give an example of a country that has actually tried communism, and not some kind of dictatorship falsely masquerading under the banner of communism.
Not saying communism would actually work, people are simply too corrupt, too corrupt for it to even have been tried... And that corruption and greed destroys any system eventually (look at the mess capitalist countries are in right now too).
If Google want to compete with MS they should really throw some resources behind openoffice, that way they can have a functional online suite which is fully integrated with an offline suite too...
Google apps provide all the features most non business users would need, most people just create simple spreadsheets and write simple 1-2 page letters and buying expensive software for such simple duties is a horrendous waste of money for them.
Business users are likely to avoid google apps because of the privacy concerns, at least i can't recommend it at any place i've worked for these reasons, on the other hand if we had a version we could install locally and fully integrate with openoffice that would be great. I doubt google will ever offer anything like that, but ms will be for sure, unfortunately it will be tied to their other products.
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The difference between this and road regulations, is that breaking the road rules can result in people being killed or seriously injured, as well as significant costs to individuals.
Copyright infringement on the other hand, typically only harms large corporations, and the actual level of harm it does is often massively overstated (most people would never have bought all the media they copied, simply due to cost if nothing else).
But it will filter down, people want their home computers to run the same as they have at work, so the more OSS takes off in large businesses the more it will filter down to home users.
Of course in an OSS world the corporate desktop software can be used as a base for the consumer desktop, and the rest of the cost can be rolled in with the price of hardware, this model seems to work for Apple.
OSX branched from OS9, which started long before Linux and has always had a higher market share.
Apple started with a known brand and a strong existing presence in certain markets...
Apple is a single known supplier while Linux is fragmented...
OSX has been available pre-installed on hardware from the very beginning.
OSX has benefitted from the market success of the iPod and to a lesser extent other Apple products. The iPod is the market leader and serves to significantly increase Apple's brand recognition.
OSS simply serves to render obsolete the business model of selling shrink wrap software. Such a business has been artificially profitable by regularly charging customers massively more than the actual value of the work gone into producing the software. OSS simply represents better value for the users, and users far outnumber those who work for shrink-wrap software companies, who are the only ones that will lose out.
Or you could reach a situation where the work itself isn't valuable, but what you can do *with* the work is... That's where OSS makes money, by providing services using OSS (eg google) and providing support services based around OSS (eg RedHat).
There will always be a need for developers, there just won't be a need for developers of shrink wrap software. Your job will be the same, the company you work for will just use the code you write for a different purpose...
RedHat employ lots of developers, and most of the code they write is published for free, but it's designed to sit alongside their support offerings. Who better to provide top level support for a product than one of the original developers?
Also most developers these days are employed to do bespoke development inside organizations, and development of this kind is likely to increase... Larger or more technical companies have their own internal applications, and with more prevalent open source companies will be more able to modify existing applications to better suit their needs.
With software the development cost is up front and not ongoing... If competition gets too intense, a vendor can quite easily give their software away for free to push a competitor out, and if the competitor is smaller they are likely to die first (look at netscape). Once they're gone, the vendor can now make minor (ie cheap) changes to their product which break compatibility and start charging again, only now the barrier of entry is much higher for someone else who would have to start from scratch and thus you end up with a highly profitable captive market, commercial competitors stand no chance because the entry costs are too high, and the only thing you have to worry about is OSS which will usually develop slowly giving you many profitable years before it either kills your business model or you're forced to start competing again.
Depends on the competitors...
Look at Internet Explorer vs Netscape... Netscape was a paid product, IE was given away for free for the sole purpose of pushing Netscape out of the market. If you are competing against large companies like MS or IBM then they can afford to give their product away for free, market it heavily and tie it in to other products they own which already have significant user bases. You don't stand much of a chance against a commercial competitors like that.
OSS on the other hand can give the product away for free, but probably can't market it or tie it to existing products.
Hot swap?
OSX is a very good desktop when you just want everything to work, coupled with apple hardware you're guaranteed fully compatibility...
On the other hand, you can buy a lot of machines with linux pre-installed these days, making it just as likely to work out of the box as vista (ie just one step behind apple). dell have a bunch of ubuntu machines for instance, as do several other vendors.
Yes, if you choose to assign copyright for your contributions to sun (they require this to keep things simple, the FSF do exactly the same too)...
Or you can just take the open source code and fork it, look at novell's version of openoffice, and neooffice.
When OpenSolaris first came out, there were some binary components required as part of the install...
Over this 3 and a half years they've been rewriting these bits, because something required at runtime affects everyone... Give them time, and the build time dependencies will be removed too.
Also consider, solaris is built using sun's compiler because it generally produces faster code than gcc, especially on sparc.
Yes, and to this of us with a technical background this business model is about optimal...
You can use it yourself, for free, you're free to learn about it and use it all you want for yourself...
You can sell if to your boss because it has commercial support...
In the future you may be able to save money by reducing the support...
Don't get me wrong, i don't like flash any more than you do...
Sites which depend on it are usually pretty awful, and it's usually used totally frivolously (like stupid and pointless click through splash pages)...
And yes, most things could be done with dhtml and ajax, however...
Producing such things in flash is much easier, doing it in dhtml/ajax is a lot more work, not least of all because of how far msie is behind other browsers when it comes to these things, also the performance is seriously lacking (again, primarily in microsoft's antiquated browser)...
Flash is open enough now, Macromedia published the specs years ago with restrictions, Adobe have now lifted the restriction prohibiting you from producing a player using the specs...
It would make sense to embrace flash, which already has a sizable market, a published spec and many development tools.
The Phenom seem to perform somewhat better under linux, or at least gcc produces better code for them than it does for intel chips...
(note, this is based on 64bit gentoo, gcc 4.3.0 compiled with -O2 and appropriate cpu type setting on a 2.3ghz phenom 9500 and 2.4ghz Q6600)
Are you referring to the Playstation 2 (PS2), or the old IBM system known as the PS/2 ?
If it's the latter as your post suggests, it's not surprising it hardly gets used...
Apple is also a small niche player who can easily be avoided...
It's unfortunately rather hard to avoid MS.
Alcohol, if used irresponsibly, can harm consumers and often as a side effect harm innocent bystanders who didn't drink any alcohol themselves. There are plenty of people who become ill from alcohol poisoning, or are suffering from the actions of a drunk driver for instance.
Things like time shifting on the other hand, provide purely benefits and no negative side effects whatsoever for the end user. It is only a small cartel of companies who want to stop such activity, not because it harms anyone but because they're greedy and want to wring every last cent out of their paying customers (pirates will always pirate or just do without).
Of course, excessive greed has shown that it can explode in the face of big business, so let's hope the same thing happens here.
The user experiences is in many ways more intuitive, but that's not the issue...
What people say "intuitive" they actually mean "familiar". They are familiar with the old interface, and don't want to change to the new one even if it is better. They use the same argument against linux or mac too.
Only on hardware that doesn't have XP drivers (or a misconfigure xp since it has very few drivers out of the box)...
Once you have the proper drivers for your hardware XP just walks all over vista on any machine.
No, and Linux/OSX would behave in a similar way, ie asking for your password when trying to do such tasks...
On the other hand, many windows apps do try to do such things, because that is the way previous versions were designed. And the issue is that OSX and Linux did not suffer such poor design decisions in the first place.
Because if they don't, it takes away a perceived level of control from the user, and users like at least having the feeling that they're in control.
Also there are often false positives, and it would be extremely annoying to be unable to install something useful because it's mistakenly detected as a virus.
From the perspective of malware authors tho, microsoft taking over the anti malware market and driving all the other competitors out of business is the best possible outcome. You now only have one anti malware program to test your malware with (ie ensure it doesn't get detected) and one anti malware program that your malware needs to disable.
Yes, but the SMB protocol predates NT by some margin...
Please give an example of a country that has actually tried communism, and not some kind of dictatorship falsely masquerading under the banner of communism.
Not saying communism would actually work, people are simply too corrupt, too corrupt for it to even have been tried... And that corruption and greed destroys any system eventually (look at the mess capitalist countries are in right now too).
If Google want to compete with MS they should really throw some resources behind openoffice, that way they can have a functional online suite which is fully integrated with an offline suite too...
Google apps provide all the features most non business users would need, most people just create simple spreadsheets and write simple 1-2 page letters and buying expensive software for such simple duties is a horrendous waste of money for them.
Business users are likely to avoid google apps because of the privacy concerns, at least i can't recommend it at any place i've worked for these reasons, on the other hand if we had a version we could install locally and fully integrate with openoffice that would be great. I doubt google will ever offer anything like that, but ms will be for sure, unfortunately it will be tied to their other products.