Elf Sternberg, an long-time personality on Usenet, anticipated some of the growing problems with it and has put this proposal on his web site for a distributed solution. It is worth reading, especially in light of the idea for a Slashdot/NNTP gateway.
Mandrake has been quite proactive is adding any available support for as many languages as possible. They have a localization page dedicated to it. They aren't the only organization working on it, but they are trying to make it widely available in an easily usable form. The Translation Project and Linux International which has sponsored mailing lists for it, have probably been doing it as actively as anyone else out there. There are other projects working on it as well:
Given that the Linux kernel has been ported to a number of different architectures, and gcc supports lots of processors, my question is: How portable is Linux and the software that runs under it? The GNU tools are extremely portable. That has always been one of their design criteria. But how easy is it to take all of it and port it to new hardware?
One very good reason for asking this question is that widespread use of highly portable free software might encourage innovation in new processors. If the processor manufacturers know that they can port a mature OS with lots of tools to their new architecture with little effort, then the risk goes down.
Spider Robinson, a fine science fiction writer, author of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series wrote a short story back in the early 80's called Melancholy Elephants about precisely this problem. He pointed out that carried to it's ultimate conclusion, extending both the scope and duration of copyright protection would simply result in an environment that stifles creativity rather than promoting it. Every story, every melody, every character name would have the potential to violate the copyright of someone long dead whose heirs could of course sue. He makes his living as an author. He stands to lose royalties for his heirs down the line for opposing longer terms for copyright protection. But he also stands to lose by having copyrights that should long since have expired used against him.
Even if I could have a laptop the size of a paperback, I probably wouldn't carry it unless it had voice recognition and really good integration with my desktop (I'm really picky about keyboards. The only ones I like right now are the the ones dell ships.)
I'm funny about keyboards myself. I used them. I don't like having to switch back and forth between a keyboard and a mouse. I want an interface that uses one or the other. The time I spend switching is time I spend losing touch with what I was doing. I can spend hours coding via Emacs and never once think about which keys I'm hitting. Put me on the wrong keyboard and that flow disappears until I get used to the new one.
Okay, I recognize that irony doesn't come across clearly in a text medium, but I thought my irony was clear enough. Most people never load anything onto their machines that wasn't there when they bought them other than games, tax software and the free CD from some big ISP. I think we all know that.
Cringly mentions it in his latest column. The winning PDA will be one which gives away programming tools for third party applications. Good tools and good documentation for doing that will be a key.
If I had a PDA tightly integrated with my PC (running Linux, of course), that I could write new applications for easily, blah blah blah. Okay, all of my conditions are met today by one or more players in the market. I don't think it will come down to one killer app. There will be different applications for different markets.
I found the reviewer's bias toward languages with built-in garbage collection a little annoying.
The one thing I find myself wishing for most often with garbage collection is a feature that is available in most Lisp implementations: a function to explicitly trigger the garbage collector. This gives me all the power that I usually want in a language with explicit storage allocation and deallocation. I often just want the ability to say when it is convenient. That is a bit of knowledge that programmers almost always have and the runtime library frequently doesn't. So right before a big task that is going to take a while and chew up memory, or right after a big response gets handed to the user:
You'd be annoyed to if you needed to pay for a second OS just to use a piece of hardware that came bundled with your system, not because there was no software for the OS you use, but because that software was the subject of a lawsuit. Imagine if you had to pay for a copy of OS/2 to use your DVD player even though you already have Windows.
Titanic, a huge movie which made lots of money, used Linux as a platform to generate it's special effects. Does anyone here have connections with anyone involved in that? Disney uses SGI, and SGI is Linux friendly. There are people making movies who know what Linux is.
Can anyone with connections with people inside movie studios find a sympathetic ear, someone who would be willing to champion the idea that we want to be able to play legally purchased DVD movies under Linux? Put any rhetoric on the shelf for a couple of minutes and just make the point to them that we want to have free software to play the movies. We want to be their customers.
Just yesterday we had an article right here on Slashdot talking about a speech Linus gave mentioning the various efforts to bring a journaling file system to Linux. I don't know whether that article may have prompted IBM to put their code up for everyone to have a look or not. It may just be a coincidence. Either way, I tip my hat to them. Thanks, IBM.
The way I read the announcement, this is a good thing for the shareholders of both companies and is an indication that VA Linux is doing well as well as the fact that Andover.Net is an attractice company to purchase. I am also happy because I have confidence that VA Linux will let Andover.Net continue to do the things that I think everyone reading this appreciates. The combined company will have a bit more weight to throw around as well and will be better able to weather shifts in the marketplace because of a broader base of services.
Okay, enough hype. All of what I've said may be and probably is true. But I am still concerned. Can VA Linux manage the rate of growth that has come with it's success? And as other people have pointed out here, as open source companies merge, are they bigger competitors or more centralized targets?
As long as viable new players with new ideas keep springing up and creating niches for themselves and the big players don't forget what makes their reputation in the open source community, I don't think I'll worry. If we end up with one behemoth as the only corporate player in the open source world, then I will suspect a problem. Not because that company got big; I hope that VA Linux and Redhat continue to grow. But any market that isn't spawning new ideas is dying.
So my message to the open source companies is simple. Stay young and alive for as long as you possibly can. It's more fun and you'll have the support of a lot more open source developers. Don't grow at the expense of who you are. This merger has every sign of being the right direction.
And so, instead of teaching the corporations about the benefits of open development, I think that open source leaders are in for a lesson themselves. They won't have beaten the corporations by having joined them. Rather, it will be the other way around.
Yes, this is true as far as it goes. The change in the Linux marketplace does change who open source companies can find as employees and the terms on which they can hire them. It raises the stakes. It means that open source businesses will be competing on a business playing field.
But that is a separate issue from what is so dear to many of us. The code, the future of Linux, and GNU, and FreeBSD, does not live or die with a single open source company. The GPL isn't magic. Just because we have it won't make the future of free software be what we want it to be. The one thing that it does guarantee is the option to fork any GPL'd project. If it isn't going the way you want it to, you can take the source and go work on it yourself.
That means that mindshare can't be won by claims to owning the code. Some big company can certainly put out a Linux release of its own, with proprietary software running on it. They may grab a dominant position in the market that way. And it is still a smart move for them to play nice with the rest of the open source developers on the kernel and other free tools. Their other choice is to do all the work themselves, on software that anyone else can tweak and release a cheap copy of.
The article didn't say anything about how the $8 billion figure was arrived at, although I didn't expect that. Does anyone have any guesses, or better yet, hard facts? And what is AOL's current installed base? We could certainly figure out how much this works out to per user from that. As for the real merits of the suit, I have no idea. I'm not a lawyer and the only thing I understand about class action lawsuits is that they are only ever aimed at targets with deep pockets.
He said it will be for the market to decide which journaling system gets chosen. Right now there are two main contenders, ReiserFS and ext3, an improvement to the current Linux file system, ext2. In addition, SGI and IBM have journaling file system work under way.
It struck me that put simply, free software can be nothing other than a free market. The barriers to entry are very low. You have to be competent and credible, or you are ignored, but you don't need a marketing machine and shelf placement at nationwide retail chains. And the only constraints preventing project forking are cultural.
Plus (and I know I keep bring this up), we adhere to publically documented interfaces. If nothing else, the source is the documentation of the interface. Anyone can read it.
Together these factors add up to the opportunity for multiple solutions to arise. In the case of journaling file systems, the demand is clearly there, so the solutions are springing up.
The two sides of the free market equation are both illustrated by this example. Multiple producers competing to be the best solution. And those same projects acting as customers bidding for developers to work on them. In both cases, they are bidding with technical merit and project credibility. On one side, they have to convince users to use them. On the other, they have to get programmers to enhance them.
We are all consumers, and we are all producers. What makes the free software marketplace interesting to watch is that a large portion of the community acts as both in the same space. And the currency with which we buy is the most valuable thing we have, our time.
February 2 2000 or something to that effect. There is NO (simple) WAY that this could be misunderstood.
By humans, perhaps (English speaking ones certainly). However, unless you hard code the English month names, parsing this is going to fail for non-English locales. Let's not introduce an internationalization problem just to solve a date problem.
It would be interesting to see a single valid entry that could be submitted to more than one Obfuscated Foo Code Contest. Here are some of the contest announcements (not all current):
The Risks Digest frequently covers issues related to this. The latest issue contains a brief comment on Simson Garfinkel's new book, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century published by O'Reilly & Associates. The PRIVACY Forum is also an excellent resource on issues of privacy and technology.
For years, especially while Y2K fears were building, I advocated the One True Date Format: YYYY-MM-DD (punctuation is optional and either dots or dashes may be substituted). It sorts correctly. It is locale-independent. It is Y3K-compliant. You need not use it for human interaction, but it should be used to store the dates and transmit them in internal protocols whenever they must be in a printable form. Binary equivalents are acceptable, but may not easily extend to Y10K compliance (see RFC 2550: Y10K and Beyond).
When you use this format, placing the most significant digits first (2000-02-02, see Jargon File 4.2.0: big-endian), it is painfully obvious that there is going to be a 2 in the high-order digit for the rest of our expected lifespan.
This implies something very important. Know what you want. Know your values, and what you are trying to do. There are a million compromises to be made in the world. A start-up may present you with more of them more quickly, but it is not unique in that. Some compromises are fine. Renting an office located closer to your potential investors may be a good compromise. Spend your time asking yourself about the potential investors, not the office. You can get out of a lease and rent a different office. That costs money, but it is doable. Pay attention to the important things.
Now for me it's back to teaching the geek I work with that reading books on salemanship doesn't make him a salesman.
However, that doesn't mean that there is no value in having a geek understand sales. One of the most underrated skills around is being able to translate ideas between different groups of people, getting them talking in the same language. Whether he is that translator, or his is one of the people on the geek side of the room who needs to understand the salepeople, the knowledge is not necessarily wasted. Be good at what you do, but be able to explain it to the people around you.
I don't have a problem with license agreements on software. I can always use software that is licensed under the GPL or another free license. However, when the law will be changed retroactively modifying the GPL and granting to shrink-wrapped licenses a power to completely disclaim liability which is not available to free software, that is just wrong.
I am probably one of the people in the community that RMS was referring to when he said that some of us have argued that more restrictive licenses would drive customers to free software. What I remember saying is that the restrictiveness of the license is just another part of the overall cost to the customer. Software will compete on license restrictiveness as well as price, functionality and reliability. That is already the case.
I suggest a modification in the GPL (somebody put it in legalese):
Any supporter of UCITA agrees to permanently delete all software on all computers under his control that is not licensed under a license accepted under the definition for Open Source or Free Software or that is licensed under a license that depends on UCITA. Said supporter will never again use non-free software. Supporters are defined as any legislator who voted in favor of UCITA, his or her office staff, any attorney who has drafted a license that depends on UCITA, anyone who has authorized the use of such a license or paid to have one written that is actually in use. For the purposes of determining control, corporate executives will be deemed to have control of the computers used by their companies. This license, even if it is subsequently found to depend on UCITA in anyway, is not subject to this provision.
Remember, if this clause could hold up, then a clause in a proprietary license forbidding you to use it on a dual boot machine with free software could hold up as well.
Linux, HURD and FreeBSD share quite a bit. A huge number of tools port between them with little effort. We welcome each other at conferences and users' groups. Etc., etc. In the end, the best open source OS will win. The best open source desktop OS will run on desktops. The other best open source desktop OS will run on the other desktops. The best open source web server OS.... It's about choice. It's about comparing them objectively for different uses. It is about learning from each one's strengths and bring that knowledge from one to another.
Every open source OS is stronger because they are all a training ground for open source programmers. You don't have to use a single book or a single kernel's source code to learn the One True Way (tm). I'm using Linux (sorry Richard, GNU/Linux) at home right now. I may switch to FreeBSD or HURD, or dual boot. And my data and applications will come with me. Standards are common data formats and common protocols, not a specific version of a specific program or OS.
If Open Source is to win, REALLY win, it must defeat not the armies of the Sauron (the MPA) or the Orcs and Trolls of Sauruman (the RIAA) but the One Ring (Power Over Others). Yes, that means -fighting- those armies, but as in Tolkein's depiction, those battles can be won or lost by either side, and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. All that matters is whether The Ring is destroyed or handed over.
Ordinarily I don't like facile literary analogies when trying to analyze complex issues involving lots of parties. There is too much of a tendency to assign to each of these parties one of the roles from the book. You avoided that error while bring the point straight home. The true heroes of Lord of the Rings were Frodo, of course, and Sam. Frodo is obvious, a reluctant hero, an ordinary person who takes on a tremendous burden because the task must be done...
Sam is less obvious, but I suspect that Tolkien wanted to emphasize the heroic aspects of his personality as highly as anyone else in the story. Sam wanted happiness, comfort and friendship. The few times he thought about uses for The One Ring, he sould have turned his corner of the Shire into a garden and a breadbasket. The only control he ever wanted was what he needed to make himself and his own comfortable. The world would have been a better place with Sam in charge simply because he would have done nothing to anyone. The desire for power over anyone else had no hold on him.
Now, what does this have to do with open source? Well, why would anyone spend countless hours of his own time working on software for his own use and for the possible accolades of his peers when he could pay much less than that time is worth and get a shrink-wrapped package that did the job? Control over his own life, his own data, his own computer. We want to make tools to make our own lives easier or more fulfilling. As Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
And we not only do we not object when other people benefit from it, we have realized that the collaboration that the open source model makes possible can provide us with useful enhancements in return. The guarantee of control over the software on our systems, the source code and the right to modify it, and distribute those modifications is control over our own lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Elf Sternberg, an long-time personality on Usenet, anticipated some of the growing problems with it and has put this proposal on his web site for a distributed solution. It is worth reading, especially in light of the idea for a Slashdot/NNTP gateway.
This article may be copied and distributed under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) Version 1.0, July 14, 1998.
Given that the Linux kernel has been ported to a number of different architectures, and gcc supports lots of processors, my question is: How portable is Linux and the software that runs under it? The GNU tools are extremely portable. That has always been one of their design criteria. But how easy is it to take all of it and port it to new hardware?
One very good reason for asking this question is that widespread use of highly portable free software might encourage innovation in new processors. If the processor manufacturers know that they can port a mature OS with lots of tools to their new architecture with little effort, then the risk goes down.
Spider Robinson, a fine science fiction writer, author of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series wrote a short story back in the early 80's called Melancholy Elephants about precisely this problem. He pointed out that carried to it's ultimate conclusion, extending both the scope and duration of copyright protection would simply result in an environment that stifles creativity rather than promoting it. Every story, every melody, every character name would have the potential to violate the copyright of someone long dead whose heirs could of course sue. He makes his living as an author. He stands to lose royalties for his heirs down the line for opposing longer terms for copyright protection. But he also stands to lose by having copyrights that should long since have expired used against him.
Even if I could have a laptop the size of a paperback, I probably wouldn't carry it unless it had voice recognition and really good integration with my desktop (I'm really picky about keyboards. The only ones I like right now are the the ones dell ships.)
I'm funny about keyboards myself. I used them. I don't like having to switch back and forth between a keyboard and a mouse. I want an interface that uses one or the other. The time I spend switching is time I spend losing touch with what I was doing. I can spend hours coding via Emacs and never once think about which keys I'm hitting. Put me on the wrong keyboard and that flow disappears until I get used to the new one.
Okay, I recognize that irony doesn't come across clearly in a text medium, but I thought my irony was clear enough. Most people never load anything onto their machines that wasn't there when they bought them other than games, tax software and the free CD from some big ISP. I think we all know that.
Cringly mentions it in his latest column. The winning PDA will be one which gives away programming tools for third party applications. Good tools and good documentation for doing that will be a key.
If I had a PDA tightly integrated with my PC (running Linux, of course), that I could write new applications for easily, blah blah blah. Okay, all of my conditions are met today by one or more players in the market. I don't think it will come down to one killer app. There will be different applications for different markets.
I found the reviewer's bias toward languages with built-in garbage collection a little annoying.
The one thing I find myself wishing for most often with garbage collection is a feature that is available in most Lisp implementations: a function to explicitly trigger the garbage collector. This gives me all the power that I usually want in a language with explicit storage allocation and deallocation. I often just want the ability to say when it is convenient. That is a bit of knowledge that programmers almost always have and the runtime library frequently doesn't. So right before a big task that is going to take a while and chew up memory, or right after a big response gets handed to the user:
(garbage-collect) ; Emacs Lisp dialect
You'd be annoyed to if you needed to pay for a second OS just to use a piece of hardware that came bundled with your system, not because there was no software for the OS you use, but because that software was the subject of a lawsuit. Imagine if you had to pay for a copy of OS/2 to use your DVD player even though you already have Windows.
ObLinuxRant: just think of the money Ford could have saved if they gave their employees boxes with Linux on them!
I wonder what percentage of them will end up running Linux, FreeBSD or Hurd anyway.
Titanic, a huge movie which made lots of money, used Linux as a platform to generate it's special effects. Does anyone here have connections with anyone involved in that? Disney uses SGI, and SGI is Linux friendly. There are people making movies who know what Linux is.
Can anyone with connections with people inside movie studios find a sympathetic ear, someone who would be willing to champion the idea that we want to be able to play legally purchased DVD movies under Linux? Put any rhetoric on the shelf for a couple of minutes and just make the point to them that we want to have free software to play the movies. We want to be their customers.
Just yesterday we had an article right here on Slashdot talking about a speech Linus gave mentioning the various efforts to bring a journaling file system to Linux. I don't know whether that article may have prompted IBM to put their code up for everyone to have a look or not. It may just be a coincidence. Either way, I tip my hat to them. Thanks, IBM.
The way I read the announcement, this is a good thing for the shareholders of both companies and is an indication that VA Linux is doing well as well as the fact that Andover.Net is an attractice company to purchase. I am also happy because I have confidence that VA Linux will let Andover.Net continue to do the things that I think everyone reading this appreciates. The combined company will have a bit more weight to throw around as well and will be better able to weather shifts in the marketplace because of a broader base of services.
Okay, enough hype. All of what I've said may be and probably is true. But I am still concerned. Can VA Linux manage the rate of growth that has come with it's success? And as other people have pointed out here, as open source companies merge, are they bigger competitors or more centralized targets?
As long as viable new players with new ideas keep springing up and creating niches for themselves and the big players don't forget what makes their reputation in the open source community, I don't think I'll worry. If we end up with one behemoth as the only corporate player in the open source world, then I will suspect a problem. Not because that company got big; I hope that VA Linux and Redhat continue to grow. But any market that isn't spawning new ideas is dying.
So my message to the open source companies is simple. Stay young and alive for as long as you possibly can. It's more fun and you'll have the support of a lot more open source developers. Don't grow at the expense of who you are. This merger has every sign of being the right direction.
And so, instead of teaching the corporations about the benefits of open development, I think that open source leaders are in for a lesson themselves. They won't have beaten the corporations by having joined them. Rather, it will be the other way around.
Yes, this is true as far as it goes. The change in the Linux marketplace does change who open source companies can find as employees and the terms on which they can hire them. It raises the stakes. It means that open source businesses will be competing on a business playing field.
But that is a separate issue from what is so dear to many of us. The code, the future of Linux, and GNU, and FreeBSD, does not live or die with a single open source company. The GPL isn't magic. Just because we have it won't make the future of free software be what we want it to be. The one thing that it does guarantee is the option to fork any GPL'd project. If it isn't going the way you want it to, you can take the source and go work on it yourself.
That means that mindshare can't be won by claims to owning the code. Some big company can certainly put out a Linux release of its own, with proprietary software running on it. They may grab a dominant position in the market that way. And it is still a smart move for them to play nice with the rest of the open source developers on the kernel and other free tools. Their other choice is to do all the work themselves, on software that anyone else can tweak and release a cheap copy of.
The article didn't say anything about how the $8 billion figure was arrived at, although I didn't expect that. Does anyone have any guesses, or better yet, hard facts? And what is AOL's current installed base? We could certainly figure out how much this works out to per user from that. As for the real merits of the suit, I have no idea. I'm not a lawyer and the only thing I understand about class action lawsuits is that they are only ever aimed at targets with deep pockets.
Something the article cited caught my attention:
He said it will be for the market to decide which journaling system gets chosen. Right now there are two main contenders, ReiserFS and ext3, an improvement to the current Linux file system, ext2. In addition, SGI and IBM have journaling file system work under way.
It struck me that put simply, free software can be nothing other than a free market. The barriers to entry are very low. You have to be competent and credible, or you are ignored, but you don't need a marketing machine and shelf placement at nationwide retail chains. And the only constraints preventing project forking are cultural.
Plus (and I know I keep bring this up), we adhere to publically documented interfaces. If nothing else, the source is the documentation of the interface. Anyone can read it.
Together these factors add up to the opportunity for multiple solutions to arise. In the case of journaling file systems, the demand is clearly there, so the solutions are springing up.
The two sides of the free market equation are both illustrated by this example. Multiple producers competing to be the best solution. And those same projects acting as customers bidding for developers to work on them. In both cases, they are bidding with technical merit and project credibility. On one side, they have to convince users to use them. On the other, they have to get programmers to enhance them.
We are all consumers, and we are all producers. What makes the free software marketplace interesting to watch is that a large portion of the community acts as both in the same space. And the currency with which we buy is the most valuable thing we have, our time.
February 2 2000 or something to that effect. There is NO (simple) WAY that this could be misunderstood.
By humans, perhaps (English speaking ones certainly). However, unless you hard code the English month names, parsing this is going to fail for non-English locales. Let's not introduce an internationalization problem just to solve a date problem.
The Risks Digest frequently covers issues related to this. The latest issue contains a brief comment on Simson Garfinkel's new book, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century published by O'Reilly & Associates. The PRIVACY Forum is also an excellent resource on issues of privacy and technology.
For years, especially while Y2K fears were building, I advocated the One True Date Format: YYYY-MM-DD (punctuation is optional and either dots or dashes may be substituted). It sorts correctly. It is locale-independent. It is Y3K-compliant. You need not use it for human interaction, but it should be used to store the dates and transmit them in internal protocols whenever they must be in a printable form. Binary equivalents are acceptable, but may not easily extend to Y10K compliance (see RFC 2550: Y10K and Beyond).
When you use this format, placing the most significant digits first (2000-02-02, see Jargon File 4.2.0: big-endian), it is painfully obvious that there is going to be a 2 in the high-order digit for the rest of our expected lifespan.
The only rule I would offer is:
Rule #1: Don't Sell Out
This implies something very important. Know what you want. Know your values, and what you are trying to do. There are a million compromises to be made in the world. A start-up may present you with more of them more quickly, but it is not unique in that. Some compromises are fine. Renting an office located closer to your potential investors may be a good compromise. Spend your time asking yourself about the potential investors, not the office. You can get out of a lease and rent a different office. That costs money, but it is doable. Pay attention to the important things.
Now for me it's back to teaching the geek I work with that reading books on salemanship doesn't make him a salesman.
However, that doesn't mean that there is no value in having a geek understand sales. One of the most underrated skills around is being able to translate ideas between different groups of people, getting them talking in the same language. Whether he is that translator, or his is one of the people on the geek side of the room who needs to understand the salepeople, the knowledge is not necessarily wasted. Be good at what you do, but be able to explain it to the people around you.
I don't have a problem with license agreements on software. I can always use software that is licensed under the GPL or another free license. However, when the law will be changed retroactively modifying the GPL and granting to shrink-wrapped licenses a power to completely disclaim liability which is not available to free software, that is just wrong.
I am probably one of the people in the community that RMS was referring to when he said that some of us have argued that more restrictive licenses would drive customers to free software. What I remember saying is that the restrictiveness of the license is just another part of the overall cost to the customer. Software will compete on license restrictiveness as well as price, functionality and reliability. That is already the case.
I suggest a modification in the GPL (somebody put it in legalese):
Any supporter of UCITA agrees to permanently delete all software on all computers under his control that is not licensed under a license accepted under the definition for Open Source or Free Software or that is licensed under a license that depends on UCITA. Said supporter will never again use non-free software. Supporters are defined as any legislator who voted in favor of UCITA, his or her office staff, any attorney who has drafted a license that depends on UCITA, anyone who has authorized the use of such a license or paid to have one written that is actually in use. For the purposes of determining control, corporate executives will be deemed to have control of the computers used by their companies. This license, even if it is subsequently found to depend on UCITA in anyway, is not subject to this provision.
Remember, if this clause could hold up, then a clause in a proprietary license forbidding you to use it on a dual boot machine with free software could hold up as well.
Linux, HURD and FreeBSD share quite a bit. A huge number of tools port between them with little effort. We welcome each other at conferences and users' groups. Etc., etc. In the end, the best open source OS will win. The best open source desktop OS will run on desktops. The other best open source desktop OS will run on the other desktops. The best open source web server OS .... It's about choice. It's about comparing them objectively for different uses. It is about learning from each one's strengths and bring that knowledge from one to another.
Every open source OS is stronger because they are all a training ground for open source programmers. You don't have to use a single book or a single kernel's source code to learn the One True Way (tm). I'm using Linux (sorry Richard, GNU/Linux) at home right now. I may switch to FreeBSD or HURD, or dual boot. And my data and applications will come with me. Standards are common data formats and common protocols, not a specific version of a specific program or OS.
If Open Source is to win, REALLY win, it must defeat not the armies of the Sauron (the MPA) or the Orcs and Trolls of Sauruman (the RIAA) but the One Ring (Power Over Others). Yes, that means -fighting- those armies, but as in Tolkein's depiction, those battles can be won or lost by either side, and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. All that matters is whether The Ring is destroyed or handed over.
Ordinarily I don't like facile literary analogies when trying to analyze complex issues involving lots of parties. There is too much of a tendency to assign to each of these parties one of the roles from the book. You avoided that error while bring the point straight home. The true heroes of Lord of the Rings were Frodo, of course, and Sam. Frodo is obvious, a reluctant hero, an ordinary person who takes on a tremendous burden because the task must be done...
Sam is less obvious, but I suspect that Tolkien wanted to emphasize the heroic aspects of his personality as highly as anyone else in the story. Sam wanted happiness, comfort and friendship. The few times he thought about uses for The One Ring, he sould have turned his corner of the Shire into a garden and a breadbasket. The only control he ever wanted was what he needed to make himself and his own comfortable. The world would have been a better place with Sam in charge simply because he would have done nothing to anyone. The desire for power over anyone else had no hold on him.
Now, what does this have to do with open source? Well, why would anyone spend countless hours of his own time working on software for his own use and for the possible accolades of his peers when he could pay much less than that time is worth and get a shrink-wrapped package that did the job? Control over his own life, his own data, his own computer. We want to make tools to make our own lives easier or more fulfilling. As Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
And we not only do we not object when other people benefit from it, we have realized that the collaboration that the open source model makes possible can provide us with useful enhancements in return. The guarantee of control over the software on our systems, the source code and the right to modify it, and distribute those modifications is control over our own lives.