I wouldn't say that. Maybe the user is trying Ubuntu per suggestion of a friend, not knowing what to expect.
For example, a while ago I suggested Ubuntu to a friend. She eventually got rid of it and said that it's too different. The primary reason being that the applications menu is on top instead of at the bottom like in Windows.
Correlation is not causation. I'm not saying that a FOSS business shouldn't be in touch with the community, but still, a *lot* of people claim that open source won't succeed until it's more business-like. As for RedHat, they're recently being flamed left and right by the community because of the whole security breach issue - they're accused of being closed and corporate by the (Slashdot) community. I've seen plenty of people who say that RedHat is too commercial, e.g. the fact that they replaced their original RedHat distros with Fedora.
So it isn't open by default and you have to *make* it open? I don't call that open at all. Besides, there's this issue with Apple actively trying to brick jailbroken iPhones via updates. Saying that the iPhone is open if you jailbreak it is like saying that Windows is free because you can pirate it. I don't doubt that an iPhone is more useful than a normal phone because jailbreaking is possible, but to me it can never be called "open" as long as it isn't open by default.
I'm not really convinced. There must be *something* that they can do. For example, take the iPhone. Someone's iPhone melted the owner's pocket and burned his skin. Some magazines showed that the iPhone would occasionally drop the connection during a phone conversation. The iPhone platform is not open and is strictly regulated by Apple. Despite all this, the iPhone hype still exist and everybody still wants one. This shows that it is possible to market a product so that people still want it despite all the problems. On the other hand, I've seen people who are absolutely determined to see Firefox's demise in the coming few months, and this for a product that's essentially free.
Maybe it's reasonable, but lots of people will be angered by this, whether it's justified or not. Firefox already has a bad reputation right now, and by this I mean that a lot of people complain it, e.g. about the AwesomeBar, invalid SSL certs handling, and how it has gone downhill since 1.0. I don't agree with them, but nevertheless, the number of people who comment negatively about Firefox is *very* high. This became even more obvious since the release of Chrome. Many people are already predicting the death of the Firefox or ranting how about Firefox should ditch Gecko and switch to Webkit. For a lot of people, this EULA thing might make them snap and ditch Firefox completely. If that happens Mozilla will lose a bit of market share, maybe even a significant bit.
I'm wondering why Mozilla thinks displaying an EULA in Ubuntu is absolutely necessary for protecting its trademark. Are there no alternatives? What are the legal reasons for this decision?
Am I the only one here who's worried about Shuttleworth's wealth? How is Canonical making money? Is it making a profit? What if Shuttleworth runs out of money, then what would happen to him and to FOSS? Is Shuttleworth getting a reward back, as he rightfully deserves?
Furthermore, why is he the one who's injecting money into FOSS? Why don't Slashdot readers donate some money to their favorite FOSS project? Is everybody so used to leeching off free work?
What are we talking about? Multi-file uploads. How many people *really* need that, and how often? Given that Internet Explorer doesn't support it, photo sites usually provide a Java or Flash applet or a client application for batch uploads. This doesn't exactly make the issue high-priority, does it?
For some reason you are blaming all this on "user interface design incompetence" instead of just a matter of having priorities. And you blame it on open source - somehow commercial software has become better in every way. I will tell you now that Firefox is in fact commercial software. Commercial open source software to be exact, developed by Mozilla Corporation. They even have professional user interface designers.
See? Being commercial doesn't mean the software will be 100% to your liking, and being open source doesn't mean it will always suck. Stop it with the generalizations.
Uhm, sorry? I update my Ubuntu system weekly and I've never, ever, *ever* encountered this problem.
While it sucks for you, it's frankly impossible to have 100.000% success rate. Once every while things will go wrong, either because you did something to your system (or not), or because a monkey infiltrated your house and pressed the self-destruct button, or because some cosmic ray hit your RAM and flipped a bit causing filesystem corruption, or because the update is damaged by a network problem.
"No you don't really have that choice, unless you could run all your apps using just either (not both) of the two environments."
What are you talking about? I'm using KTorrent inside GNOME as we speak.
Wait, do you want to say that I don't have a choice until I can run KTorrent without having KDElibs installed? What kind of reasoning is that? That's like saying that I don't have a choice between eating bread or sushi until I don't have to pay for the sushi.
Systems come with at least 1 GB of RAM these days. I have 2 GB. The additional initial memory overhead of KDElibs of 20 MB doesn't even make a dent in my system's memory usage.
And why should the author give documentation to you for free? Should he not be rewarded for his time? What's in it for him to do all that for you for free? If you were him, would you spend so much time giving freebies to people who don't appreciate the fact that you've already given them free code in the first place?
And no, I'm not a Drupal developer or even a Drupal user.
Erlang processes are not OS processes. If one Erlang process enters an infinite loop, can you kill it without affecting all the others?
Erlang is great for some things but horrible for other things that "normal" languages are good at. Have you tried writing a function which counts the number of occurrences of a character in a string? Compare the Erlang implementation with the, say, Python, Ruby or Java implementation.
Agreed. These days standards compliance between browsers is very good. I design for Firefox, and in 99% of the cases, it renders exactly the same in Konqueror and Opera. Mostly gone are the days when all browsers render differently. The only browser that's continuously giving me rendering troubles is Internet Explorer.
I'm wondering what they're going to do after 2009. Current version is Ubuntu 8.04. Then comes 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. What's the next version then? Ubuntu 0.04? Or would they call it 10.04?
So? Whether they make money off you or off some Indian's dog, you still don't have a valid reason to be rude, ungrateful and anti-social. Just what have they done to you? Did you kill your pet or something to deserve all that crap? Oh no, they gave you software for free, which you are even allowed to distribute and modify. How horrible and evil.
That doesn't matter. You still haven't paid them a penny. Just because they have a means to make sure that their wives and children don't starve from poverty, doesn't give you the right to be a jerk and to flame them for no valid reason.
"Do you understand the difference between using Ubuntu and Firefox? One is made by people who really are doing it just for the love of it, and the other is a for-profit company."
So? They're still giving you a product for free. A product that's open source. You are not their customer, you don't pay them, yet they're still being nice to you. So bashing them for a free product is ungrateful and rude at best.
Frankly, I think this "for-profit" thing is just an excuse for slamming them. Even if it was Ubuntu, they would still be slammed, only people will come up with a different excuse.
"Why did Google get slammed here on/. for Chrome"
Chrome getting slammed? I don't know which universe you came from, but in this one, 95% of the comments about Chrome are praise.
"Can you really not use a product without becoming emotionally attached and using it's fucking logo as a family herald?"
There, the typical "it's all emotions" excuse again. Personal attacks are not valid arguments. It has got nothing to do with emotions and everything to do with being polite, social and fair. It doesn't matter whether it's Mozilla or Mama's Little Browser. They gave something to you for free even though they're not obligated to give anything to you. If you have the time to flame them then at least take the time to give proper, polite feedback.
Ridiculous. They are giving you stuff for free, *and* you expect them to do even more stuff for you for free while insulting them at the same time? Talk about being ungrateful, rude and anti-social!
It's because of the tools. With RSS, you only need a web server. Web server hosting is and was cheap. A news server on the other hand? I don't even know how to set one up. Can I host a news server on Dreamhost or some other $10/mo hosting company? So even if the functionality is the same, HTTP-based technologies usually win because of the available tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I really think that you're mistaking "usefulness" with "open". By your definition, an Xbox is open because you can mod it.
I wouldn't say that. Maybe the user is trying Ubuntu per suggestion of a friend, not knowing what to expect.
For example, a while ago I suggested Ubuntu to a friend. She eventually got rid of it and said that it's too different. The primary reason being that the applications menu is on top instead of at the bottom like in Windows.
Correlation is not causation. I'm not saying that a FOSS business shouldn't be in touch with the community, but still, a *lot* of people claim that open source won't succeed until it's more business-like. As for RedHat, they're recently being flamed left and right by the community because of the whole security breach issue - they're accused of being closed and corporate by the (Slashdot) community. I've seen plenty of people who say that RedHat is too commercial, e.g. the fact that they replaced their original RedHat distros with Fedora.
"jailbreaking"
So it isn't open by default and you have to *make* it open? I don't call that open at all. Besides, there's this issue with Apple actively trying to brick jailbroken iPhones via updates. Saying that the iPhone is open if you jailbreak it is like saying that Windows is free because you can pirate it. I don't doubt that an iPhone is more useful than a normal phone because jailbreaking is possible, but to me it can never be called "open" as long as it isn't open by default.
"The answer of course is B."
Is that so? I've seen plenty of people who criticize that open source software will never succeed on the desktop until it's more business-like.
I'm not really convinced. There must be *something* that they can do. For example, take the iPhone. Someone's iPhone melted the owner's pocket and burned his skin. Some magazines showed that the iPhone would occasionally drop the connection during a phone conversation. The iPhone platform is not open and is strictly regulated by Apple. Despite all this, the iPhone hype still exist and everybody still wants one. This shows that it is possible to market a product so that people still want it despite all the problems. On the other hand, I've seen people who are absolutely determined to see Firefox's demise in the coming few months, and this for a product that's essentially free.
Maybe it's reasonable, but lots of people will be angered by this, whether it's justified or not. Firefox already has a bad reputation right now, and by this I mean that a lot of people complain it, e.g. about the AwesomeBar, invalid SSL certs handling, and how it has gone downhill since 1.0. I don't agree with them, but nevertheless, the number of people who comment negatively about Firefox is *very* high. This became even more obvious since the release of Chrome. Many people are already predicting the death of the Firefox or ranting how about Firefox should ditch Gecko and switch to Webkit.
For a lot of people, this EULA thing might make them snap and ditch Firefox completely. If that happens Mozilla will lose a bit of market share, maybe even a significant bit.
I'm wondering why Mozilla thinks displaying an EULA in Ubuntu is absolutely necessary for protecting its trademark. Are there no alternatives? What are the legal reasons for this decision?
"After all, it's not like all 3 platforms would be completely alien in the backend -- they are POSIX compliant."
Uh, sorry? Since when is Windows POSIX compliant? Windows seems to be the only major modern OS in existence that's not POSIX compliant.
I know that Windows provides some POSIX support, but it's broken and non-compliant in various ways. For example fork() is not supported.
Why is the LHC connected to the Internet in the first place???
Am I the only one here who's worried about Shuttleworth's wealth? How is Canonical making money? Is it making a profit? What if Shuttleworth runs out of money, then what would happen to him and to FOSS? Is Shuttleworth getting a reward back, as he rightfully deserves?
Furthermore, why is he the one who's injecting money into FOSS? Why don't Slashdot readers donate some money to their favorite FOSS project? Is everybody so used to leeching off free work?
Firefox has priorities, just like everybody else.
What are we talking about? Multi-file uploads. How many people *really* need that, and how often? Given that Internet Explorer doesn't support it, photo sites usually provide a Java or Flash applet or a client application for batch uploads. This doesn't exactly make the issue high-priority, does it?
For some reason you are blaming all this on "user interface design incompetence" instead of just a matter of having priorities. And you blame it on open source - somehow commercial software has become better in every way. I will tell you now that Firefox is in fact commercial software. Commercial open source software to be exact, developed by Mozilla Corporation. They even have professional user interface designers.
See? Being commercial doesn't mean the software will be 100% to your liking, and being open source doesn't mean it will always suck. Stop it with the generalizations.
Uhm, sorry? I update my Ubuntu system weekly and I've never, ever, *ever* encountered this problem.
While it sucks for you, it's frankly impossible to have 100.000% success rate. Once every while things will go wrong, either because you did something to your system (or not), or because a monkey infiltrated your house and pressed the self-destruct button, or because some cosmic ray hit your RAM and flipped a bit causing filesystem corruption, or because the update is damaged by a network problem.
"No you don't really have that choice, unless you could run all your apps using just either (not both) of the two environments."
What are you talking about? I'm using KTorrent inside GNOME as we speak.
Wait, do you want to say that I don't have a choice until I can run KTorrent without having KDElibs installed? What kind of reasoning is that? That's like saying that I don't have a choice between eating bread or sushi until I don't have to pay for the sushi.
Systems come with at least 1 GB of RAM these days. I have 2 GB. The additional initial memory overhead of KDElibs of 20 MB doesn't even make a dent in my system's memory usage.
And why should the author give documentation to you for free? Should he not be rewarded for his time? What's in it for him to do all that for you for free? If you were him, would you spend so much time giving freebies to people who don't appreciate the fact that you've already given them free code in the first place?
And no, I'm not a Drupal developer or even a Drupal user.
Erlang processes are not OS processes. If one Erlang process enters an infinite loop, can you kill it without affecting all the others?
Erlang is great for some things but horrible for other things that "normal" languages are good at. Have you tried writing a function which counts the number of occurrences of a character in a string? Compare the Erlang implementation with the, say, Python, Ruby or Java implementation.
"If you're writing a server to handle 100,000 connections simultaneously you probably want to use threads."
Actually, if you want to scale to 100000 connections then you will *not* want to use threads. Google "C10K problem".
Agreed. These days standards compliance between browsers is very good. I design for Firefox, and in 99% of the cases, it renders exactly the same in Konqueror and Opera. Mostly gone are the days when all browsers render differently. The only browser that's continuously giving me rendering troubles is Internet Explorer.
I'm wondering what they're going to do after 2009. Current version is Ubuntu 8.04. Then comes 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. What's the next version then? Ubuntu 0.04? Or would they call it 10.04?
So? Whether they make money off you or off some Indian's dog, you still don't have a valid reason to be rude, ungrateful and anti-social. Just what have they done to you? Did you kill your pet or something to deserve all that crap? Oh no, they gave you software for free, which you are even allowed to distribute and modify. How horrible and evil.
That doesn't matter. You still haven't paid them a penny. Just because they have a means to make sure that their wives and children don't starve from poverty, doesn't give you the right to be a jerk and to flame them for no valid reason.
It doesn't matter. That's still no valid reason for people like you to act like jerks.
"Do you understand the difference between using Ubuntu and Firefox? One is made by people who really are doing it just for the love of it, and the other is a for-profit company."
So? They're still giving you a product for free. A product that's open source. You are not their customer, you don't pay them, yet they're still being nice to you. So bashing them for a free product is ungrateful and rude at best.
Frankly, I think this "for-profit" thing is just an excuse for slamming them. Even if it was Ubuntu, they would still be slammed, only people will come up with a different excuse.
"Why did Google get slammed here on /. for Chrome"
Chrome getting slammed? I don't know which universe you came from, but in this one, 95% of the comments about Chrome are praise.
"Can you really not use a product without becoming emotionally attached and using it's fucking logo as a family herald?"
There, the typical "it's all emotions" excuse again. Personal attacks are not valid arguments. It has got nothing to do with emotions and everything to do with being polite, social and fair. It doesn't matter whether it's Mozilla or Mama's Little Browser. They gave something to you for free even though they're not obligated to give anything to you. If you have the time to flame them then at least take the time to give proper, polite feedback.
"They have people who are paid to do this shit."
Ridiculous. They are giving you stuff for free, *and* you expect them to do even more stuff for you for free while insulting them at the same time? Talk about being ungrateful, rude and anti-social!
It's because of the tools. With RSS, you only need a web server. Web server hosting is and was cheap. A news server on the other hand? I don't even know how to set one up. Can I host a news server on Dreamhost or some other $10/mo hosting company? So even if the functionality is the same, HTTP-based technologies usually win because of the available tools.
Sure it is. But it's an issue that people - my users - care about. As a developer, I have the responsibility to please my users.