Public opinion can be a factor, but ultimately the company will select the option that will be most profitable for them. There's no other way to run a business, if you want to stay in business.
There's a difference between making a profit and staying and business, and maximizing your profits to the exclusion of all else. I believe there are many ways to run a profitable business.
Photoshop is too fancy and the gimp is too slow and unusable on Windows.
You may want to consider Photoshop Elements, which costs about $100 or less if you wait for a rebate. It's a surprisingly big subset of Photoshop, missing mainly the pre-press tools that are useful to professionals. It's also a useful training tool if you plan to move up to Photoshop one day.
He just lost someone he loved so much, I wasn't about to slap him in the face with some bullshit policy.
...and in the process violated the daughter's right to privacy, which your employer probably promised to uphold. Do you even have a way of knowing whether the daughter is really dead, if in fact he was her father? What if she was gay and didn't want her father to find out, just to pick an example? Who are you to reveal this for her?
I think that, upon request, the account should not be subjected to the 90-day deletion rule. However, it should take far more than your personal opinion of the veracity of the claim to open up somebody else's personal communications.
I'm not saying you did the wrong thing, either at the time or in the end. I'm saying that the decision seems to be harder than just casually saying the policy is "bullshit".
When I said that Linus wasn't speaking for all of Linux development, I meant that Linus can't speak for anyone else. He has no fiscal or legal right to represent the rest of the community.
Sure, and neither is Linus likely to claim to be such a representative. What I'm saying is that he is taken as such, along with the likes of RMS or ESR. These are some of the leading (not just louder) voices in the community.
MLK didn't have a legal right to speak for the black community, either. It still meant that he doesn't have the luxury of speaking only for himself in most cases.
Linus' interview responses are like a breath of fresh air compared to interview responses of the other computer industry 'luminaries'.
And my point is that comparing him to people who stand to lose billions of dollars on a honest remark is a disservice to him. Compare him to somebody whom we generally expect to be honest instead.
Not my point. The basic ideas didn't come from Netscape.
Netscape was a small company that refused to be bought out, and eventually was crushed by the giant. Did they not have "great vision", or did they not even have "a little know-how"?
My point is that it takes far more than "great vision and a little know-how" to ultimately succeed against a big corporation. I'm still waiting for your counterexample.
No, of course not for many reasons. Like I said, corporations are good at making things bigger and better; they excel at that.
So who's going to "lay waste" to them?
(I wonder how Steve Wozniak would have fared in today's society.)
Wozniak was working for HP before he quit to form Apple. He had more than "a little know-how", and his work on the Apple computers was regarded as a work of art by many.
But, to address your specific question, I expect that even in the late 70s it was unusual to quit a stable job at a big company to form a small one that might change the world.
the next great idea that fundamentally changes how you (and I) view "viable alternatives" to the P4 will not come from a corporate team. I can guarantee you that. It never does.
Possibly, but neither will it come from a person who only has a "great vision and a little know-how". I would also not be surprised if that know-how was honed while employed by a corporate America.
Note that he isn't speaking for all of the Linux development in this interview. He's just speaking for himself.
Some people don't have that luxury. Linus is the leader of Linux developers, and an icon in the open source software community. He no longer has the ability to speak only for himself.
Tell me again how often you'd hear _any_ honest answers from _any_ executive of _any_ corporation? IMO, Linus is like breath of fresh air [...]
That's just lame. I think Linus would be insulted if his honesty is compared to the likes of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison. These are people beholden to billions of dollars whenever they speak.
Truth is, you've elevated Linus Torvalds onto a pedestal so high that by simply admitting he could be wrong he's already scoring big points in your book. That's really not very healthy both for him and for you.
Since when was Linux about bettering what the other guy is doing and taking market share?
It's been a long time since Linux was about any single particular thing. Linux, as Red Hat and IBM fund it, is about Red Hat and IBM. As Linus runs it, it's about Linus and what he feels the users want. As the NSA patches it, it's about national security. And so on. There are too many contributors and too many agenda that it's folly to try to pinpoint what Linux is about.
A person with a great vision and a little know-how can (and do) lay waste to corporate teams.
I think you missed my point. Indeed, many (maybe even most) seeds of wonderful ideas have come from independents or small teams. However, unless the idea is heavily protected by patents, they are very vulnerable to competition from established players. The reason they frequently get bought up is because that costs the corporations less money, not because the corporations can't compete. In fact, if there's any "laying waste" to be done, it's usually in the other direction. Netscape was the first real player on the web, enabling the eBay, blogging, Yahoo!, and Google examples you listed. What happened to them (and they already had far more than a little know-how)?
Also, in the rare occasions that the small guy does win, there's usually superhuman will, very hard work, a boatload of know-how, and probably some money to begin with. Can you actually cite a case where it was literally just "a great vision and a little know-how"?
This presumption that the garage tinkerer is history is ludicrous.
The original post you were responding to was specifically limited to "chip design", as you quoted. It was not a general statement about "garage tinkerers". Anybody designed a viable alternative to the P4 in a garage lately?
A lot of times, getting something actually done is also "busy work". Consider the testing and bug-fixing phases of software development, which most programmers would consider tedious. How do you like the programmers who are too clever to be fixing their own bugs?
A single person with a great idea and a little know-how can lay waste to any corporate team. [...] Watch how many little companies with great ideas that corporations buy up.
So you "lay waste" to the corporations by getting bought up? Truth is, not many such little companies are truly indispensable. Many such purchases are simply cheaper than the alternatives. Consider what happened to Netscape (yes, illegal, but little consolation now) when they refused Microsoft. And Netscape had perhaps the best idea of its decade.
Yes, there's still plenty of creativity going around, and great minds are capable of great things. However, there are areas whose state of the art is essentially out of reach to anybody without a lot of money. So while it might be wrong to say that one person can never accomplish something, it's more often wrong to dismiss a well-funded team in favor of "a great idea and a little know-how". Corporations manage to attract some very smart people too.
Surely it is simply good sense that species resident on multiple planets, and particularly in multiple solar systems throughout the galaxy, and indeed the universe, are more likely to survive?
You're right, but that doesn't mean the survival of the human species is necessarily worth the resources we would have to spend to guarantee it. I'm not objecting to the call in any way, but I don't think it'll resonate.
Look at earth today. We don't spend that much money to try to save every human dying of some disease. In fact, a generous country is one that spends a few percent of its GDP in aid. I'm not condemning anybody, but we need to recognize that we're saying everyday with our wallets that some things (and lives) are not worth the money to save. These are not abstract future "children", but people who are alive but dying. You may have a hard time arguing that extinction in a few hundred years is a far graver threat than, say, tens of millions dead from AIDS in the next decade or two.
Even if the catastrophe was a certainty in 455 years, we'll still have to decide whether living miserably for that period of time (to save up money on spaceships) is worthwhile. This is simply how we think and make decisions, and if that means we might be caught by an asteroid with our pants down, it just means that we're not collectively smart enough to survive this Darwinian universe.
Put another way, if human nature remains unchanged, we'll survive an asteroid if we can build a defense from existing technology before it hits. We're not likely to develop the technology just because we fear extinction in the abstract.
In his conclusion he writes, "It's now up to us to pick our directions and to pick them carefully." Do you think he is proposing a licensing change? That is not even legal for GPL software. What would be the point?
Indeed, which is why I wrote:
Let's say it hurts free software. What is anybody going to do about it? Close the source? Prohibit its use in Windows? Either way, you'd "kill" free software as it exists today.
in my original reply.
My interpretation of his blog was merely to discuss whether or not open source benefits from developing on Windows and perhaps to persuade developers not to spend their time doing so.
So your statement that "he does propose devoting resources to other areas as a strategy" is wrong? Because I really don't see that proposal (or any concrete proposed solution to his problem) in the blog.
That is possible, but not necessarily the case. Not everyone will have the resources or ability to create a port.
I wrote "ported or written". A variety of freeware, shareware, and commercial software writers are available on Windows who have no qualms about developing for it.
I was claiming that if the community as a whole decided to avoid development on Windows, open source OS's would probably gain market share.
Is this an assumption or a conclusion? If the latter, you'll need to explain why all the Windows developers would fail to clone every last useful application available only on Linux.
Also, the "community as a whole" cannot even agree on what to call Linux.
Even just looking at Firefox, how many day-job Window's users would push for a different OS if they had to use IE?
Very, very few. I'm a pushy advocate of Firefox, and I encounter (mainly passive) resistance everywhere I look. People acknowledge its distinguishing features, but few switch. Even fewer would ditch Windows.
Are you claiming that [cost] is the only benefit of open source?
No. For one, the source is open. Please try not to assume so little of people you converse with.
Will they reboot with a CD in the drive? Will they buy a new system with something different pre-loaded?
No, and no. I've basically given up trying to "sell" Linux to somebody who isn't already highly interested. Most people I know aren't sick enough of Windows to go through even that.
That doesn't mean I've given up on Linux. I just don't think you can or should rally the "community" as if it was a rival company to Microsoft. For one, Microsoft will likely always be far better organized and funded if you want to play the game that way. I always thought that Linux would eventually "win by accident" instead.
The author does not propose forcing anyone to do anything through licensing. He does propose devoting resources to other areas as a strategy to counter MS's illegal and unethical practices.
Sorry, where does Seigo's blog propose this? What does "devoting resources to other areas" mean, exactly?
His main point (and only point, as far as I can tell) is that making open source software available on Windows helps Microsoft. I don't disagree with that point. I'm saying there's nothing you can do about that, because when there is a demand for something, either it will be ported or be written. Expecting that you can keep a useful tool available only to certain platforms is folly. (In fact, look at all the talented people who are willing to build clones of commercial software and give it away for free, and then imagine the people willing to build clones of free tools for money.)
I think, however, some companies would prefer Linux+Firefox to Windows+Opera and this would inspire some movement to Linux (and other OSs that are not Windows).
Sure it would. The question that nobody has answered is whether Linux adoption will speed up or slow down if the control variable is the availability of Firefox on Windows. I would not assume that it would speed up (especially over the mid- to long-term) just because you withhold Firefox. For one, Windows-based web developers would be even less likely to test their work on Firefox.
You seem to think that different and unfamiliar are the biggest stumbling blocks to open source adoption. I strongly disagree. People like to try different things.
No, I think that "different and unfamiliar" is a big stumbling block if the only thing you can offer is lower cost. While I agree that "people like to try different things" to a certain extent, most non-technical people I know would not repartition their hard disk to try Linux.
This is not about forcing people to do something, it is about a group deciding where to devote their resources.
No, it's about Windows "being the platform of a company who competes very aggressively and effectively on their own platform". If you read the blog, it's entirely about making killer apps unavailable to Windows users as a strategy for the survival of open source applications and platforms.
What the author of the blog is missing is that how the app arrived on Windows (as a port or as a clone) is not really relevant. Using the Firefox example in the blog, if Firefox could not be ported to Windows and IE is as poor as it is today, then some Windows programmer or company will probably give away or sell a replacement browser. How would the further success of Opera (presumably taking over the Firefox market share) help Firefox or Linux very much?
About the only thing I can think of is cost. A total lack of free software would make running Windows somewhat more expensive. Indeed, at some point, a fully viable Linux desktop would be much cheaper than an equivalent Windows one, but then no Windows user would've ever tried any of the apps if the author has his way. How likely are they to switch to something totally foreign just because it's free beer/speech?
Yes. Yes I would, because I believe in personal responsibility. On the other hand, I doubt I would kill myself, regardless of any requirements anyone else tries to impose.
Oh well, no analogy is perfect. However, removing the "kill yourself immediately" requirement from the analogy almost seems that you're deliberately trying to misunderstand it.
it would no longer be the draining the resources of the development group. Were it made very clear by the original development group that they don't approve of, and would not support such a port, I'd think that would discourage a port.
The original author has clarified that:
this has nothing to do with it being a closed source platform [...] and everything to do with it being the platform of a company who competes very aggressively and effectively on their own platform.
so it's not about "draining the resources" of the developers, but the very availability of a Windows port hurting the product in the "mid- to long-term", however the Windows port came to be.
Yes, given options, most people would respect the wishes of the the original developers if they don't want to see a Windows port. However, if the tool is truly useful and unique, it's inevitable that it will be ported or cloned for the operating system that has a 90% market share. The scenario you are trying to avoid (an equivalent running under Windows) is not avoidable except by holding valid and blocking patents (which incidentally the GPL requires you to license along your code).
For a large and complicated program the source itself may as well be the binary for all the good it does someone other than a developer immersed in it.
If the "enough eyes" cannot understand the code well enough to port it, how can they be expected to make "all bugs shallow"?;)
you, as most of people posting here thus far, have missed the thesis of my blog entirely.
If you want to open your source code and let others use it freely, then somebody is going to port it to Windows. Asking whether it helps or hurts Linux in particular or free software in general is moot.
Let's say it hurts free software. What is anybody going to do about it? Close the source? Prohibit its use in Windows? Either way, you'd "kill" free software as it exists today. It would be effectively the same as closed source software, except for a small club who doesn't run Windows (just as there's a small club for whom Windows is effectively "open source").
If you are required to kill yourself immediately if you are HIV positive, would you bother getting tested?
Well, it's certainly coming on quicker than Bluetooth. When bluetooth was launched, $5 units were a distant prospect, and Zigbee is starting at that point. Sure it's big for phones, but it is the right start.
Even if I grant you "right start", would you agree that it's still a long way from "it will be big in phones"?
The 5 million units won't be in phones, but to get to 1% of something as established as Bluetooth in one year, is pretty good
Correction: if they sell 5 million units in the first year, it will be pretty good. You are taking an advocate's prediction of the future as if it already happened.
The causes for optimism are: [...]
Your article and assertions would be much improved if you cited the reasons in the first place, particularly if you compared its qualities against what you think made Bluetooth unsuccessful. Better yet, you should also cite risk areas* and assumptions that were made in the analysis.
Point is, it looks a bit like Bluetooth, so one naturally wonders what would make it phenomenally successful where Bluetooth was sluggish. History has proven that technical superiority, if any, is rarely enough.
* For example, the idealized Zigbee user experience that the advocates foresee require a great deal of software-layer cooperation. What would make Zigbee immune from a Microsoft-style embrace and extend? What would make it immune from lazy implementors? What would make phone manufacturers spend the money on their software, when today a large number of phones can barely even synchronize their address books with a PC?
Zigbee will be big in phones, and he reckons it's on target for 5 million units by the end of 2005.
Vendors shipped 165 million cell phones worldwide in the third quarter of 2004. In-start/MDR predicts 653 million units to be shipped this year. So, even by 2004 numbers, Zigbee will be in less than 1% of new cell phones shipped next year if they hit their target. Bluetooth, on the other hand, ships two million units per week in various devices.
Perhaps it "will be big", but you need far stronger numbers to back up your prediction.
Heile says it'll be "on target for 5 million units"? Your own article reports that he also said "analysts are predicting between 5 million and 50 million Zigbee devices in the first year", which means Zigbee might make the low end of predictions.
Also, $5 per unit is a huge cost for cell phone vendors. Nokia, for instance, would have to pay over $1 billion a year (~200 million units, excluding engineering costs) to support this in all their phones. To put that number in perspective, that's about a good quarter's worth of net profit for Nokia.
In other words, like any new technology, it will become much cheaper with wide adoption, but it will not be widely adopted unless it's cheap. Its future may be interesting, but is by no means assured. I simply don't see the evidence for your optimism.
I doubt you will find a police dispatch system built around Open Standards
By that I presume you mean that police dispatch systems should be authenticated, and possibly encrypted. For such, you can rely on standards where the keys - rather than the opened algorithms - ensure security.
As long as it's technically possible, every player should support every format. AIFF, WAV, AU, MP2, MP3, OGG, MOD, S3M, XM, IT, AAC (M4A, M4P), WMA... these should all be supported.
You forget to consider the cost of licensing and support. Every customer has to pay for each non-free encoder, whether they've even heard of the format or not.
There's just no excuse not to support everything, unless you're after a slice of the vendor lock-in pie.
That way, all the music on the music store would sound as good as possible (assuming the person doing the encoding was willing to try various codecs and see which one sounded best).
As far participating in the iTMS is concerned, this would easily triple the cost for the record labels or more. Aside from the extra encoding and listening time, you'll have to pay for the expertise to judge which encoding is better, because it's no longer something a cheap intern can do.
How likely do you think that would be, given how greedy these people generally appear to be?
They issue their own passports recognized by every country on the planet except China.
Including China, indirectly. If a holder of an ROC (Taiwan) passport wants a visa into China, the person would be issued an alternative travel pass based on the Taiwanese passport. This avoids the embarrassment of a Chinese official apparently recognizing a Taiwanese official document, but the real effect is the same.
And now some of the Taiwan politicians claim they are Japanese and claim Taiwan an independent country.
The first is most likely a misrepresentation. Ex-president Lee Teng Hui once remarked to a visitor that before year so-and-so (I can't remember) he was also a Japanese. That was factual. Taiwan was not only under Japanese occupation, it was a part of the Japanese empire following a treaty. Today, virtually nobody in Taiwan would consider themselves Japanese.
The second comes from one's understanding of history. The mainland view is basically that the ROC evaporated when the PRC was formed in Beijing. However, since nothing actually happened in Taipei, it's hard for the Taiwanese to consider it "outrageous" that their country (the ROC) has disappeared somehow.
We Chinese are peace people. We don't have too much ambitious. We enjoy our food and tea.
This is perhaps correct in a relative sense, compared to other expansionist empires. However, you would not like to face the business end of the Chinese empire (Han or Mongolian or otherwise) during one of its strong periods. Even the peaceful regimes required expensive tributes from smaller neighbors throughout history.
It is obvious you are patriotic. However, don't get dreamy. There are plenty of ugly episodes throughout the millennia that must be inherited along with the glory.
There is always culture difference between portions of a country, but this doesn't mean the country should be broke into parts.
The main difference between Taiwan and mainland China is not only of culture (which is rather slight), but form of government.
Slashdot Mirror
The suggestion is directed at somebody who says he cannot afford the "real deal", so there's not a big likelihood of having gotten used to it first.
There's a difference between making a profit and staying and business, and maximizing your profits to the exclusion of all else. I believe there are many ways to run a profitable business.
You may want to consider Photoshop Elements, which costs about $100 or less if you wait for a rebate. It's a surprisingly big subset of Photoshop, missing mainly the pre-press tools that are useful to professionals. It's also a useful training tool if you plan to move up to Photoshop one day.
What's the right thing?
I think that, upon request, the account should not be subjected to the 90-day deletion rule. However, it should take far more than your personal opinion of the veracity of the claim to open up somebody else's personal communications.
I'm not saying you did the wrong thing, either at the time or in the end. I'm saying that the decision seems to be harder than just casually saying the policy is "bullshit".
Sure, and neither is Linus likely to claim to be such a representative. What I'm saying is that he is taken as such, along with the likes of RMS or ESR. These are some of the leading (not just louder) voices in the community.
MLK didn't have a legal right to speak for the black community, either. It still meant that he doesn't have the luxury of speaking only for himself in most cases.
Linus' interview responses are like a breath of fresh air compared to interview responses of the other computer industry 'luminaries'.
And my point is that comparing him to people who stand to lose billions of dollars on a honest remark is a disservice to him. Compare him to somebody whom we generally expect to be honest instead.
Netscape was a small company that refused to be bought out, and eventually was crushed by the giant. Did they not have "great vision", or did they not even have "a little know-how"?
My point is that it takes far more than "great vision and a little know-how" to ultimately succeed against a big corporation. I'm still waiting for your counterexample.
No, of course not for many reasons. Like I said, corporations are good at making things bigger and better; they excel at that.
So who's going to "lay waste" to them?
(I wonder how Steve Wozniak would have fared in today's society.)
Wozniak was working for HP before he quit to form Apple. He had more than "a little know-how", and his work on the Apple computers was regarded as a work of art by many.
But, to address your specific question, I expect that even in the late 70s it was unusual to quit a stable job at a big company to form a small one that might change the world.
the next great idea that fundamentally changes how you (and I) view "viable alternatives" to the P4 will not come from a corporate team. I can guarantee you that. It never does.
Possibly, but neither will it come from a person who only has a "great vision and a little know-how". I would also not be surprised if that know-how was honed while employed by a corporate America.
Some people don't have that luxury. Linus is the leader of Linux developers, and an icon in the open source software community. He no longer has the ability to speak only for himself.
Tell me again how often you'd hear _any_ honest answers from _any_ executive of _any_ corporation? IMO, Linus is like breath of fresh air [...]
That's just lame. I think Linus would be insulted if his honesty is compared to the likes of Gates, Jobs, and Ellison. These are people beholden to billions of dollars whenever they speak.
Truth is, you've elevated Linus Torvalds onto a pedestal so high that by simply admitting he could be wrong he's already scoring big points in your book. That's really not very healthy both for him and for you.
It's been a long time since Linux was about any single particular thing. Linux, as Red Hat and IBM fund it, is about Red Hat and IBM. As Linus runs it, it's about Linus and what he feels the users want. As the NSA patches it, it's about national security. And so on. There are too many contributors and too many agenda that it's folly to try to pinpoint what Linux is about.
I think you missed my point. Indeed, many (maybe even most) seeds of wonderful ideas have come from independents or small teams. However, unless the idea is heavily protected by patents, they are very vulnerable to competition from established players. The reason they frequently get bought up is because that costs the corporations less money, not because the corporations can't compete. In fact, if there's any "laying waste" to be done, it's usually in the other direction. Netscape was the first real player on the web, enabling the eBay, blogging, Yahoo!, and Google examples you listed. What happened to them (and they already had far more than a little know-how)?
Also, in the rare occasions that the small guy does win, there's usually superhuman will, very hard work, a boatload of know-how, and probably some money to begin with. Can you actually cite a case where it was literally just "a great vision and a little know-how"?
This presumption that the garage tinkerer is history is ludicrous.
The original post you were responding to was specifically limited to "chip design", as you quoted. It was not a general statement about "garage tinkerers". Anybody designed a viable alternative to the P4 in a garage lately?
A lot of times, getting something actually done is also "busy work". Consider the testing and bug-fixing phases of software development, which most programmers would consider tedious. How do you like the programmers who are too clever to be fixing their own bugs?
So you "lay waste" to the corporations by getting bought up? Truth is, not many such little companies are truly indispensable. Many such purchases are simply cheaper than the alternatives. Consider what happened to Netscape (yes, illegal, but little consolation now) when they refused Microsoft. And Netscape had perhaps the best idea of its decade.
Yes, there's still plenty of creativity going around, and great minds are capable of great things. However, there are areas whose state of the art is essentially out of reach to anybody without a lot of money. So while it might be wrong to say that one person can never accomplish something, it's more often wrong to dismiss a well-funded team in favor of "a great idea and a little know-how". Corporations manage to attract some very smart people too.
You're right, but that doesn't mean the survival of the human species is necessarily worth the resources we would have to spend to guarantee it. I'm not objecting to the call in any way, but I don't think it'll resonate.
Look at earth today. We don't spend that much money to try to save every human dying of some disease. In fact, a generous country is one that spends a few percent of its GDP in aid. I'm not condemning anybody, but we need to recognize that we're saying everyday with our wallets that some things (and lives) are not worth the money to save. These are not abstract future "children", but people who are alive but dying. You may have a hard time arguing that extinction in a few hundred years is a far graver threat than, say, tens of millions dead from AIDS in the next decade or two.
Even if the catastrophe was a certainty in 455 years, we'll still have to decide whether living miserably for that period of time (to save up money on spaceships) is worthwhile. This is simply how we think and make decisions, and if that means we might be caught by an asteroid with our pants down, it just means that we're not collectively smart enough to survive this Darwinian universe.
Put another way, if human nature remains unchanged, we'll survive an asteroid if we can build a defense from existing technology before it hits. We're not likely to develop the technology just because we fear extinction in the abstract.
Indeed, which is why I wrote:
in my original reply.My interpretation of his blog was merely to discuss whether or not open source benefits from developing on Windows and perhaps to persuade developers not to spend their time doing so.
So your statement that "he does propose devoting resources to other areas as a strategy" is wrong? Because I really don't see that proposal (or any concrete proposed solution to his problem) in the blog.
That is possible, but not necessarily the case. Not everyone will have the resources or ability to create a port.
I wrote "ported or written". A variety of freeware, shareware, and commercial software writers are available on Windows who have no qualms about developing for it.
I was claiming that if the community as a whole decided to avoid development on Windows, open source OS's would probably gain market share.
Is this an assumption or a conclusion? If the latter, you'll need to explain why all the Windows developers would fail to clone every last useful application available only on Linux.
Also, the "community as a whole" cannot even agree on what to call Linux.
Even just looking at Firefox, how many day-job Window's users would push for a different OS if they had to use IE?
Very, very few. I'm a pushy advocate of Firefox, and I encounter (mainly passive) resistance everywhere I look. People acknowledge its distinguishing features, but few switch. Even fewer would ditch Windows.
Are you claiming that [cost] is the only benefit of open source?
No. For one, the source is open. Please try not to assume so little of people you converse with.
Will they reboot with a CD in the drive? Will they buy a new system with something different pre-loaded?
No, and no. I've basically given up trying to "sell" Linux to somebody who isn't already highly interested. Most people I know aren't sick enough of Windows to go through even that.
That doesn't mean I've given up on Linux. I just don't think you can or should rally the "community" as if it was a rival company to Microsoft. For one, Microsoft will likely always be far better organized and funded if you want to play the game that way. I always thought that Linux would eventually "win by accident" instead.
Sorry, where does Seigo's blog propose this? What does "devoting resources to other areas" mean, exactly?
His main point (and only point, as far as I can tell) is that making open source software available on Windows helps Microsoft. I don't disagree with that point. I'm saying there's nothing you can do about that, because when there is a demand for something, either it will be ported or be written. Expecting that you can keep a useful tool available only to certain platforms is folly. (In fact, look at all the talented people who are willing to build clones of commercial software and give it away for free, and then imagine the people willing to build clones of free tools for money.)
I think, however, some companies would prefer Linux+Firefox to Windows+Opera and this would inspire some movement to Linux (and other OSs that are not Windows).
Sure it would. The question that nobody has answered is whether Linux adoption will speed up or slow down if the control variable is the availability of Firefox on Windows. I would not assume that it would speed up (especially over the mid- to long-term) just because you withhold Firefox. For one, Windows-based web developers would be even less likely to test their work on Firefox.
You seem to think that different and unfamiliar are the biggest stumbling blocks to open source adoption. I strongly disagree. People like to try different things.
No, I think that "different and unfamiliar" is a big stumbling block if the only thing you can offer is lower cost. While I agree that "people like to try different things" to a certain extent, most non-technical people I know would not repartition their hard disk to try Linux.
No, it's about Windows "being the platform of a company who competes very aggressively and effectively on their own platform". If you read the blog, it's entirely about making killer apps unavailable to Windows users as a strategy for the survival of open source applications and platforms.
What the author of the blog is missing is that how the app arrived on Windows (as a port or as a clone) is not really relevant. Using the Firefox example in the blog, if Firefox could not be ported to Windows and IE is as poor as it is today, then some Windows programmer or company will probably give away or sell a replacement browser. How would the further success of Opera (presumably taking over the Firefox market share) help Firefox or Linux very much?
About the only thing I can think of is cost. A total lack of free software would make running Windows somewhat more expensive. Indeed, at some point, a fully viable Linux desktop would be much cheaper than an equivalent Windows one, but then no Windows user would've ever tried any of the apps if the author has his way. How likely are they to switch to something totally foreign just because it's free beer/speech?
Yes. Yes I would, because I believe in personal responsibility. On the other hand, I doubt I would kill myself, regardless of any requirements anyone else tries to impose.
Oh well, no analogy is perfect. However, removing the "kill yourself immediately" requirement from the analogy almost seems that you're deliberately trying to misunderstand it.
The original author has clarified that:
so it's not about "draining the resources" of the developers, but the very availability of a Windows port hurting the product in the "mid- to long-term", however the Windows port came to be.Yes, given options, most people would respect the wishes of the the original developers if they don't want to see a Windows port. However, if the tool is truly useful and unique, it's inevitable that it will be ported or cloned for the operating system that has a 90% market share. The scenario you are trying to avoid (an equivalent running under Windows) is not avoidable except by holding valid and blocking patents (which incidentally the GPL requires you to license along your code).
For a large and complicated program the source itself may as well be the binary for all the good it does someone other than a developer immersed in it.
If the "enough eyes" cannot understand the code well enough to port it, how can they be expected to make "all bugs shallow"? ;)
If you want to open your source code and let others use it freely, then somebody is going to port it to Windows. Asking whether it helps or hurts Linux in particular or free software in general is moot.
Let's say it hurts free software. What is anybody going to do about it? Close the source? Prohibit its use in Windows? Either way, you'd "kill" free software as it exists today. It would be effectively the same as closed source software, except for a small club who doesn't run Windows (just as there's a small club for whom Windows is effectively "open source").
If you are required to kill yourself immediately if you are HIV positive, would you bother getting tested?
Even if I grant you "right start", would you agree that it's still a long way from "it will be big in phones"?
The 5 million units won't be in phones, but to get to 1% of something as established as Bluetooth in one year, is pretty good
Correction: if they sell 5 million units in the first year, it will be pretty good. You are taking an advocate's prediction of the future as if it already happened.
The causes for optimism are: [...]
Your article and assertions would be much improved if you cited the reasons in the first place, particularly if you compared its qualities against what you think made Bluetooth unsuccessful. Better yet, you should also cite risk areas* and assumptions that were made in the analysis.
Point is, it looks a bit like Bluetooth, so one naturally wonders what would make it phenomenally successful where Bluetooth was sluggish. History has proven that technical superiority, if any, is rarely enough.
* For example, the idealized Zigbee user experience that the advocates foresee require a great deal of software-layer cooperation. What would make Zigbee immune from a Microsoft-style embrace and extend? What would make it immune from lazy implementors? What would make phone manufacturers spend the money on their software, when today a large number of phones can barely even synchronize their address books with a PC?
Vendors shipped 165 million cell phones worldwide in the third quarter of 2004. In-start/MDR predicts 653 million units to be shipped this year. So, even by 2004 numbers, Zigbee will be in less than 1% of new cell phones shipped next year if they hit their target. Bluetooth, on the other hand, ships two million units per week in various devices. Perhaps it "will be big", but you need far stronger numbers to back up your prediction.
Heile says it'll be "on target for 5 million units"? Your own article reports that he also said "analysts are predicting between 5 million and 50 million Zigbee devices in the first year", which means Zigbee might make the low end of predictions.
Also, $5 per unit is a huge cost for cell phone vendors. Nokia, for instance, would have to pay over $1 billion a year (~200 million units, excluding engineering costs) to support this in all their phones. To put that number in perspective, that's about a good quarter's worth of net profit for Nokia.
In other words, like any new technology, it will become much cheaper with wide adoption, but it will not be widely adopted unless it's cheap. Its future may be interesting, but is by no means assured. I simply don't see the evidence for your optimism.
By that I presume you mean that police dispatch systems should be authenticated, and possibly encrypted. For such, you can rely on standards where the keys - rather than the opened algorithms - ensure security.
You forget to consider the cost of licensing and support. Every customer has to pay for each non-free encoder, whether they've even heard of the format or not.
There's just no excuse not to support everything, unless you're after a slice of the vendor lock-in pie.
As far participating in the iTMS is concerned, this would easily triple the cost for the record labels or more. Aside from the extra encoding and listening time, you'll have to pay for the expertise to judge which encoding is better, because it's no longer something a cheap intern can do.
How likely do you think that would be, given how greedy these people generally appear to be?
Including China, indirectly. If a holder of an ROC (Taiwan) passport wants a visa into China, the person would be issued an alternative travel pass based on the Taiwanese passport. This avoids the embarrassment of a Chinese official apparently recognizing a Taiwanese official document, but the real effect is the same.
The first is most likely a misrepresentation. Ex-president Lee Teng Hui once remarked to a visitor that before year so-and-so (I can't remember) he was also a Japanese. That was factual. Taiwan was not only under Japanese occupation, it was a part of the Japanese empire following a treaty. Today, virtually nobody in Taiwan would consider themselves Japanese.
The second comes from one's understanding of history. The mainland view is basically that the ROC evaporated when the PRC was formed in Beijing. However, since nothing actually happened in Taipei, it's hard for the Taiwanese to consider it "outrageous" that their country (the ROC) has disappeared somehow.
We Chinese are peace people. We don't have too much ambitious. We enjoy our food and tea.
This is perhaps correct in a relative sense, compared to other expansionist empires. However, you would not like to face the business end of the Chinese empire (Han or Mongolian or otherwise) during one of its strong periods. Even the peaceful regimes required expensive tributes from smaller neighbors throughout history.
It is obvious you are patriotic. However, don't get dreamy. There are plenty of ugly episodes throughout the millennia that must be inherited along with the glory.
There is always culture difference between portions of a country, but this doesn't mean the country should be broke into parts.
The main difference between Taiwan and mainland China is not only of culture (which is rather slight), but form of government.