I have a friend that lives in the middle of no where Idaho and he has DSL so I thought it was available in most places by now.
Not an expert, but working DSL depends on how long the line is between you and the phone co's first sub-station/signal-booster/whatever. In the case of an apartment, even the distance from the main junction box of the building to your own outlet makes a difference.
About 10 miles from where I am they have DSL, but I don't. The loc thats 10 miles away is on the other side of a ridgeline on a different phone-line branch with a closer sub-station. I suspect there a lot of DSL-less 'pockets' like this in rural areas.
All depends on where you are, or as they say, 'location, location, location'.
If only Firefox would stop being so patent-freaky and decode H.264
There is a reason they, and lots of others, in the IT industry are 'so patent-freaky'. Might have something to do with all the patent litigation thats continuously going on...
If they distributed FF with H264 playback, they'd be violating the law, because they haven't paid MPEGLA their blood money. This isn't being 'freaky', its merely behaving sanely in an insane world.
Apple has no problem using H264, since they've got the money to pay the royalties, and they don't need to worry about violating the GPL (since they don't use it)... never mind that some of those H264 patents are their *own* anyway. Did you know that Apple gets part of the H264 royalties thats collected by MPEGLA?
No, its pretty darn clear why Apple would love for H264 to win and any open alternatives, that they won't either be able to control nor make money on, fail...
*buntu seem perfectly capable of shipping a video player that'll use the x264 codec if installed
Which is not the same thing as shipping a video player with H264 builtin and active, which not even Canonical can do.
Secondly, making FF work with existing codecs on a user's system... kinda requires intimate knowledge of that user's system. Now the FF package distributed by Canonical obviously has that info for their own distro, but Mozilla, after all, isn't a distro maker, so as long the MPEGLA stranglehold continues, it'll be up to the distros and the users themselves to 'solve' the problem.
But we've heard for well over a decade now that "any time now", Linux is going to have its day and "threaten Windows for dominance"
Every OS has its fanboys. I've been listening for over a decade to Win/Mac fanboys talk about 'crap Linux'. I just chuckle, and go on running Linux on my Windowless desktop...
I think it's rather idealistic to believe Linux can somehow overtake a gigantic commercial endeavor to make and market an operating system
'overtaking' MS is a stretch, sure. But the reason Ballmer includes Linux with Apple as MS's main concerns is that unlike a commercial endeavor, he knows they can't buy or kill Linux off. Whole different kind of ballgame for MS now...
convincing a massive number of existing Windows users
Aside from the fanboys, what many of the rest of us are hoping for is simply enough of an impact on the market to break MS's monopoly power/influence over it, and 'we' (Linux/*BSDs/Apple) together don't need a lot of the market share to accomplish that. It especially doesn't depend on *current* home Windows users. The real battle is for future mindshare within the business sector and among younger new users. *That* is what has got Ballmer throwing furniture...
about 18 years ago, THEN we'd have more of a "fair fight".
We're dealing with a monopoly, so by definition, it is not a fair fight. If victory happens at all, it'll take awhile.
having spent much of its existence concentrating on being true to its Unix roots with shell scripts, a command line, and catering more to server administration
That by itself, the prospect of Linux getting established within the business sector for server use, has got Ballmer scared to death. He can't buy Linux, he can't kill Linux, and he can't beat Linux's price. Any sector Linux gets established in, is one MS will have a very hard if not impossible time trying to take back.
I don't foresee some dominating victory that you're describing here, but thats ok since we don't really need one. My crystal ball does tell me that there will be more damaged furniture and broken glass in Redmond's future though...
I would agree it doesn't work for all cases, but Linux hardware support is based on the kernel, not necessarily the distro.
Umm, not at all.
For example, graphics issues, other than modesetting, are on Xorg's shoulders, not the kernel.
And the recent flameage about PulseAudio was, of course, about a user-space daemon, not the kernel.
Then there's always the fun for distros to make sure, once they know the kernel is doing its job, that their primary Desktop Environment is itself properly recognizing existing hardware and supporting it within the user's GUI (auto-detecting presence of DVDs or Zip drives just plugged in, for example).
Keeping Kernel/UDEV/HAL/Xorg/DE all in sync with new hardware coming out all the time isn't easy, for any distro.
How would it be even? They only power MS has inside of China's borders is whatever the Chinese government choses to give them (and could take away at any time). MS isn't a government: no citizens, no army, no nukes.
Although, giving them enough time, and Ballmer enough chairs, then anything may be possible, I suppose...
They have to distribute the source code for it as well. Thus it should be much easier to spot every code that does not really belong there and aimed at spying on/restric/keeping in line the population
Chinese authorities don't need to do a thing. Just bundle a browser (IE on Windows, FF on Linux) and preconfigure its phishing checker to report all URLs to a server that is ran by the government. Preconfigure the checker to be ON by default. 99.999% of the intended audience will never realize what's happening. Those who know what it is will turn it off, but they are too smart anyway for *this level* of monitoring.
Do they even need to do that much?
Doesn't their 'Great Chinese Firewall' already give them enough oversight of the net internal to China to control their own population?
If you control the pipe, then you can control, or at least know, what goes through it.
I see lots of claims there but no facts, #4 clearly shows you don't know the long history of Intel and AMD (AMD has trailed, especially in the top end, for most of that history), and #6 is downright hilarious, not only because the *whole world* is just now coming out of that economic crisis, not just the US, but also because neither AMD or Intel are somehow "US-only" companies (see the link below).
Intel fanboys have been predicting AMD's death for as long as I can remember, at least since their first x86 clone that outperformed what Intel provided at the time (an 80286 that was clocked higher). And just recently there was this thread: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19633 which was what I was thinking of when I read your post.
So sorry if I don't take your word for it, but I'll wait for confirmation from Netcraft...
I know nothing about your games, so my comment was only meant in the general sense of the entire gaming industry.
On average, people don't care.
On average, commercial game companies never release the source for their old games, nor do they even go out of their way to allow gamers to mod/hack/tweak their games (and many actively make this harder).
So of course people aren't going to 'care' about something they have no control over anyway.
The ability to be modded is somewhat more important, but even then, they are rarely interested in modifying more than the obvious things that can be exposed through the mod interface.
This sounds like you're talking about your games, and not talking in general. As always, it depends on the game.
The fact there are still actively developed games (including new content), even after all these years, based on the old Quake engines that you mentioned is just one counter-example. Maybe they don't look like much to you, as you said, but the example the other poster gave of 'Urban Terror', which I played a little bit of awhile back (although shooters are not really my thing), looks to *me* like its a lot more than 'not much'.
For me, this prevailing attitude of 'write it, pimp it, then let it die' slowly turned me against the commercial gaming industry over time, as I watched one great game after another die a slow death (no updates/fixes for new OS versions or to deal with new hardware, bug fixes, minor/trivial improvements, etc), not because the game didn't have fans who cared, but because the game's distributor SIMPLY DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN.
Every gamer has their own example, but for me it was the game 'Master of Magic'. A fabulous game with *enormous* potential, but its fans never even got so much as a mediocre sequel to it. Nothing, Nada, Zilch. So the seeds of my discontent began with the death of my beloved MOM... and then turned to pure disgust over the last decade with the still ongoing obsession with glitz-over-substance action-shooters, cranked out one after another, using a nauseatingly unoriginal, cookie-cutter approach.
Haven't bought a game in over a decade, but its not because I'm no longer interested in gaming...
But please, feel free to ignore these rantings of a cranky, turn-based-strategy-lovin' old-timer who hasn't taken his meds yet this morning... grrr, where the hell *is* that bottle!
Wait, how does comparing a music player to a cell phone (and the very different consumers of each) actually help here?
Are you saying people don't want music on their cellphones?
No I'm not.
A market for a smartphone, which may or may not also play music, shouldn't be compared to a market for a music player, which only plays music (thus a very different kind of consumer).
I've heard some say KDE 4 just copied Gnome. Dolphin appeared to take some inspiration from Nautilus.
Others insist Dolphin is just a clone from Vista explorer (which I don't get).
Others insist KDE 4 is just a Mac clone.
I honestly find the Gnome, KDE 3, KDE 4, Vista, XP and Mac OS X desktops to all be pretty unique.
The advantage(1) with KDE is that one can make it look and act like just about anything else, which is why as soon as one of these arguments about look-n-feel starts, I tune out and skip over it.
As for Dolphin, I don't know, I've never used it. I didn't even switch to KDE4 until I was sure Krusader(2) was usable on it.
1 : Of course, some people don't consider this kind of reconfigurability/tweakability to be an 'advantage', but thats another flamewar...
2 : Yes, choice is *good*.:)
But maybe I just focus more on the differences more than the similarities.
I'll admit, I haven't used an ATI card for sometime for the reasons I mentioned above, and last I heard (earlier this year), there were quite a few issues with ATI cards in Ubuntu.
Do the OSS ATI drivers work with things like Compiz?
I'd say take a look at this again in about a year. Work on AMD/ATI's new open driver is in progress now. Early adopters (myself) are already using the new software stack (a reorganization of the Xorg codebase which includes changes related to the new in-kernel modesetting support), and things are looking very good, but everything is not yet in place, e.g. things like support for Compiz across all chipsets, etc.
The level of improvement from just ~6 months ago though is great. I've got a newish AMD/ATI IGP: 6 months ago I had nothing (aside from using their binary blob, fglrx), the FOSS ati/radeon driver then didn't even recognize my chipset (and wouldn't run), now I've got accelerated 2D thats faster than their fglrx blob, and working 3D... with more coming every day/week. They're catching up fast.
Ubuntu seems to be an early adopter of stuff like this, so I'd guess they'll be using the new Xorg software stack within a year (but I'm not an Ubuntu user).
They don't want to open source because they want to stay in business.
So AMD (the owner of ATI) wants to commit suicide?
FYI, within a year or two when AMD/ATI's new Xorg code/driver (open-sourced, hardware-accelerated 2D & 3D, with in-kernel modesetting) hits mainline for most Linux users, Nvidia apologists will need to come up with a new excuse, so you might want to start work on that now...
Wait, how does comparing a music player to a cell phone (and the very different consumers of each) actually help here?
Choice in and of itself is over-rated.
And yet, you can take it from me only from my cold, dead fingers...
You have to have a compelling product (or brand, even) to get people to notice.
I think you missed the main point of the GP: Android is no-cost to the manufacturers. No licensing fees or whatever to use it, and a cooperative development style which effectively means the effort of maintaining/improving it is shared, meaning less of a burden, or cost, on the companies that use it (its probably no accident that Nokia is going a similar route with their stuff, with their fully open Maemo software). It isn't just about the consumers, in fact, the GP is suggesting that consumers will have little or nothing to do with its success. Its a "win-win" for the phone makers.
Every time you touch a mouse to move the cursor on your color graphics screen and click on a window, menu or icon, you are using a computer the way Steve Jobs wants you to. Think about that.
a) When I think of that, its not Jobs that comes to my mind, its Xerox PARC (see the sections on the GUI & Apple).
b) Jobs *really* only wants you using a computer that way if its an Apple computer that you're using.:)
I tacitly assumed that it was common knowledge that Linux was trademarked for perfectly good reasons, and that everybody would pick up on this.
And you still don't get why the trademark happened. No one within the FOSS community was interested in the name until an outsider tried to abuse the trademark system and restrict everyone else's freedom to use Linux.
So the OP's original phrase is still perfectly valid: those truly interested in freedom of software aren't especially concerned with names either.
I apologise for misjudging the company I keep.
Yea, some of us not only know what happened, but also *why* it happened. We're not all as ignorant of the history as you are.
As for successful legal actions against the Linux kernel, here's one (perhaps it's unique, I don't know).
That wasn't against the use of the Linux kernel though, it was against the TomTom hardware device, and it involved more than just the FAT-LFN patent. The FAT-LFN patent was just one of a half dozen patents that MS sued over in that particular case.
I'd call that a successful legal action by Microsoft (because the defendant conceded)
The defendant conceded for the same reason many companies settle out of court, rather than fight. As everyone knows, settling out-of-court does not mean the patent is valid, and in this case, we don't even know whether the FAT-LFN patent had anything to do with TomTom's decision to settle, since it may have been one of the other mobile, GPS-related patents that they were afraid of losing on.
The patch you linked to doesn't change the fundamental behavior of the kernel's FAT code, it only changed the *default* behavior, the allegedly infringing code and behavior is still there, and can still be used. The patch to change the default behavior is merely to make it easier for integrators who use the kernel in their products, and who don't want to risk an expensive legal fight with MS, to not have to maintain their own custom patch. It still doesn't prove that the patent itself is valid, which points to the problem with the patent system: its almost always cheaper to settle out-of-court than fight, even if you really haven't done anything wrong.
My impression is that outside of the consumer/desktop arena the BSDs are widely used and well known
MS's greatest concern, of course, *is* the consumer/desktop arena. They obviously have some reason to fear Linux in that arena, hence their FUD and threats, but not the *BSDs.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend that lives in the middle of no where Idaho and he has DSL so I thought it was available in most places by now.
Not an expert, but working DSL depends on how long the line is between you and the phone co's first sub-station/signal-booster/whatever. In the case of an apartment, even the distance from the main junction box of the building to your own outlet makes a difference.
About 10 miles from where I am they have DSL, but I don't. The loc thats 10 miles away is on the other side of a ridgeline on a different phone-line branch with a closer sub-station. I suspect there a lot of DSL-less 'pockets' like this in rural areas.
All depends on where you are, or as they say, 'location, location, location'.
Really? Show me the hardware that you can buy and get the Mac like experience with Linux.
???
I could dig out my old digital camera from wherever it is and send you a pic of my PC, would that help?
What I really don't get is that what the GP said about Apple was a *compliment*, why did you feel the need to go into rant-mode?
If only Firefox would stop being so patent-freaky and decode H.264
There is a reason they, and lots of others, in the IT industry are 'so patent-freaky'. Might have something to do with all the patent litigation thats continuously going on...
If they distributed FF with H264 playback, they'd be violating the law, because they haven't paid MPEGLA their blood money. This isn't being 'freaky', its merely behaving sanely in an insane world.
when it is available
Apple has no problem using H264, since they've got the money to pay the royalties, and they don't need to worry about violating the GPL (since they don't use it)... never mind that some of those H264 patents are their *own* anyway. Did you know that Apple gets part of the H264 royalties thats collected by MPEGLA?
No, its pretty darn clear why Apple would love for H264 to win and any open alternatives, that they won't either be able to control nor make money on, fail...
*buntu seem perfectly capable of shipping a video player that'll use the x264 codec if installed
Which is not the same thing as shipping a video player with H264 builtin and active, which not even Canonical can do.
Secondly, making FF work with existing codecs on a user's system... kinda requires intimate knowledge of that user's system. Now the FF package distributed by Canonical obviously has that info for their own distro, but Mozilla, after all, isn't a distro maker, so as long the MPEGLA stranglehold continues, it'll be up to the distros and the users themselves to 'solve' the problem.
But we've heard for well over a decade now that "any time now", Linux is going to have its day and "threaten Windows for dominance"
Every OS has its fanboys. I've been listening for over a decade to Win/Mac fanboys talk about 'crap Linux'. I just chuckle, and go on running Linux on my Windowless desktop...
I think it's rather idealistic to believe Linux can somehow overtake a gigantic commercial endeavor to make and market an operating system
'overtaking' MS is a stretch, sure. But the reason Ballmer includes Linux with Apple as MS's main concerns is that unlike a commercial endeavor, he knows they can't buy or kill Linux off. Whole different kind of ballgame for MS now...
convincing a massive number of existing Windows users
Aside from the fanboys, what many of the rest of us are hoping for is simply enough of an impact on the market to break MS's monopoly power/influence over it, and 'we' (Linux/*BSDs/Apple) together don't need a lot of the market share to accomplish that. It especially doesn't depend on *current* home Windows users. The real battle is for future mindshare within the business sector and among younger new users. *That* is what has got Ballmer throwing furniture...
about 18 years ago, THEN we'd have more of a "fair fight".
We're dealing with a monopoly, so by definition, it is not a fair fight. If victory happens at all, it'll take awhile.
having spent much of its existence concentrating on being true to its Unix roots with shell scripts, a command line, and catering more to server administration
That by itself, the prospect of Linux getting established within the business sector for server use, has got Ballmer scared to death. He can't buy Linux, he can't kill Linux, and he can't beat Linux's price. Any sector Linux gets established in, is one MS will have a very hard if not impossible time trying to take back.
I don't foresee some dominating victory that you're describing here, but thats ok since we don't really need one. My crystal ball does tell me that there will be more damaged furniture and broken glass in Redmond's future though...
I would agree it doesn't work for all cases, but Linux hardware support is based on the kernel, not necessarily the distro.
Umm, not at all.
For example, graphics issues, other than modesetting, are on Xorg's shoulders, not the kernel.
And the recent flameage about PulseAudio was, of course, about a user-space daemon, not the kernel.
Then there's always the fun for distros to make sure, once they know the kernel is doing its job, that their primary Desktop Environment is itself properly recognizing existing hardware and supporting it within the user's GUI (auto-detecting presence of DVDs or Zip drives just plugged in, for example).
Keeping Kernel/UDEV/HAL/Xorg/DE all in sync with new hardware coming out all the time isn't easy, for any distro.
Lastly, Canonical has been getting uncomfortably cozy with tying in pay-for services into the OS, either theirs or 3rd parties. I was shocked ...
Wow, a commercial company that has the audacity to try to make some money, I'm shocked too...
Now that would be an even battle.
How would it be even? They only power MS has inside of China's borders is whatever the Chinese government choses to give them (and could take away at any time). MS isn't a government: no citizens, no army, no nukes.
Although, giving them enough time, and Ballmer enough chairs, then anything may be possible, I suppose...
They have to distribute the source code for it as well. Thus it should be much easier to spot every code that does not really belong there and aimed at spying on/restric/keeping in line the population
Chinese authorities don't need to do a thing. Just bundle a browser (IE on Windows, FF on Linux) and preconfigure its phishing checker to report all URLs to a server that is ran by the government. Preconfigure the checker to be ON by default. 99.999% of the intended audience will never realize what's happening. Those who know what it is will turn it off, but they are too smart anyway for *this level* of monitoring.
Do they even need to do that much?
Doesn't their 'Great Chinese Firewall' already give them enough oversight of the net internal to China to control their own population?
If you control the pipe, then you can control, or at least know, what goes through it.
Oh no, what is a good China-hating Linux-loving Slashdot denizen to do?
Whine and bitch about how stupid the world is, of course.
China-hating, Linux-loving Slashdot denizens aren't the only ones doing that.
Its a popular, global pastime.
Don't underestimate the peasants.
Yes, *especially* if you're a queen who thinks cakes are easier and cheaper to make than bread.
I see lots of claims there but no facts, #4 clearly shows you don't know the long history of Intel and AMD (AMD has trailed, especially in the top end, for most of that history), and #6 is downright hilarious, not only because the *whole world* is just now coming out of that economic crisis, not just the US, but also because neither AMD or Intel are somehow "US-only" companies (see the link below).
Intel fanboys have been predicting AMD's death for as long as I can remember, at least since their first x86 clone that outperformed what Intel provided at the time (an 80286 that was clocked higher). And just recently there was this thread: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19633 which was what I was thinking of when I read your post.
So sorry if I don't take your word for it, but I'll wait for confirmation from Netcraft...
Don't change just to change. That's how we got Obama and see what a cluster fuck that is?
And the previous admin promised to worship the status quo, yet gave us an even bigger cluster-fsck.
Sorry, but this old anti-change rhetoric just don't cut it anymore... not after that last moron.
Well aside from the fact that AMD is slowly dieing anyway,
Yea, right, and Netcraft has confirmed it...
Well, so far, every single one of my games
I know nothing about your games, so my comment was only meant in the general sense of the entire gaming industry.
On average, people don't care.
On average, commercial game companies never release the source for their old games, nor do they even go out of their way to allow gamers to mod/hack/tweak their games (and many actively make this harder).
So of course people aren't going to 'care' about something they have no control over anyway.
The ability to be modded is somewhat more important, but even then, they are rarely interested in modifying more than the obvious things that can be exposed through the mod interface.
This sounds like you're talking about your games, and not talking in general. As always, it depends on the game.
The fact there are still actively developed games (including new content), even after all these years, based on the old Quake engines that you mentioned is just one counter-example. Maybe they don't look like much to you, as you said, but the example the other poster gave of 'Urban Terror', which I played a little bit of awhile back (although shooters are not really my thing), looks to *me* like its a lot more than 'not much'.
For me, this prevailing attitude of 'write it, pimp it, then let it die' slowly turned me against the commercial gaming industry over time, as I watched one great game after another die a slow death (no updates/fixes for new OS versions or to deal with new hardware, bug fixes, minor/trivial improvements, etc), not because the game didn't have fans who cared, but because the game's distributor SIMPLY DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN.
Every gamer has their own example, but for me it was the game 'Master of Magic'. A fabulous game with *enormous* potential, but its fans never even got so much as a mediocre sequel to it. Nothing, Nada, Zilch. So the seeds of my discontent began with the death of my beloved MOM... and then turned to pure disgust over the last decade with the still ongoing obsession with glitz-over-substance action-shooters, cranked out one after another, using a nauseatingly unoriginal, cookie-cutter approach.
Haven't bought a game in over a decade, but its not because I'm no longer interested in gaming...
But please, feel free to ignore these rantings of a cranky, turn-based-strategy-lovin' old-timer who hasn't taken his meds yet this morning... grrr, where the hell *is* that bottle!
Wait, how does comparing a music player to a cell phone (and the very different consumers of each) actually help here?
Are you saying people don't want music on their cellphones?
No I'm not.
A market for a smartphone, which may or may not also play music, shouldn't be compared to a market for a music player, which only plays music (thus a very different kind of consumer).
My point? Don't compare apples to oranges.
It's just not worth the trouble - no gamers really care.
Hogwash.
There are plenty of gamers that care, they just don't have any *choice* in the matter.
Its the commercial game makers that don't care.
One day I'll too have a wife that WANTS EXT4! ** dreams **
I'd settle for one that just wants *me*...
I've heard some say KDE 4 just copied Gnome. Dolphin appeared to take some inspiration from Nautilus.
Others insist Dolphin is just a clone from Vista explorer (which I don't get).
Others insist KDE 4 is just a Mac clone.
I honestly find the Gnome, KDE 3, KDE 4, Vista, XP and Mac OS X desktops to all be pretty unique.
The advantage(1) with KDE is that one can make it look and act like just about anything else, which is why as soon as one of these arguments about look-n-feel starts, I tune out and skip over it.
As for Dolphin, I don't know, I've never used it. I didn't even switch to KDE4 until I was sure Krusader(2) was usable on it.
1 : Of course, some people don't consider this kind of reconfigurability/tweakability to be an 'advantage', but thats another flamewar...
2 : Yes, choice is *good*. :)
But maybe I just focus more on the differences more than the similarities.
Ditto here.
Old disks hold 700MB right? Wait floppy disks? What's a floppy disk?
I thought you where talking about ZIP discs for a minute. I forgot that CDs say 700MB too.
Aha, that explains that part. Thanks.
Now... what's a CD?
I'll admit, I haven't used an ATI card for sometime for the reasons I mentioned above, and last I heard (earlier this year), there were quite a few issues with ATI cards in Ubuntu.
Do the OSS ATI drivers work with things like Compiz?
I'd say take a look at this again in about a year. Work on AMD/ATI's new open driver is in progress now. Early adopters (myself) are already using the new software stack (a reorganization of the Xorg codebase which includes changes related to the new in-kernel modesetting support), and things are looking very good, but everything is not yet in place, e.g. things like support for Compiz across all chipsets, etc.
The level of improvement from just ~6 months ago though is great. I've got a newish AMD/ATI IGP: 6 months ago I had nothing (aside from using their binary blob, fglrx), the FOSS ati/radeon driver then didn't even recognize my chipset (and wouldn't run), now I've got accelerated 2D thats faster than their fglrx blob, and working 3D... with more coming every day/week. They're catching up fast.
Ubuntu seems to be an early adopter of stuff like this, so I'd guess they'll be using the new Xorg software stack within a year (but I'm not an Ubuntu user).
They don't want to open source because they want to stay in business.
So AMD (the owner of ATI) wants to commit suicide?
FYI, within a year or two when AMD/ATI's new Xorg code/driver (open-sourced, hardware-accelerated 2D & 3D, with in-kernel modesetting) hits mainline for most Linux users, Nvidia apologists will need to come up with a new excuse, so you might want to start work on that now...
Look at the iPod.
Wait, how does comparing a music player to a cell phone (and the very different consumers of each) actually help here?
Choice in and of itself is over-rated.
And yet, you can take it from me only from my cold, dead fingers...
You have to have a compelling product (or brand, even) to get people to notice.
I think you missed the main point of the GP: Android is no-cost to the manufacturers. No licensing fees or whatever to use it, and a cooperative development style which effectively means the effort of maintaining/improving it is shared, meaning less of a burden, or cost, on the companies that use it (its probably no accident that Nokia is going a similar route with their stuff, with their fully open Maemo software). It isn't just about the consumers, in fact, the GP is suggesting that consumers will have little or nothing to do with its success. Its a "win-win" for the phone makers.
This is exactly how Apple lost the PC war
Every time you touch a mouse to move the cursor on your color graphics screen and click on a window, menu or icon, you are using a computer the way Steve Jobs wants you to. Think about that.
a) When I think of that, its not Jobs that comes to my mind, its Xerox PARC (see the sections on the GUI & Apple).
b) Jobs *really* only wants you using a computer that way if its an Apple computer that you're using. :)
I tacitly assumed that it was common knowledge that Linux was trademarked for perfectly good reasons, and that everybody would pick up on this.
And you still don't get why the trademark happened. No one within the FOSS community was interested in the name until an outsider tried to abuse the trademark system and restrict everyone else's freedom to use Linux.
So the OP's original phrase is still perfectly valid: those truly interested in freedom of software aren't especially concerned with names either.
I apologise for misjudging the company I keep.
Yea, some of us not only know what happened, but also *why* it happened. We're not all as ignorant of the history as you are.
As for successful legal actions against the Linux kernel, here's one (perhaps it's unique, I don't know).
That wasn't against the use of the Linux kernel though, it was against the TomTom hardware device, and it involved more than just the FAT-LFN patent. The FAT-LFN patent was just one of a half dozen patents that MS sued over in that particular case.
I'd call that a successful legal action by Microsoft (because the defendant conceded)
The defendant conceded for the same reason many companies settle out of court, rather than fight. As everyone knows, settling out-of-court does not mean the patent is valid, and in this case, we don't even know whether the FAT-LFN patent had anything to do with TomTom's decision to settle, since it may have been one of the other mobile, GPS-related patents that they were afraid of losing on.
The patch you linked to doesn't change the fundamental behavior of the kernel's FAT code, it only changed the *default* behavior, the allegedly infringing code and behavior is still there, and can still be used. The patch to change the default behavior is merely to make it easier for integrators who use the kernel in their products, and who don't want to risk an expensive legal fight with MS, to not have to maintain their own custom patch. It still doesn't prove that the patent itself is valid, which points to the problem with the patent system: its almost always cheaper to settle out-of-court than fight, even if you really haven't done anything wrong.
My impression is that outside of the consumer/desktop arena the BSDs are widely used and well known
MS's greatest concern, of course, *is* the consumer/desktop arena. They obviously have some reason to fear Linux in that arena, hence their FUD and threats, but not the *BSDs.