According to Apache, Libreoffice may be able to port from APL->LGPL, but Apache will likely not be able to port from LGPL->APL.
Which is, IMHO, another example of why FSF licenses suck. Why some people think this a feature, not a bug, is beyond me. A truly open license should foster a mentality towards openness and working towards a better product, with plenty of cross-pollination, instead of being a harbor for tantrum fits. Now we have two office suites, and who knows which one is the best for the corporate office? (THE market for an office suite). How are third-party software houses going to build the tools for an electronic paper workflow in this environment? Well, we know the answer...They don't. They'd just rather write a check for the Microsoft development tools suite. And free software developers wonder why people stick with Microsoft Office...
Wow! The Supreme Court of the United States has done something historic, that will - as a collateral - promote worldwide scientific collaboration in search for cures!
No more will researchers have their hand tied because of the genetic patent trolls!
It's obviously a corrupt deal. A shitty school district, from Brazil's shittiest region (the "North East"), spending a huge sum of money for tech not even developed countries dare implement. The writing is pretty much on the wall...
Young adults in industrialised countries typically receive only 20–120 min of daily light exposure exceeding 1000 lux.42 87 108 109 Elderly adults’ bright light exposures average only 1/3 to 2/3 that duration.42 110 Institutionalised elderly receive less than 10 min per day of light exposure exceeding 1000 lux,55 111 with median illuminances as low as 54 lux.55
The article was very interesting. However, how would it stack up against other epidemiological data, such as the fact that depression in Brazil (lots, and lots of sunlight), approaches U.S. rates of depression?
Sites that carry e-books have scanned material that is
1) decades out of print 2) the author is dead 3) the printing was never very big (2,000, 3,000 copies) 4) the book was never a commercial hit 5) the book is nowhere to be found in a 400 miles radius (say) 6) you can't even find used copies 7) the book was a fantastic book
Now, under those premises, what is so immoral about the human thirst for knowledge, when the only way to quench it, given the above, is through exchanging pirated material?
If that is a practice that damages society, then I say that to give hard-earned human knowledge away for insects to munch on, and for mold to grow on is a bigger crime!
If anything is immoral, given the above premises, then I say it is that under today's law the publisher can claim ownership rights to something he so blatantly neglects!
I don't know about the U.S. law, but I do know there are some currents of thought in Law that say (even for land) that if you have neglected something that has the potential to serve the public interest, and you have neglected it for too long, then no longer you get to claim ownership rights. If I'm not mistaken, in human history, that applied even to slaves or to wives...
Sure. This week I'm gonna go to the friendly librarian and ask: "can you reccommend me nice books on Markov chains? And what would you reccommend on Sobolev spaces?"
Not always do they make money lowering prices. In the case of, say, automobiles or first-class airplane tickets, you actually make more money increasing the price. In fact, if you make sufficiently expensive cars, you get to make fewer cars, provided you have targeted the right consumer base. Most car manufacturers AFAIK make money with their high end products. The very cheap models are just for creating brand loyalty (i.e., your first car).
The thing with music and digital media is that the product is selected in an entirely different way. If cars were mp3, not even Saudi princes would have enough garage space to store them all. But, with current hardware and telecom technology, it's cheap to store, fast to download tons of stuff. The reason you have to make it cheap is because you are in fact nearing optimum cost (for consumers): zero.
It's gotta be sort of like shopping "green": the consumer has got to feel some sort of advantage, even if indirect, in giving away 0.99 cents - it's to support the band, for instance. Crowdfunding might change some dynamics in the middle-man game record labels play.
I don't thhink you necessarily have to sell the "container". You could, for instance, like Netflix, sell me "easyness" - the quality of making it easy and cheap to deliver me content. Think, hmmm, gasoline or canned peaches. That too, has been that way for eons.
because "push" media is dead, I get to choose, and I choose I want Game of Thrones, Chuck, Star Trek and Star Gate all in the same month. "I want it all, and I want it now!" In the past, I used to have to stuff the piggy bank with coins. But before, I had to think real hard about what I wanted to buy, and THEN begin the process of saving. This isn't so anymore. As the machines allow for ever more room & speed for obtaining and keeping content, the process of merchandise-selection has been turned upside down.
With the explosion of content, which is only going to get bigger & faster, as digital media makers & outlets grow bigger in numbers & smaller in size, you can't expect media consumers NOT to overload their "shopping cart". Rather, they will load it with everything they can find and only select what they like later, and not BEFORE, in a "thoughtful" consumer manner, in a piggy bank savings way. They're gonna load it and shake it, and the best will survive by the process of the digital word-of-mouth sieve (ALL medias, not just social medias - they're all interlocked). Not only that, "niche" content gets to be eternal too, and "niche" content has no place in the current media-empires' spreadsheets.
This now only applies to cultural goods, but pretty soon we will witness physical goods being pirated (or transmitted) digitally, only to be made physical with 3D printers. Maybe farther along this trend we'll see circuit printers, food printers and cloth-cutting robots. With future tools being able to manufacture everything we could wish for - clothing, electronics, food and cultural goods, etc what is it exactly the corporation-moguls expect us to buy from them? In the past, we used to trade food recipes on Usenet. In the future, I might just download the CAD-like specs of your trademark hamburger, only to see it materialize in my digital-to-physical brand new kitchenware.
Your numbers do not add up to this new way of fast-consumption of content. You're talking old money. I'm talking new money - if it is money at all.
PS: In the 26th century, nobody works for money - everybody knows that.;-)
Oh it gains users, they just don't know they're using BSD. BSD license instead of GPL means its an anti-social community, where you don't have to contribute back, which is why its much smaller and weaker than the GPL community. r.
First of all, you don't get to call the BSD community "anti-social". It is a thriving community (last year's donation to FreeBSD was record, for example), as they continue to put out top-quality software - in fact, stuff more secure and advanced than Linux, we could argue. It's a very cooperative community, it being an open source community. When you slander the BSD community like that, you do a disservice to yourself, because you come across as an idiot who does not understand the inherent logical contradiction in something being open source and "anti-social." Your logic machinery is completely broken.
Besides, just STFU. The Linux community relies - rather - depends on business such as Canonical and IBM who roll out proprietary software. IBM supports Linux because it used it against Sun Microsystems. Are you really going to argue that IBM`s product portfolio is open source? If you do, you're a complete ignoramus...A bunch of companies rallied behind the GPL because supporting Linux meant eroding Sun Microsystems.., I'm sure Stallman enjoyed that, almost as much as Oracle's owner, Larry Ellison. Red Hat sells per-seat licenses, just like Microsoft. MySQL plays dual-game GPL/proprietary licenses. Why aren't you revolting? And what about Real Time Linux-based OSes? It ain`t easy finding the source code, you know. When did Stallman write about that? What about Google. What's so open source about Google? Their core business is an industry secret - rightly so. So, clearly, the Linux community is one of double standards. I'm cool with businesses, but I really think your high-and-mighty attitude (problem) problem is despicable.
There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries.
Libraries are generally licensed under the LGPL. The LGPL is specifically designed to avoid the imaginary problems you bring up. From that link (emphasis mine):
The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program governed under it but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely link with the program.
If you're going to be childish and call me names like "moron" and "zealot", you should least demonstrate a basic familiarity with the facts. If you feel a need to deal with things that way, it is a sure sign you are reacting emotionally and not proactively evaluating anything reasonably. Against anyone who remains reasonable, you are going to make yourself look foolish. Just for your future reference.
Doesn't the fact that most libraries allow for mingling with proprietary code mean that the purported success of the GPL is just a chronic brain fart Linooxers keep having?
You GPL defenders contradict yourselves every time... On the one hand it's touted as evidence for the sheer power of the GPL that Google uses GPLed software. OTOH, you don't seem to have a beef with the fact that they keep the source changes as their own, not releasing it. But if it were BSDed software, that might happen, and then it would be proof of sheer Evil Incarnate. WTF.
I suppose your argument was to be pro-GPL, but I hope you come to realize that you just supported the following argument as a corollary:
By writing more GPL software, we are pushing companies to write more proprietary software that duplicates functionality and for which they will file for patents.
(Maybe it's not a coincidence that IBM is the force behind Linux and at the same time has filed for more patents? --- Relation between the two is not clearly established in this argument)
Linux is pretty "communist". When you want Linux apps you either got read The Tomes of Packaging, or file a complain with the Politburo, or wait for the Packaging High-Committee to package what you want, so that it's made available in the Centralized Application Distribution Application. You'd best not to attempt and compile it on your own, because libraries in Linux distros are a mess. They aren't where they're supposed to be, or they've been repackaged, renamed or otherwise butchered by the Packaging Office of Packaging Standards Commissariat, because a True Revolutionary *always* forks! Makefiles are too bourgeois! Package and fork! Give them Java! "We fork!", they say. Give them an office suite! "We fork!", they say! "Fork! Fork! Fork!", they shout!
Whereas in - dare I say it? - Windows (!), you just use that thing called The Internet, then hop on to that other thing called The GOOG and *search* for it in the - dare I say it? - the market (!), where you'll find perhaps tens or dozens of manufacturers with the list of features they use to - dare I say it? - compete (!). Of course, to use them you must - dare I say it? - pay (!).
Paying up for software, according to the Manifest of Linooxism is very, very evil. According to Linooxism, one can go to even an Ivy League college to get an education in Computer Science, and you're allowed to pay for *hardware* (because, stealing a laptop *will* result in jail time), but you must never, *ever*, EVAH! pay for *SOFTWARE*! No! You have to spend less on sophisticated cutting-edge software tools for your craft than the *blue-collar crew* that build your beautiful hypersized American house payed for *their* power tools! Yes, noble software designer, you must Join the Revolution (TM)! The revolution is on the server side, and it will be televised! (oh, on Apple TV)
You're either naive or uninformed. Others have mentioned the lawsuit problems BSD was having at the time Linux was released, so I needn't comment on that. You just need to read up.
Linux was backed by companies that, in fact, make a lot of money selling proprietary software too (besides hardware). One of the main supporters is a patent champion. The GPL has allowed these companies to rally against Sun Microsystems. They did. They succeeded. Solaris is now a fraction of what it was. Great. Now, I've yet to see aviation and medical mission-critical software run on Linux. Nobody's that crazy (except for the special case of the military certified real time Linux whose source code, BTW, is pretty hard to find...*if* you find it that is...Anyways, that's not a "normal" Linux. And I've never seen Stallman cry out "where's the code" for those military-certified Linux kernels).
Not only that, but as Sun was getting targeted, a lot of people migrated to Windows (NT, at the time). So the net result is that you have less diversity, less security, more Windows, more IBM...(Oh, not to forget HP's Unix down the drain). Big fucking accomplishment it was having less Unix diversity. Hooray for the GPL... Hooray for "market forces". None of that was supported by revenue from Linux server support, I don't think anyone would be so dishonest as to claim that...It all fit Oracle, IBM and Microsoft very well. Hell, you wanna complain about Apple? They put Unix on the desktop! For the masses! How long has Gnome been trying that (and failing miserably)? *AND* they give code back (LLVM, recent big example).
In what regards "apps", let me point out that FreeBSD's ports tree is second only to Debian's in number. But I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison, because Debian's would be a broken, half-ass release, whereas the FreeBSD release with the maximum port number is a production-quality release. Bananas and oranges. So, if you mean to use "the sheer number of apps developed on Linux" as support for your argument, well it's not. I would say that those apps aren't Linux-only. They are Unix apps (hence, they're on BSDs too).
What you really have to explain is, if the *BSDs are so lame, how come they're still around? How come OpenBSD is so secure, when Linux isn't (hell, Debian has been compromised not once, but twice!)? How come FreeBSD keeps churning out innovations that outpace Linux? Better yet, innovations that were implemented first *for* FreeBSD, like the new capabilities framework (and I'm guessing you are clueless about the importance of those buzz words...). How come the donations to the FreeBSD *increased*?
Compare that with the Big Iron-backed Linux, and the distro that has a millionaire throwing money at it (with the balance book still in the red for Canonical). The *BSDs stand on their own merits. When you point to Linux's success, you gotta mention the oddball millionaire that supports Ubuntu, and the big iron strategy to rally against Sun (and others, like Red Hat's *per seat* licensing).
What do you mean "no solid ground"? It shows you never made the effort to read what usability researchers published. Eye-tracking, motion-tracking and even brain-activity (NASA project researching pilot attention to the spaceship's control panel).
Oh, for fsck's sake! A fork! How stupid can people get. This apparently is the problem with Gnome: they don't listen (it's been so for a long time - Slashdot once had a story about how Gnome devs never payed attention to user-submitted bug reports and, IIRC, there was that world-class prick Drepper telling everybody to fuck off or fix it themselves).
How is the GUI design is so dumb that users are confused about the simplest of tasks, and have to rely on information stumbled upon a web forum? How is that good, solid design? It means the use is *not* intuitive.
Look, we could all be driving cars with joysticks. But we stick to the steering wheel because it's a pretty good interface design. If you want to redesign something, then you ought to pull your very own personal internal Steve Jobs out of your ass. It had better be something better than a joystick.
That is stupid design. You are raising the user's cognitive load, instead of unloading it. That's why we have GUIs, because it's so much simpler than learning to concatenate Korn shell syntax, Bash syntax, and remember a shitload of esoteric commands (although all Unixheads do...). We unload the user's cognitive load, his/her working memory, etc. The user becomes more relaxed, productive...GUIs are not necessarily or always better, though, as we know from experience (see below GUIs X CLIs).
You wanna see example of a simple and intelligent interface, done by people who thought long and hard about how to do these things? Try this demo of the Enso interface (follow on-screen instructions):
I've seen this before - a system so fucked up its users need to go on line, on "communities", on "forums" to switch on or off some badly designed asinine shitty smelling wart they call feature. That was Windows. Congrats, Gnomers, way to go!
When you design your interface in such an annoying manner that it creates emotional pain, it becomes ingrained in the victims memory and the experience never goes away - and then you win! You win, Gnome! Win!
Should we take your post to mean that you really, really would put your chips on Gnome 3 as the thing that will bring Linux to the masses?
Hey, I'll share this: my little lady thinks KDE is better than Windows. But what she really digs is Mac OS X. What does that have to do with Gnome? Exactly. Nothing. Gnome stopped being funny in the 90s, when Mac OS 8 was still around. (Nowdays there's Unity, which seems to have divided the community of Ubuntusers or whatever it is they call themselves).
Slashdot Mirror
According to Apache, Libreoffice may be able to port from APL->LGPL, but Apache will likely not be able to port from LGPL->APL.
Which is, IMHO, another example of why FSF licenses suck. Why some people think this a feature, not a bug, is beyond me.
A truly open license should foster a mentality towards openness and working towards a better product, with plenty of cross-pollination, instead of being a harbor for tantrum fits.
Now we have two office suites, and who knows which one is the best for the corporate office? (THE market for an office suite). How are third-party software houses going to build the tools for an electronic paper workflow in this environment? Well, we know the answer...They don't. They'd just rather write a check for the Microsoft development tools suite.
And free software developers wonder why people stick with Microsoft Office...
No.
There's your answer (mathematics is not a science).
Wow! The Supreme Court of the United States has done something historic, that will - as a collateral - promote worldwide scientific collaboration in search for cures!
No more will researchers have their hand tied because of the genetic patent trolls!
This is great day for the medical sciences!
It's obviously a corrupt deal. A shitty school district, from Brazil's shittiest region (the "North East"), spending a huge sum of money for tech not even developed countries dare implement.
The writing is pretty much on the wall...
I didn't know microwave destroyed chips. You mean, if you microwave a pen drive, it's gone? That would make so many office people vulnerable...
Young adults in industrialised countries typically receive only 20–120 min of daily light exposure exceeding 1000 lux.42 87 108 109 Elderly adults’ bright light exposures average only 1/3 to 2/3 that duration.42 110 Institutionalised elderly receive less than 10 min per day of light exposure exceeding 1000 lux,55 111 with median illuminances as low as 54 lux.55
The article was very interesting. However, how would it stack up against other epidemiological data, such as the fact that depression in Brazil (lots, and lots of sunlight), approaches U.S. rates of depression?
http://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20110726/richer-countries-have-higher-depression-rates
Sites that carry e-books have scanned material that is
1) decades out of print
2) the author is dead
3) the printing was never very big (2,000, 3,000 copies)
4) the book was never a commercial hit
5) the book is nowhere to be found in a 400 miles radius (say)
6) you can't even find used copies
7) the book was a fantastic book
Now, under those premises, what is so immoral about the human thirst for knowledge, when the only way to quench it, given the above, is through exchanging pirated material?
If that is a practice that damages society, then I say that to give hard-earned human knowledge away for insects to munch on, and for mold to grow on is a bigger crime!
If anything is immoral, given the above premises, then I say it is that under today's law the publisher can claim ownership rights to something he so blatantly neglects!
I don't know about the U.S. law, but I do know there are some currents of thought in Law that say (even for land) that if you have neglected something that has the potential to serve the public interest, and you have neglected it for too long, then no longer you get to claim ownership rights. If I'm not mistaken, in human history, that applied even to slaves or to wives...
Why not apply this to books?
Sure. This week I'm gonna go to the friendly librarian and ask: "can you reccommend me nice books on Markov chains? And what would you reccommend on Sobolev spaces?"
Not always do they make money lowering prices. In the case of, say, automobiles or first-class airplane tickets, you actually make more money increasing the price. In fact, if you make sufficiently expensive cars, you get to make fewer cars, provided you have targeted the right consumer base. Most car manufacturers AFAIK make money with their high end products. The very cheap models are just for creating brand loyalty (i.e., your first car).
The thing with music and digital media is that the product is selected in an entirely different way. If cars were mp3, not even Saudi princes would have enough garage space to store them all. But, with current hardware and telecom technology, it's cheap to store, fast to download tons of stuff. The reason you have to make it cheap is because you are in fact nearing optimum cost (for consumers): zero.
It's gotta be sort of like shopping "green": the consumer has got to feel some sort of advantage, even if indirect, in giving away 0.99 cents - it's to support the band, for instance. Crowdfunding might change some dynamics in the middle-man game record labels play.
I don't thhink you necessarily have to sell the "container". You could, for instance, like Netflix, sell me "easyness" - the quality of making it easy and cheap to deliver me content. Think, hmmm, gasoline or canned peaches. That too, has been that way for eons.
Here's my commentary to your numbers:
because "push" media is dead, I get to choose, and I choose I want Game of Thrones, Chuck, Star Trek and Star Gate all in the same month. "I want it all, and I want it now!" In the past, I used to have to stuff the piggy bank with coins. But before, I had to think real hard about what I wanted to buy, and THEN begin the process of saving. This isn't so anymore. As the machines allow for ever more room & speed for obtaining and keeping content, the process of merchandise-selection has been turned upside down.
With the explosion of content , which is only going to get bigger & faster, as digital media makers & outlets grow bigger in numbers & smaller in size, you can't expect media consumers NOT to overload their "shopping cart". Rather, they will load it with everything they can find and only select what they like later , and not BEFORE, in a "thoughtful" consumer manner, in a piggy bank savings way. They're gonna load it and shake it, and the best will survive by the process of the digital word-of-mouth sieve (ALL medias, not just social medias - they're all interlocked). Not only that, "niche" content gets to be eternal too, and "niche" content has no place in the current media-empires' spreadsheets.
This now only applies to cultural goods, but pretty soon we will witness physical goods being pirated (or transmitted) digitally, only to be made physical with 3D printers. Maybe farther along this trend we'll see circuit printers, food printers and cloth-cutting robots. With future tools being able to manufacture everything we could wish for - clothing, electronics, food and cultural goods, etc what is it exactly the corporation-moguls expect us to buy from them? In the past, we used to trade food recipes on Usenet. In the future, I might just download the CAD-like specs of your trademark hamburger, only to see it materialize in my digital-to-physical brand new kitchenware.
Your numbers do not add up to this new way of fast-consumption of content. You're talking old money. I'm talking new money - if it is money at all.
PS: In the 26th century, nobody works for money - everybody knows that. ;-)
http://www.sealandgov.org/announcements/get-a-sealand-email-address
Let's make Sealand a financially stable nation. :-)
How about a capabilities-based security framework? ZFS? LLVM (soon)? What's so 70's about that?
Oh it gains users, they just don't know they're using BSD. BSD license instead of GPL means its an anti-social community, where you don't have to contribute back, which is why its much smaller and weaker than the GPL community. r.
First of all, you don't get to call the BSD community "anti-social". It is a thriving community (last year's donation to FreeBSD was record, for example), as they continue to put out top-quality software - in fact, stuff more secure and advanced than Linux, we could argue. It's a very cooperative community, it being an open source community. When you slander the BSD community like that, you do a disservice to yourself, because you come across as an idiot who does not understand the inherent logical contradiction in something being open source and "anti-social." Your logic machinery is completely broken.
Besides, just STFU. The Linux community relies - rather - depends on business such as Canonical and IBM who roll out proprietary software. IBM supports Linux because it used it against Sun Microsystems. Are you really going to argue that IBM`s product portfolio is open source? If you do, you're a complete ignoramus...A bunch of companies rallied behind the GPL because supporting Linux meant eroding Sun Microsystems.., I'm sure Stallman enjoyed that, almost as much as Oracle's owner, Larry Ellison. Red Hat sells per-seat licenses, just like Microsoft. MySQL plays dual-game GPL/proprietary licenses. Why aren't you revolting? And what about Real Time Linux-based OSes? It ain`t easy finding the source code, you know. When did Stallman write about that? What about Google. What's so open source about Google? Their core business is an industry secret - rightly so. So, clearly, the Linux community is one of double standards. I'm cool with businesses, but I really think your high-and-mighty attitude (problem) problem is despicable.
There are reasons not to use GPL not having to do with modifying code, but simply running the code. E.g. GPL'd libraries.
Libraries are generally licensed under the LGPL. The LGPL is specifically designed to avoid the imaginary problems you bring up. From that link (emphasis mine):
The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program governed under it but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely link with the program.
If you're going to be childish and call me names like "moron" and "zealot", you should least demonstrate a basic familiarity with the facts. If you feel a need to deal with things that way, it is a sure sign you are reacting emotionally and not proactively evaluating anything reasonably. Against anyone who remains reasonable, you are going to make yourself look foolish. Just for your future reference.
Doesn't the fact that most libraries allow for mingling with proprietary code mean that the purported success of the GPL is just a chronic brain fart Linooxers keep having?
You GPL defenders contradict yourselves every time... On the one hand it's touted as evidence for the sheer power of the GPL that Google uses GPLed software. OTOH, you don't seem to have a beef with the fact that they keep the source changes as their own, not releasing it. But if it were BSDed software, that might happen, and then it would be proof of sheer Evil Incarnate. WTF.
I suppose your argument was to be pro-GPL, but I hope you come to realize that you just supported the following argument as a corollary:
By writing more GPL software, we are pushing companies to write more proprietary software that duplicates functionality and for which they will file for patents.
(Maybe it's not a coincidence that IBM is the force behind Linux and at the same time has filed for more patents? --- Relation between the two is not clearly established in this argument)
Linux is pretty "communist". When you want Linux apps you either got read The Tomes of Packaging, or file a complain with the Politburo, or wait for the Packaging High-Committee to package what you want, so that it's made available in the Centralized Application Distribution Application. You'd best not to attempt and compile it on your own, because libraries in Linux distros are a mess. They aren't where they're supposed to be, or they've been repackaged, renamed or otherwise butchered by the Packaging Office of Packaging Standards Commissariat, because a True Revolutionary *always* forks! Makefiles are too bourgeois! Package and fork! Give them Java! "We fork!", they say. Give them an office suite! "We fork!", they say! "Fork! Fork! Fork!", they shout!
Whereas in - dare I say it? - Windows (!), you just use that thing called The Internet, then hop on to that other thing called The GOOG and *search* for it in the - dare I say it? - the market (!), where you'll find perhaps tens or dozens of manufacturers with the list of features they use to - dare I say it? - compete (!). Of course, to use them you must - dare I say it? - pay (!).
Paying up for software, according to the Manifest of Linooxism is very, very evil. According to Linooxism, one can go to even an Ivy League college to get an education in Computer Science, and you're allowed to pay for *hardware* (because, stealing a laptop *will* result in jail time), but you must never, *ever*, EVAH! pay for *SOFTWARE*! No! You have to spend less on sophisticated cutting-edge software tools for your craft than the *blue-collar crew* that build your beautiful hypersized American house payed for *their* power tools! Yes, noble software designer, you must Join the Revolution (TM)! The revolution is on the server side, and it will be televised! (oh, on Apple TV)
You're either naive or uninformed. Others have mentioned the lawsuit problems BSD was having at the time Linux was released, so I needn't comment on that. You just need to read up.
Linux was backed by companies that, in fact, make a lot of money selling proprietary software too (besides hardware). One of the main supporters is a patent champion. The GPL has allowed these companies to rally against Sun Microsystems. They did. They succeeded. Solaris is now a fraction of what it was. Great. Now, I've yet to see aviation and medical mission-critical software run on Linux. Nobody's that crazy (except for the special case of the military certified real time Linux whose source code, BTW, is pretty hard to find...*if* you find it that is...Anyways, that's not a "normal" Linux. And I've never seen Stallman cry out "where's the code" for those military-certified Linux kernels).
Not only that, but as Sun was getting targeted, a lot of people migrated to Windows (NT, at the time). So the net result is that you have less diversity, less security, more Windows, more IBM...(Oh, not to forget HP's Unix down the drain). Big fucking accomplishment it was having less Unix diversity. Hooray for the GPL... Hooray for "market forces". None of that was supported by revenue from Linux server support, I don't think anyone would be so dishonest as to claim that...It all fit Oracle, IBM and Microsoft very well. Hell, you wanna complain about Apple? They put Unix on the desktop! For the masses! How long has Gnome been trying that (and failing miserably)? *AND* they give code back (LLVM, recent big example).
In what regards "apps", let me point out that FreeBSD's ports tree is second only to Debian's in number. But I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison, because Debian's would be a broken, half-ass release, whereas the FreeBSD release with the maximum port number is a production-quality release. Bananas and oranges. So, if you mean to use "the sheer number of apps developed on Linux" as support for your argument, well it's not. I would say that those apps aren't Linux-only. They are Unix apps (hence, they're on BSDs too).
What you really have to explain is, if the *BSDs are so lame, how come they're still around? How come OpenBSD is so secure, when Linux isn't (hell, Debian has been compromised not once, but twice!)? How come FreeBSD keeps churning out innovations that outpace Linux? Better yet, innovations that were implemented first *for* FreeBSD, like the new capabilities framework (and I'm guessing you are clueless about the importance of those buzz words...). How come the donations to the FreeBSD *increased*?
Compare that with the Big Iron-backed Linux, and the distro that has a millionaire throwing money at it (with the balance book still in the red for Canonical). The *BSDs stand on their own merits. When you point to Linux's success, you gotta mention the oddball millionaire that supports Ubuntu, and the big iron strategy to rally against Sun (and others, like Red Hat's *per seat* licensing).
What do you mean "no solid ground"? It shows you never made the effort to read what usability researchers published. Eye-tracking, motion-tracking and even brain-activity (NASA project researching pilot attention to the spaceship's control panel).
Oh, for fsck's sake! A fork! How stupid can people get.
This apparently is the problem with Gnome: they don't listen (it's been so for a long time - Slashdot once had a story about how Gnome devs never payed attention to user-submitted bug reports and, IIRC, there was that world-class prick Drepper telling everybody to fuck off or fix it themselves).
Gnome 2 and xterm.
How is the GUI design is so dumb that users are confused about the simplest of tasks, and have to rely on information stumbled upon a web forum? How is that good, solid design? It means the use is *not* intuitive.
Look, we could all be driving cars with joysticks. But we stick to the steering wheel because it's a pretty good interface design. If you want to redesign something, then you ought to pull your very own personal internal Steve Jobs out of your ass. It had better be something better than a joystick.
That is stupid design. You are raising the user's cognitive load, instead of unloading it. That's why we have GUIs, because it's so much simpler than learning to concatenate Korn shell syntax, Bash syntax, and remember a shitload of esoteric commands (although all Unixheads do...). We unload the user's cognitive load, his/her working memory, etc. The user becomes more relaxed, productive...GUIs are not necessarily or always better, though, as we know from experience (see below GUIs X CLIs).
Mac OS X is a wonderful example where GUI can meet Unix-style CLI intelligently (Automator): http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/
You wanna see example of a simple and intelligent interface, done by people who thought long and hard about how to do these things? Try this demo of the Enso interface (follow on-screen instructions):
http://www.schuderer.net/ensoid/
Enso is now open source (it used to be Windows-only - BTW, I just learned this today), with the nice New BSD license.
http://code.google.com/p/enso/
Here's more brainfood on interfaces (GUIs X CLIs): http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/07/05/the-graphical-keyboard-user-interface/
I've seen this before - a system so fucked up its users need to go on line, on "communities", on "forums" to switch on or off some badly designed asinine shitty smelling wart they call feature. That was Windows. Congrats, Gnomers, way to go!
When you design your interface in such an annoying manner that it creates emotional pain, it becomes ingrained in the victims memory and the experience never goes away - and then you win! You win, Gnome! Win!
Should we take your post to mean that you really, really would put your chips on Gnome 3 as the thing that will bring Linux to the masses?
Hey, I'll share this: my little lady thinks KDE is better than Windows. But what she really digs is Mac OS X. What does that have to do with Gnome? Exactly. Nothing. Gnome stopped being funny in the 90s, when Mac OS 8 was still around. (Nowdays there's Unity, which seems to have divided the community of Ubuntusers or whatever it is they call themselves).
MATÉ? WTFIT?