Bullshit. Pure bullshit. Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
Tivo
And just what in hell does that have to do with the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code? Either you are claiming it as some sort of victory for BSD licensing, or you are throwing it out as a red herring.
As you wish.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
Forgive me, I did not realize that software was all things beneath the sky. It did not occur to me that experience earned from alternate fields could POSSIBLY apply in the heavenly and untouchable field that is software programming. Before they programmed software before, no-one ever had to propagate a product into a saturated market.
And so much for your original contention that projects NOT under the GPL are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
How is it wrong? Linux is not most, just one.
Baloney. GPL does precisely that by leveling the playing field. It means that if one company funds a GPL project they don't have to worry that some other company will take the fruits of that labor, add a couple of proprietary features and then use the first company's own investment to get a leg up on competing with them.
That may be true, however as was mentioned previously, it also results in people funding a project, industrializing it; and then getting sued by the movement for improper use. Not to mention complaints about parts of the software not being free enough.
MySQL is GPL. Commercial sales of linux-based products are many orders of magnitude greater than any of your examples, including MySQL.
It was my mistake then.
You seem to be confused, probably because you are waving a red herring. Are you talking about software or file formats? Because LAME was GPL and is now LGPL and there are plenty of GPL'd PDF reading and writing software out there too, like xpdf and evince for starters.
At least credit me with enough intelligence to know the difference. I was talking about the open-ness of the file format and it's attendant software. Eg, people have created software that works with.doc files, however I'm pretty sure there's no manual out there that details how it works. The same for.pdf if KPDF's failure to open some of the more recent files is any indication. There IS software that can read the formats, however they must reverse-engineer the format to get any sort of compatibility.
Now I may just be grousing about the movement; nevertheless, a more open mindset about how the software is used will allow it to spread faster. It worked for IBM.
Lol. OpenSSH ala their parent OpenBSD was publicly begging for money just a year or two ago. I firmly believe, with only anecdotal proof and sound reasoning, that GPL licensed projects are used (and profitably too) orders of magnitude more than BSD-style licensed projects are.
That may be true but it's also true that they are uncommonly popular. OpenSSH is pretty much THE ssh client, I hadn't even heard of other clients until somewhat recently, neither did I consider them valid. Simultaneously, Apache is pretty much the HTTP server, even OSX 10.3.x uses it. It's granted that there are fewer BSD licensed projects than GPL projects. However, while every Linux server will by definition run Linux; that's not a guarantee for other projects like Gnome, Kde, etc..
While they may be hard up for cash, that has little to do with their license; since being GPL doesn't promote funding. With what I've read and seen, I would contest the GPL superiority by virtue of Apache, OpenSSH and Mysql's popularity. PDF and mp3 as well, despite the licenses on their own code and the closed nature of their licenses.
Where did they get us, and who is this "us" exactly? But that's not my point.
My point is that most people are not interested in anything with political connotations. The very touch of it sends them screaming. More to the point, focusing on it to the expense of popularization is doing far more harm than good to OSS's overall spread.
Yours is actually a good statement. If we were to give it up, I would point out that projects NOT under the GPL, like OpenSSH or Apache are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
That's spot on, whenever some commercial product is found to be using Linux code, complaints start up almost instantly and they never seem to stop. Complaints not just about Tivo but Vmware's kernel and Parallel's wine code. It's true that the complaints had some justification; but if you want to be accepted, constant whining isn't the way to do it. Certainly if mass usage is your goal a stiff upper lip might be the best course.
Not to mention the whole driver issue that just never stops. People aren't going to give up a good chunk of functionality just so they can push some groups political agenda. The GPL and Free Software ARE political ideals.
Here's an thought, by refusing contact with modern civilization and it's science, they have purposefully entered a weakened position. The very fact that we're having a discussion on weather they all live or die shows the superiority of modern civilization; you can talk about the "distinct advantages" all you want but they'll only keep those distinct advantages if we let them.
Is this arrogance, of course. But even the kindest individual on these boards only talks about what we will do to them.
I'd like to give them the option to join their home government, because the idea of keeping them isolated like some kind of pet is disturbing to me.
One anthropologist had a theory that the defining meme of Western civilization is to refuse to choose between any viewpoints on the basis that they are all equally valid.
I agree completely. I also want to add that one of the greatest assets of Linux is it's ability to be easily configured towards a certain goal. To that end, it's better to let all the desktops develop where they will, hopefully in opposite directions so that when people need a desktop geared towards a specific approach they can get the perfect software for them.
but... and this is the thing. Computers and especially Linux are very flexible. This means that they are by nature complex to use. I'm not saying usability is bad, but that at some point, eventually, your users should ideally read some documentation or manual or something to actually understand how the system works.
If new Linux users meticulously avoid actually learning anything, that just makes for irritating bug reports. I'm not complaining about the new features, but rather about the culture that expects to use complex machinery without understanding anything about it.
It may sound lame, but THIS is what keeps me up at night.
His argument is too tenacious, I can't remember any historical situation which would bear out this line of thinking. Come to think of it, weren't there some MS guys calling themselves "The Open Document Foundation"? This is too strange to be legitimate.
It's important to keep in mind the reasons we oppose the OpenXML format..
* It'll let Microsoft extend the blight of their ".doc" format for years to come. * As with doc, hard to reverse engineer, if it becomes a standard and gets widely used, especially in government, we'll be stuck implementing it in OSS apps while they change it to be different (Bourne out with.doc history and allegations from Windows file Sharing programmers) * Binary blobs that could be anything, stuck into the code at Microsoft's request, obtainable only from Microsoft.
Lately there have been even better reasons.
* Allegations of corruption and mishandled votes.
In order to ensure the public good, we have to stand against that sort of thing. Being stuck reverse engineering a broken format is LESS of a problem than being in a situation where your votes get messed with. It wasn't a public vote I'll grant but it still matters. After the mess with the standard voting, they have to become an example to others.
While in the pro-camp, we have what?
* Better spreadsheet handling with Excel * Legacy features of Microsoft formats
Handy sure, but it's not as if we can't transfer from.doc to.odf already and while "better" handling of excel files is good and all, it doesn't mention why this isn't a problem with OpenOffice. I'd bet it's the same as one of the reasons people hate the old format, because Excel does something strange.
Basically, the benefits aren't as important as stopping vote rigging or the problems of being blighted with Microsoft lock-in and binary blobs.
You're completely right about the textbooks. Everything is explained in way that sort of makes sense but not really. As if the people writing them assumed the readers already understand the subject matter.
I've often wondered if I was a special case when, reading a paragraph for the 5th time, I caught myself wondering why it was so much hassle for the authors to explain the interim steps in their thinking. But no, apparently no-one here buys the textbooks for the second year onward. It's disturbing that I've found for-dummies books to be more useful than the course designated textbooks.
That line of thinking is disturbingly like saying "We don't need a police force, the citizens should police themselves." While completely true, it misses the point that they won't. The idea of bursting seems pretty good. Notwithstanding that there are traffic shaping scripts out there that have done this since 2001 and that updating the protocols for people who still run Windows 98 will be interesting if nothing else.
Ahh, here they go. "I could imagine a fairly simple solution where an ISP would cut the broadband connection rate eight times for any P2P user using the older TCP stack to exploit the multi-stream or persistence loophole. It would be fairly simple to verify whether someone is cheating with an older stack and they would be dropped to much slower connection speeds." If they don't update, cut their speed by 8 times, genius. I can see this going down so well for people who don't want to deal with the insecurities of disabling a working system, for whatever reason, but still want networking. So how will they distinguish between P2P users? Will they do packet inspection or just nuke everyone above an arbitrary limit?
There are some really good congestion control algorithms out there, but my problem is with the article; they're a puff piece. Even right at the end, they completely ignore the fact that the guy with 11 connections is transferring MORE DATA than the user with 1 connection. Not to mention the user with one connection might be on 256/64 and the 11 connection guy on FIOS. Therefore, even with this, the end benefit to these companies will be almost..... nothing. Bandwith usage will stay exactly the same, there might be quality improvements but if Comcast is expecting this to fix their bandwith problems, they'll be surprised. Of course it's a straw man, he brought it up with THAT sentence.
So yeah, it might provide QoS benefits to some people but it'll probably do squat for users or networks. I mean, if you transfer 500KB/Day like their example, would you really notice a difference on anything remotely fast enough to benefit?
How do they get off saying THAT line? By their own admission, the P2P apps simply TRANSFER MORE DATA, it's not an issue of congestion control if one guy uploads 500KB/Day and another uses 500MB in the same period. Hell you could up-prioritize all HTTP uploads and most P2P uploaders wouldn't care or notice. The issue with Comcast is that instead of prioritizing HTTP, they're dropping Bittorrent. There's a big difference in taking a small speed bump to non-critical protocols for the benefit of the network and having those protocols disabled entirely.
Between the data transfer amount, and THAT line, this reads like a puff piece. It's not as if the P2P applications were the first to come up with multiple connections either, I'm pretty sure download managers like "GetRight" did it.
IMHO Suse is the most reliable and useful distro out there. The packages all work, they're straightforward to configure, the kernel defaults are sane and there aren't any show-stopper bugs. Pretty much every other distribution has at least one of the above, including Ubuntu.
Irrelevancy is a strange concept that I have never been able to understand. A company that makes a useful product at a reasonable price is unlikely to be shot down by marketing alone, their customers KNOW the stuff is good and most people will trust the word of someone they know over the statement of a multinational corporation.
By the way, I'm using Suse right now; I know it's good.
Regarding the Microsoft deal, I can see why it would leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Personally I'm in favor of it for one reason. Microsoft loses money, which goes to Novell, then everyone pretty much forgot about it. I admire such deviousness.
A 3GHz computer is by no means OLD. A 300mhz computer is old; running vista on something that would SCREAM with any other system and saying that it runs "ok" isn't a testament to Vista's specs.
The point about not selling public spectrum was an excellent one, so was the one for getting lobbyists. It's entirely dependent on how irritating the ISP's get. Worst case scenario, we hold a poll to figure out which company we like the least, set the routers to their spectrum and jack up the power.
I should point out that once Kleenex became a synonim for tissues, they lost their copyright on Kleenex as a brand. That's why google wants people to stop using the word "Googling"; there are business owners who don't want this.
More to the point, I don't like being used as advertisement for a third party. If you've bought a laptop, every time you take it out you'll be flashing the brand of Dell/Apple/Whatever to someone else. After already paying for whatever, it feels like they're taking advantage of you. I'm not opposed to brands completely, they are useful to check authenticity of a product, but that's it. Somewhere small and out-of-the-way, not splayed across the front in giant letters.
Also, if you have the manpower to build the hardware, odds are the same people can whip up a driver for it.
Try accessing anything as a newbie user and you'll understand my main point. Even a search box often has to be explained, I've explained them a few times myself.
I admit find is tricky but you know the search dialog in SUSE works with the beagled indexing service, available in both gnome and kde. It's not as if Linux can't do searching. If you don't want to use beagled, gnome has it's own search menu in nautilus; accessed with the Search button.
From your phrasing I get the impression that being different from Windows is seen as a flaw. Working to make things simpler is one thing, but copying a different system verbatim because a hypothetical user group doesn't want to learn ANYTHING before switching is something different.
Linux isn't particularly harder to use than Windows. Heck even "find" is ridiculously simple; one look over the examples explains everything. When I made the choice to learn Linux, I backed up my files and nuked windows, because without dedication it's hard to get anywhere.
But my core response to both your essay and the main post is as follows. While you would like to use Linux, I would also like giant barrels of money. But it's silly to expect that you can pick up a new tool and use it perfectly with ZERO practice and ZERO learning. Even a "For Dummies" book would have made everything much easier and if it's not worth it to you to go even that far then you're not really trying.
There are plenty of reasons why one might use Linux..
* Improved Security - Virus and Malware resistant * Reliable - Even in the rare case that X11 crashes, your services keep working * Trustworthy - No DRM, No Government backdoors, you can depend on your system * Software - Loads of available software installable with a single button press * Fast - If your only machine is a P166mhz, we can work with that.
But you're being mostly hypothetical. Most users DO care. You forget that most people, despite not being interested in computers, are smart enough to grasp whatever fields they are involved in. Being it Medicine, Psychology, Electrical or Mechanical systems, Art or History. They might resist change, because change is a bother, but they're smart enough to grasp the basics if it's needed. A system that doesn't get viruses and is resilient is pretty useful no matter what you're doing.
The biggest barrier is the idea that computers are complicated and learning them is hard. As someone only just learning C++, I can state that a straightforward and simple handbook makes everything fairly painless. As long as it's explained properly, learning Linux is fairly easy. Especially if people have used Windows before.
You're redefining the word soul in a way that I have never before seen. I refuse to accept such a definition. A soul is a spiritual component of my body. My emergent property does not have a defined presence, therefore, it cannot be defined as a soul.
Unless you insure that you stick with the proper definition of the words, it's impossible to understand one another.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
Tivo
And just what in hell does that have to do with the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code? Either you are claiming it as some sort of victory for BSD licensing, or you are throwing it out as a red herring.
As you wish.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
Forgive me, I did not realize that software was all things beneath the sky. It did not occur to me that experience earned from alternate fields could POSSIBLY apply in the heavenly and untouchable field that is software programming. Before they programmed software before, no-one ever had to propagate a product into a saturated market.
And so much for your original contention that projects NOT under the GPL are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
How is it wrong? Linux is not most, just one.
Baloney. GPL does precisely that by leveling the playing field. It means that if one company funds a GPL project they don't have to worry that some other company will take the fruits of that labor, add a couple of proprietary features and then use the first company's own investment to get a leg up on competing with them.
That may be true, however as was mentioned previously, it also results in people funding a project, industrializing it; and then getting sued by the movement for improper use. Not to mention complaints about parts of the software not being free enough.
MySQL is GPL. Commercial sales of linux-based products are many orders of magnitude greater than any of your examples, including MySQL.
It was my mistake then.
You seem to be confused, probably because you are waving a red herring. Are you talking about software or file formats? Because LAME was GPL and is now LGPL and there are plenty of GPL'd PDF reading and writing software out there too, like xpdf and evince for starters.
At least credit me with enough intelligence to know the difference. I was talking about the open-ness of the file format and it's attendant software. Eg, people have created software that works with .doc files, however I'm pretty sure there's no manual out there that details how it works. The same for .pdf if KPDF's failure to open some of the more recent files is any indication. There IS software that can read the formats, however they must reverse-engineer the format to get any sort of compatibility.
Now I may just be grousing about the movement; nevertheless, a more open mindset about how the software is used will allow it to spread faster. It worked for IBM.
Lol. OpenSSH ala their parent OpenBSD was publicly begging for money just a year or two ago. I firmly believe, with only anecdotal proof and sound reasoning, that GPL licensed projects are used (and profitably too) orders of magnitude more than BSD-style licensed projects are.
That may be true but it's also true that they are uncommonly popular. OpenSSH is pretty much THE ssh client, I hadn't even heard of other clients until somewhat recently, neither did I consider them valid. Simultaneously, Apache is pretty much the HTTP server, even OSX 10.3.x uses it. It's granted that there are fewer BSD licensed projects than GPL projects. However, while every Linux server will by definition run Linux; that's not a guarantee for other projects like Gnome, Kde, etc..
While they may be hard up for cash, that has little to do with their license; since being GPL doesn't promote funding. With what I've read and seen, I would contest the GPL superiority by virtue of Apache, OpenSSH and Mysql's popularity. PDF and mp3 as well, despite the licenses on their own code and the closed nature of their licenses.
Where did they get us, and who is this "us" exactly? But that's not my point.
My point is that most people are not interested in anything with political connotations. The very touch of it sends them screaming. More to the point, focusing on it to the expense of popularization is doing far more harm than good to OSS's overall spread.
Yours is actually a good statement. If we were to give it up, I would point out that projects NOT under the GPL, like OpenSSH or Apache are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
That's spot on, whenever some commercial product is found to be using Linux code, complaints start up almost instantly and they never seem to stop. Complaints not just about Tivo but Vmware's kernel and Parallel's wine code. It's true that the complaints had some justification; but if you want to be accepted, constant whining isn't the way to do it. Certainly if mass usage is your goal a stiff upper lip might be the best course.
Not to mention the whole driver issue that just never stops. People aren't going to give up a good chunk of functionality just so they can push some groups political agenda. The GPL and Free Software ARE political ideals.
Here's an thought, by refusing contact with modern civilization and it's science, they have purposefully entered a weakened position. The very fact that we're having a discussion on weather they all live or die shows the superiority of modern civilization; you can talk about the "distinct advantages" all you want but they'll only keep those distinct advantages if we let them.
Is this arrogance, of course. But even the kindest individual on these boards only talks about what we will do to them.
I'd like to give them the option to join their home government, because the idea of keeping them isolated like some kind of pet is disturbing to me.
If things are that bad where you live then I really feel for you, here we have an illiteracy rate of nearly 0%, and something like 3% unemployment.
One anthropologist had a theory that the defining meme of Western civilization is to refuse to choose between any viewpoints on the basis that they are all equally valid.
I agree completely. I also want to add that one of the greatest assets of Linux is it's ability to be easily configured towards a certain goal. To that end, it's better to let all the desktops develop where they will, hopefully in opposite directions so that when people need a desktop geared towards a specific approach they can get the perfect software for them.
but... and this is the thing. Computers and especially Linux are very flexible. This means that they are by nature complex to use. I'm not saying usability is bad, but that at some point, eventually, your users should ideally read some documentation or manual or something to actually understand how the system works.
If new Linux users meticulously avoid actually learning anything, that just makes for irritating bug reports. I'm not complaining about the new features, but rather about the culture that expects to use complex machinery without understanding anything about it.
It may sound lame, but THIS is what keeps me up at night.
A legitimate point, did I mention my favorite method of data storage is ASCII .txt files.
My credibility is ruined FOREVER; the horror.....
His argument is too tenacious, I can't remember any historical situation which would bear out this line of thinking. Come to think of it, weren't there some MS guys calling themselves "The Open Document Foundation"? This is too strange to be legitimate.
.doc history and allegations from Windows file Sharing programmers)
.doc to .odf already and while "better" handling of excel files is good and all, it doesn't mention why this isn't a problem with OpenOffice. I'd bet it's the same as one of the reasons people hate the old format, because Excel does something strange.
It's important to keep in mind the reasons we oppose the OpenXML format..
* It'll let Microsoft extend the blight of their ".doc" format for years to come.
* As with doc, hard to reverse engineer, if it becomes a standard and gets widely used, especially in government, we'll be stuck implementing it in OSS apps while they change it to be different (Bourne out with
* Binary blobs that could be anything, stuck into the code at Microsoft's request, obtainable only from Microsoft.
Lately there have been even better reasons.
* Allegations of corruption and mishandled votes.
In order to ensure the public good, we have to stand against that sort of thing. Being stuck reverse engineering a broken format is LESS of a problem than being in a situation where your votes get messed with. It wasn't a public vote I'll grant but it still matters. After the mess with the standard voting, they have to become an example to others.
While in the pro-camp, we have what?
* Better spreadsheet handling with Excel
* Legacy features of Microsoft formats
Handy sure, but it's not as if we can't transfer from
Basically, the benefits aren't as important as stopping vote rigging or the problems of being blighted with Microsoft lock-in and binary blobs.
He's an author right? He already has his works which will live beyond his death.
You're completely right about the textbooks. Everything is explained in way that sort of makes sense but not really. As if the people writing them assumed the readers already understand the subject matter.
I've often wondered if I was a special case when, reading a paragraph for the 5th time, I caught myself wondering why it was so much hassle for the authors to explain the interim steps in their thinking. But no, apparently no-one here buys the textbooks for the second year onward. It's disturbing that I've found for-dummies books to be more useful than the course designated textbooks.
That line of thinking is disturbingly like saying "We don't need a police force, the citizens should police themselves." While completely true, it misses the point that they won't. The idea of bursting seems pretty good. Notwithstanding that there are traffic shaping scripts out there that have done this since 2001 and that updating the protocols for people who still run Windows 98 will be interesting if nothing else. Ahh, here they go. "I could imagine a fairly simple solution where an ISP would cut the broadband connection rate eight times for any P2P user using the older TCP stack to exploit the multi-stream or persistence loophole. It would be fairly simple to verify whether someone is cheating with an older stack and they would be dropped to much slower connection speeds." If they don't update, cut their speed by 8 times, genius. I can see this going down so well for people who don't want to deal with the insecurities of disabling a working system, for whatever reason, but still want networking. So how will they distinguish between P2P users? Will they do packet inspection or just nuke everyone above an arbitrary limit? There are some really good congestion control algorithms out there, but my problem is with the article; they're a puff piece. Even right at the end, they completely ignore the fact that the guy with 11 connections is transferring MORE DATA than the user with 1 connection. Not to mention the user with one connection might be on 256/64 and the 11 connection guy on FIOS. Therefore, even with this, the end benefit to these companies will be almost..... nothing. Bandwith usage will stay exactly the same, there might be quality improvements but if Comcast is expecting this to fix their bandwith problems, they'll be surprised. Of course it's a straw man, he brought it up with THAT sentence. So yeah, it might provide QoS benefits to some people but it'll probably do squat for users or networks. I mean, if you transfer 500KB/Day like their example, would you really notice a difference on anything remotely fast enough to benefit?
How do they get off saying THAT line? By their own admission, the P2P apps simply TRANSFER MORE DATA, it's not an issue of congestion control if one guy uploads 500KB/Day and another uses 500MB in the same period. Hell you could up-prioritize all HTTP uploads and most P2P uploaders wouldn't care or notice. The issue with Comcast is that instead of prioritizing HTTP, they're dropping Bittorrent. There's a big difference in taking a small speed bump to non-critical protocols for the benefit of the network and having those protocols disabled entirely.
Between the data transfer amount, and THAT line, this reads like a puff piece. It's not as if the P2P applications were the first to come up with multiple connections either, I'm pretty sure download managers like "GetRight" did it.
Did I mention I also use Gnome? Why is it a brain-damaged idea?
IMHO Suse is the most reliable and useful distro out there. The packages all work, they're straightforward to configure, the kernel defaults are sane and there aren't any show-stopper bugs. Pretty much every other distribution has at least one of the above, including Ubuntu.
Irrelevancy is a strange concept that I have never been able to understand. A company that makes a useful product at a reasonable price is unlikely to be shot down by marketing alone, their customers KNOW the stuff is good and most people will trust the word of someone they know over the statement of a multinational corporation.
By the way, I'm using Suse right now; I know it's good.
Regarding the Microsoft deal, I can see why it would leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Personally I'm in favor of it for one reason. Microsoft loses money, which goes to Novell, then everyone pretty much forgot about it. I admire such deviousness.
A 3GHz computer is by no means OLD. A 300mhz computer is old; running vista on something that would SCREAM with any other system and saying that it runs "ok" isn't a testament to Vista's specs.
The point about not selling public spectrum was an excellent one, so was the one for getting lobbyists. It's entirely dependent on how irritating the ISP's get. Worst case scenario, we hold a poll to figure out which company we like the least, set the routers to their spectrum and jack up the power.
I should point out that once Kleenex became a synonim for tissues, they lost their copyright on Kleenex as a brand. That's why google wants people to stop using the word "Googling"; there are business owners who don't want this. More to the point, I don't like being used as advertisement for a third party. If you've bought a laptop, every time you take it out you'll be flashing the brand of Dell/Apple/Whatever to someone else. After already paying for whatever, it feels like they're taking advantage of you. I'm not opposed to brands completely, they are useful to check authenticity of a product, but that's it. Somewhere small and out-of-the-way, not splayed across the front in giant letters. Also, if you have the manpower to build the hardware, odds are the same people can whip up a driver for it.
Try accessing anything as a newbie user and you'll understand my main point. Even a search box often has to be explained, I've explained them a few times myself.
I admit find is tricky but you know the search dialog in SUSE works with the beagled indexing service, available in both gnome and kde. It's not as if Linux can't do searching. If you don't want to use beagled, gnome has it's own search menu in nautilus; accessed with the Search button.
From your phrasing I get the impression that being different from Windows is seen as a flaw. Working to make things simpler is one thing, but copying a different system verbatim because a hypothetical user group doesn't want to learn ANYTHING before switching is something different.
Linux isn't particularly harder to use than Windows. Heck even "find" is ridiculously simple; one look over the examples explains everything. When I made the choice to learn Linux, I backed up my files and nuked windows, because without dedication it's hard to get anywhere.
But my core response to both your essay and the main post is as follows. While you would like to use Linux, I would also like giant barrels of money. But it's silly to expect that you can pick up a new tool and use it perfectly with ZERO practice and ZERO learning. Even a "For Dummies" book would have made everything much easier and if it's not worth it to you to go even that far then you're not really trying.
There are plenty of reasons why one might use Linux..
* Improved Security - Virus and Malware resistant
* Reliable - Even in the rare case that X11 crashes, your services keep working
* Trustworthy - No DRM, No Government backdoors, you can depend on your system
* Software - Loads of available software installable with a single button press
* Fast - If your only machine is a P166mhz, we can work with that.
But you're being mostly hypothetical. Most users DO care. You forget that most people, despite not being interested in computers, are smart enough to grasp whatever fields they are involved in. Being it Medicine, Psychology, Electrical or Mechanical systems, Art or History. They might resist change, because change is a bother, but they're smart enough to grasp the basics if it's needed. A system that doesn't get viruses and is resilient is pretty useful no matter what you're doing.
The biggest barrier is the idea that computers are complicated and learning them is hard. As someone only just learning C++, I can state that a straightforward and simple handbook makes everything fairly painless. As long as it's explained properly, learning Linux is fairly easy. Especially if people have used Windows before.
You're redefining the word soul in a way that I have never before seen. I refuse to accept such a definition. A soul is a spiritual component of my body. My emergent property does not have a defined presence, therefore, it cannot be defined as a soul.
Unless you insure that you stick with the proper definition of the words, it's impossible to understand one another.