If that were the case, *BSD operating systems would be bigger than Linux. Since that's not the case, your argument is a non-starter, at best mere speculation; at worst, self-delusion.
The BSD license is business-friendly. But apparently, business is not BSD-friendly.
The GPL was born of the realisation that, without encouragement, businesses will simply take, and not give anything back. Theo is just learning this, it seems.
After all, who will cry foul on EXTENSIVE discussions about Accessability for the Visually Challenged? It's been brought up before and it was/is a valid concern...
It was brought up before by Microsoft stooges in the Mass. debate. But, the problem isn't with the document standard (which the MS-Office XML format does not address, either), but with products; there is a dearth of accessibility products for the visually impaired for Free software operating systems in general.
The ironic thing is, Microsoft doesn't supply much in the way of accessibility, either. Most accessibility products are third-party, and they are usually hacks on top of the usual Microsoft products. A lot of those third-party vendors raise a hue and cry every time Microsoft releases a new version of its products, because it often breaks compatibility with their accessibility products.
Anyway, the accessibility issue is one of products, not standards. The ODF standard will *help* with accessibility, because it *is* a standard, and won't break compatibility with accessibility products, once those products are produced.
Corporations have a lot to gain / lose when sitting a committee like this. A lot of standards start life as a corporate standard first. Even ODF started life as a corporate standard (at Sun, I believe).
Generally, the folks sitting the committee wish to come to a real consensus. We can hope that Microsoft is merely hedging its bets by testing the ODF standards waters. It could be that Microsoft ends up adopting ODF in an MS-Office generation or two.
I believe Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to buck the standards trends. Imagine how much money they spent trying to push their own web 'standards.' In some research I did recently, it turns out that most of the time, standards beat out proprietary formats every time, usually to the point that people forget there was ever a standards battle. Imagine ASCII vs. all the proprietary character encoding schemes, or IP vs. IPX vs. NETBUEI vs. any number of other networking protocols.
In the end, even Microsoft ends up bowing to the pressure of true, open standards. The only exceptions are when Microsoft products are only concerned about interoperating with other Microsoft products, such as an MS-Windows-based network. The document format world is getting too fragmented for that now. Even within the world of MS-Office, there's document format fragmentation.
Anyway, corporations have a major vested interest in these standards, so it is only appropriate that they sit in committee with the other interested groups. In general, obstructionism is identified and dealt with by the other committee members.
For me, it's all about the ethics. Microsoft has behaved unethically; that is enough for me to avoid their products. I don't give my lunch money to the school bully.
Has it made my life more difficult? Perhaps. But the important issues usually are difficult.
However, if you have a bunch of competing hypothesis, and the evidence disproves all but one, you pretty much are stuck with the survivor as the working theory until something better comes along.
So far, the evidence is pretty much against most other competing theories, including steady-state and creationist viewpoints.
Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
The dame walked into my office with a sneer on her pretty pasty-white face. "You sure you know what you're talking about?" I sneered back.
"Yeah," she said. She had the kind of teeth made for clenching, white and pearly and pressed firmly together. "Yeah, the way I see it, the Universe got a bum rap. They say it all exploded, but I don't believe it. Not my Universe, the big handsome lug." She went on like that for a while. It coulda been the whiskey, but I think she was just dumb in love with her own voice. She went on about how the Universe had to've always been, and nobody had no evidence to the contrary.
She wound down after sixty minutes or so.
"Look, Lady," I snapped. "I get paid by the hour. You owe me big. But I'll forget to send the bill if you just answer me one question."
She squinted at me like her eyeballs got a taste of something sour. "What?" She spat the word out in a short blast of noise, like a bird honking for attention.
"You ever break the second law of thermodynamics?"
The question must've smacked her right between the eyes. "What're you implying?" She was suddenly, strangely coy.
I pressed my advantage. "Your lovely little thing with the Universe. You ever break the second law of thermodynamics? Did you ever see the Universe break the second law of thermodynamics?"
She shook her head like she had a boiled egg stuck in her ear. She admitted, "I have never done any such thing. It's impossible for a lady of my fine upbringing. I don't even understand what you are driving at, Mister Entropy."
"Yeah, I know." I pointed toward the door. She took the hint, and left my office like a hot, wet squal in the middle of the Pacific. "That's the problem, " told the blank and empty space where she had been. "If you don't get it now, you'll probably never understand."
Although it's not available from the Preferences settings, you can turn it on using the Configuration Editor (usually found in the "System Tools" menu). In the configuration editor, go to/apps/nautilus/preferences, and check the box for 'always_use_location_entry'.
I felt that method of advanced configuration was lame at first, but I'm getting used to it. I kind of prefer it over having every configuration item listed in the preferences dialog.
You have just explained the obvious. Why do people assume we are done with knowledge? Hell, wasn't it an IBM founder who decried there'd be a need for perhaps 100 computers world-wide?
We are not close to the end of knowledge. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to the obtuse.
Next week on the Inquirer: Computers Built That Break The Orange Catholic Bible's Commandment of 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likenes of a human mind'.
God Lord! I hope so. That'd be kick-ass. We'd have a machine that is arrogant, self-centered, unsure of itself and willing to act tough to make up for it, willing to fleece millions of people of their retirement, and able to send out its own spam to do it.
Would any judge be supporting them if it wasn't about pornography? Did they get whatever they wanted from Enron without a warrant?
See, that's the problem. They didn't want to get anything on Enron; perhaps too many people in the government would be implicated. (Just look at the government folks Enron met with in the year or two prior to their debacle. Interesting list.)
Since this is about people and their own personal "web experience with a happy ending," it must be too nasty for the kids to see. I know when I use Google, all I get is pornography results.
Might have something to do with all my search terms including the word "porn," though.
Here's one thing that's holding the Linux desktop back...standards.
That's great. But the list you gave are not "standards;" it's a list of things that some people use right now. Those are hardly standard. Even MS-Word changes from version to version; the next release of MS-Office breaks both their old file format, and radically changes the UI.
Email is email. We have several email clients with which most users would feel comfortable. We really don't have an MS-Outlook replacement (why the hell not?), but for a majority of users, I don't think that's a big deal.
You gave a list of keybindings and specific programs, none of which are "standard." So it isn't "standards" holding Linux back. It's a bunch of programs that are mostly under Microsoft's control.
I'm hopeful. Lotus 123 used to be king of the hill, as was WordPerfect in its space. Netware used to be the main NOS.
In the end, it'll be standards that allow Linux to capture a sizable share of the desktop space: ODF for the document format, XHTML/DOM/CSS support in the browser, etc. Linux has nearly caught up with MS-Windows in ease-of-use for the novice user who thinks he's a power user (e.g., most business users). Now it's just a matter of catching up in the application space, which is happening at an accelerated pace these days.
It is system and application centric, not user or document centric.
Worse than that: it's vendor centric.
Click on the glossy candy-like start button, and what do you see? I mean, once you click on "All Programs."
That's right! A list of vendors. Not a list of useful categories, as you get in both Gnome and KDE, and also in Enlightenment and Windowmaker and XFCE in their various menus. You get things like, "Dell." "Adobe." "Dell Accessories." "Mozilla Firefox." Oh, and then a bunch of icons pushing Microsoft's stuff, like MSN and Internet Explorer.
It's all branded and inconsistent and terrible to try to find what you are looking for. Users aren't stupid: they figure out the maze of applications under different menu picks. Hell, some users even like it.
Lately I've come to realize it's a form of Stockholm Syndrome. So please, treat MS-Windows users gently. They suffer from a mental illness. It is treatable, but it takes time and healing.
People who stand by commercial operating systems seem to have a hard time grasping the idea that open source projects are based on a principle known as freedom.
I'm starting to think that most people are into bondage.
Freedom is a messy, messy thing. It's not clean, or easy, or cheap. It's not a delicate giver-goddess fashion-plate saint; it's a rough player, dirty and sometimes mean. It takes dedication to maintain, intelligence to master, and a willingness to honor others' freedoms.
I don't think most people are up to the task. Or, at least, there's a large portion of society that isn't up to the task. Leading the way are corporations, as Freedom is anathema to business. Corporations work hard to limit choice, or better, to dictate choice ("You can have any color, as long as it's black"). Second is the government, as Freedom is difficult to govern. ("You can have any choice, as long as it's mine.")
And I think most people allow that to happen, because they don't want to have to excersize Freedom. (Citizens in the US are notoriously averse to excersize.) They would rather be stupid followers instead of intelligent independents.
My evidence?
McDonalds. Budweiser. Wal*Mart. MS-Windows. G. W. Bush. Ribbon magnets on vehicles. Star Wars I, II, III. Etc.
Each of those are demonstrably crappy products, yet each is a "leader," in some definition of the word. Each is patronized by more people than competing products (well, except G.W. Bush, but he's patrionized to by more people).
I don't know what this says about society, but it keeps me up at night sometimes. I hope someone figures out how to fix it.
Yes, because choice benefits the citizens, not the corporation. We don't want the average citizen to have choice, because they are stupid money-giving machines, and not smart, or in any way able to make their own decisions.
Also, as the other poster pointed out, "militia" as it is used in the Constitution is a much broader term than you seem to think.
Absolutely. Thomas Jefferson loathed the idea of a standing army; he figured that'd be the fastest way for a person to take over the government. At the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, the "militia" was pretty much every able-bodied male over the age of twelve. The concept was simple; should America ever need to field an army, it would be obvious to the populace, and all would answer the call.
I am a screaming liberal. I will defend my right to speak freely with my right to bear arms, because I am a responsible, free individual, who enjoys liberty and a good beer.
By today's definitions, the founding fathers of the USA would have been terrorists, or at the least, insurgents. This legislation is designed to suppress anonyous writing, which may cause people to Think Too Much, which is going to be outlawed soon.
But, if you think about it, these folks are trying to help protect us. The terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. So, take away the freedoms, you take away the reason for the terrorists to hate us. You take away their reason to be terrorists.
Drop the salaries across the board, and you won't get lesser performances. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie aren't going to stop trying so hard because they get paid $1 million per film instead of $20 million per film. Hell, you might get big name actors to work a bit longer before retiring.
But King Kong pulled in $500M.
As long as movies make hundreds of millions of dollars, the self-infatuated monstrosities known as "stars" will want a giant cut, even if the movie itself doesn't make that much. And they can't count on just getting a piece of the profit pie, because the studios manipulate the books in such a way that there *is* no "profit," at least not that the stars and directors and writers can share.
Any/.'ers have more info about Microsoft's format?
Get thee to Groklaw, my curious friend. The debate, along with fine technical details are found there.
On the other hand, the consortium (if you will) proposing a universal open document standard sounds more open and the proof will be in the implementation. Still, I'd like to know more specifically what that standard proposal is in detail.
The implementation is here. It's called "ODF," the "Open Document Format." It is the default file format of the Open Office suite of applications; KOffice is also moving (or *has* moved, I'm too lazy to look) to that format, as well. IBM's office suite will implement ODF.
Again, Groklaw has a lot of information, including pointers to the official specification.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't OO open before Sun bought them?
No; there was no OpenOffice until Sun purchased StarOffice and created the OpenOffice organisation.
Sun has done a lot for the Free / Open-Source community. They have been kinda wishy-washy at times, but they have done quite a bit.
Now if only they would open up the official Java code base.
Prove it.
If that were the case, *BSD operating systems would be bigger than Linux. Since that's not the case, your argument is a non-starter, at best mere speculation; at worst, self-delusion.
GPL is not business friendly.
True, that. Double-true.
The BSD license is business-friendly. But apparently, business is not BSD-friendly.
The GPL was born of the realisation that, without encouragement, businesses will simply take, and not give anything back. Theo is just learning this, it seems.
After all, who will cry foul on EXTENSIVE discussions about Accessability for the Visually Challenged? It's been brought up before and it was/is a valid concern...
It was brought up before by Microsoft stooges in the Mass. debate. But, the problem isn't with the document standard (which the MS-Office XML format does not address, either), but with products; there is a dearth of accessibility products for the visually impaired for Free software operating systems in general.
The ironic thing is, Microsoft doesn't supply much in the way of accessibility, either. Most accessibility products are third-party, and they are usually hacks on top of the usual Microsoft products. A lot of those third-party vendors raise a hue and cry every time Microsoft releases a new version of its products, because it often breaks compatibility with their accessibility products.
Anyway, the accessibility issue is one of products, not standards. The ODF standard will *help* with accessibility, because it *is* a standard, and won't break compatibility with accessibility products, once those products are produced.
Corporations have a lot to gain / lose when sitting a committee like this. A lot of standards start life as a corporate standard first. Even ODF started life as a corporate standard (at Sun, I believe).
Generally, the folks sitting the committee wish to come to a real consensus. We can hope that Microsoft is merely hedging its bets by testing the ODF standards waters. It could be that Microsoft ends up adopting ODF in an MS-Office generation or two.
I believe Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to buck the standards trends. Imagine how much money they spent trying to push their own web 'standards.' In some research I did recently, it turns out that most of the time, standards beat out proprietary formats every time, usually to the point that people forget there was ever a standards battle. Imagine ASCII vs. all the proprietary character encoding schemes, or IP vs. IPX vs. NETBUEI vs. any number of other networking protocols.
In the end, even Microsoft ends up bowing to the pressure of true, open standards. The only exceptions are when Microsoft products are only concerned about interoperating with other Microsoft products, such as an MS-Windows-based network. The document format world is getting too fragmented for that now. Even within the world of MS-Office, there's document format fragmentation.
Anyway, corporations have a major vested interest in these standards, so it is only appropriate that they sit in committee with the other interested groups. In general, obstructionism is identified and dealt with by the other committee members.
Past performance does not guarantee future success (or failure).
No, but past performance is a good way to bet.
I haven't let development model politics cloud my judgement in order to get the job done. Isn't that how it should be?
For you, perhaps.
For others, the politics are very important.
For me, it's all about the ethics. Microsoft has behaved unethically; that is enough for me to avoid their products. I don't give my lunch money to the school bully.
Has it made my life more difficult? Perhaps. But the important issues usually are difficult.
Very true.
However, if you have a bunch of competing hypothesis, and the evidence disproves all but one, you pretty much are stuck with the survivor as the working theory until something better comes along.
So far, the evidence is pretty much against most other competing theories, including steady-state and creationist viewpoints.
So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why?
It was depressed and binge-eating?
Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?
The dame walked into my office with a sneer on her pretty pasty-white face. "You sure you know what you're talking about?" I sneered back.
"Yeah," she said. She had the kind of teeth made for clenching, white and pearly and pressed firmly together. "Yeah, the way I see it, the Universe got a bum rap. They say it all exploded, but I don't believe it. Not my Universe, the big handsome lug." She went on like that for a while. It coulda been the whiskey, but I think she was just dumb in love with her own voice. She went on about how the Universe had to've always been, and nobody had no evidence to the contrary.
She wound down after sixty minutes or so.
"Look, Lady," I snapped. "I get paid by the hour. You owe me big. But I'll forget to send the bill if you just answer me one question."
She squinted at me like her eyeballs got a taste of something sour. "What?" She spat the word out in a short blast of noise, like a bird honking for attention.
"You ever break the second law of thermodynamics?"
The question must've smacked her right between the eyes. "What're you implying?" She was suddenly, strangely coy.
I pressed my advantage. "Your lovely little thing with the Universe. You ever break the second law of thermodynamics? Did you ever see the Universe break the second law of thermodynamics?"
She shook her head like she had a boiled egg stuck in her ear. She admitted, "I have never done any such thing. It's impossible for a lady of my fine upbringing. I don't even understand what you are driving at, Mister Entropy."
"Yeah, I know." I pointed toward the door. She took the hint, and left my office like a hot, wet squal in the middle of the Pacific. "That's the problem, " told the blank and empty space where she had been. "If you don't get it now, you'll probably never understand."
Although it's not available from the Preferences settings, you can turn it on using the Configuration Editor (usually found in the "System Tools" menu). In the configuration editor, go to /apps/nautilus/preferences, and check the box for 'always_use_location_entry'.
I felt that method of advanced configuration was lame at first, but I'm getting used to it. I kind of prefer it over having every configuration item listed in the preferences dialog.
Anyway, that's how you turn on the location bar.
Give it time, my friend. Give it time.
Oh. My. God.
Do you have to get this simple with *everyone?*
You have just explained the obvious. Why do people assume we are done with knowledge? Hell, wasn't it an IBM founder who decried there'd be a need for perhaps 100 computers world-wide?
We are not close to the end of knowledge. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to the obtuse.
This is essentially a, "Me, Too!" message.
Next week on the Inquirer: Computers Built That Break The Orange Catholic Bible's Commandment of 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likenes of a human mind'.
God Lord! I hope so. That'd be kick-ass. We'd have a machine that is arrogant, self-centered, unsure of itself and willing to act tough to make up for it, willing to fleece millions of people of their retirement, and able to send out its own spam to do it.
Yeah. Kick-ass.
Would any judge be supporting them if it wasn't about pornography? Did they get whatever they wanted from Enron without a warrant?
See, that's the problem. They didn't want to get anything on Enron; perhaps too many people in the government would be implicated. (Just look at the government folks Enron met with in the year or two prior to their debacle. Interesting list.)
Since this is about people and their own personal "web experience with a happy ending," it must be too nasty for the kids to see. I know when I use Google, all I get is pornography results.
Might have something to do with all my search terms including the word "porn," though.
It's easy to stand up to people you know aren't going to retalliate.
Yeah. Thanks for turning the other cheek, Bub.
Here's one thing that's holding the Linux desktop back...standards.
That's great. But the list you gave are not "standards;" it's a list of things that some people use right now. Those are hardly standard. Even MS-Word changes from version to version; the next release of MS-Office breaks both their old file format, and radically changes the UI.
Email is email. We have several email clients with which most users would feel comfortable. We really don't have an MS-Outlook replacement (why the hell not?), but for a majority of users, I don't think that's a big deal.
You gave a list of keybindings and specific programs, none of which are "standard." So it isn't "standards" holding Linux back. It's a bunch of programs that are mostly under Microsoft's control.
I'm hopeful. Lotus 123 used to be king of the hill, as was WordPerfect in its space. Netware used to be the main NOS.
In the end, it'll be standards that allow Linux to capture a sizable share of the desktop space: ODF for the document format, XHTML/DOM/CSS support in the browser, etc. Linux has nearly caught up with MS-Windows in ease-of-use for the novice user who thinks he's a power user (e.g., most business users). Now it's just a matter of catching up in the application space, which is happening at an accelerated pace these days.
It is system and application centric, not user or document centric.
Worse than that: it's vendor centric.
Click on the glossy candy-like start button, and what do you see? I mean, once you click on "All Programs."
That's right! A list of vendors. Not a list of useful categories, as you get in both Gnome and KDE, and also in Enlightenment and Windowmaker and XFCE in their various menus. You get things like, "Dell." "Adobe." "Dell Accessories." "Mozilla Firefox." Oh, and then a bunch of icons pushing Microsoft's stuff, like MSN and Internet Explorer.
It's all branded and inconsistent and terrible to try to find what you are looking for. Users aren't stupid: they figure out the maze of applications under different menu picks. Hell, some users even like it.
Lately I've come to realize it's a form of Stockholm Syndrome. So please, treat MS-Windows users gently. They suffer from a mental illness. It is treatable, but it takes time and healing.
People who stand by commercial operating systems seem to have a hard time grasping the idea that open source projects are based on a principle known as freedom.
I'm starting to think that most people are into bondage.
Freedom is a messy, messy thing. It's not clean, or easy, or cheap. It's not a delicate giver-goddess fashion-plate saint; it's a rough player, dirty and sometimes mean. It takes dedication to maintain, intelligence to master, and a willingness to honor others' freedoms.
I don't think most people are up to the task. Or, at least, there's a large portion of society that isn't up to the task. Leading the way are corporations, as Freedom is anathema to business. Corporations work hard to limit choice, or better, to dictate choice ("You can have any color, as long as it's black"). Second is the government, as Freedom is difficult to govern. ("You can have any choice, as long as it's mine.")
And I think most people allow that to happen, because they don't want to have to excersize Freedom. (Citizens in the US are notoriously averse to excersize.) They would rather be stupid followers instead of intelligent independents.
My evidence?
McDonalds. Budweiser. Wal*Mart. MS-Windows. G. W. Bush. Ribbon magnets on vehicles. Star Wars I, II, III. Etc.
Each of those are demonstrably crappy products, yet each is a "leader," in some definition of the word. Each is patronized by more people than competing products (well, except G.W. Bush, but he's patrionized to by more people).
I don't know what this says about society, but it keeps me up at night sometimes. I hope someone figures out how to fix it.
Yes, because choice benefits the citizens, not the corporation. We don't want the average citizen to have choice, because they are stupid money-giving machines, and not smart, or in any way able to make their own decisions.
Setill I have to admire them as the ultimate example of a capitalist success story, I also like their ability to stand up to the unions.
If they are a shining example of capitalist success, we could do with a hell of a lot more capitalist failure.
As for unions: exploitive companies like Wal*Mart are the reasons unions exist-- to protect the citizens employed by these evil companies.
(Evil == "willing to fuck over people for their own gain.")
Also, as the other poster pointed out, "militia" as it is used in the Constitution is a much broader term than you seem to think.
Absolutely. Thomas Jefferson loathed the idea of a standing army; he figured that'd be the fastest way for a person to take over the government. At the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, the "militia" was pretty much every able-bodied male over the age of twelve. The concept was simple; should America ever need to field an army, it would be obvious to the populace, and all would answer the call.
I am a screaming liberal. I will defend my right to speak freely with my right to bear arms, because I am a responsible, free individual, who enjoys liberty and a good beer.
By today's definitions, the founding fathers of the USA would have been terrorists, or at the least, insurgents. This legislation is designed to suppress anonyous writing, which may cause people to Think Too Much, which is going to be outlawed soon.
But, if you think about it, these folks are trying to help protect us. The terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. So, take away the freedoms, you take away the reason for the terrorists to hate us. You take away their reason to be terrorists.
All this is part of the brilliant War On Terror.
Drop the salaries across the board, and you won't get lesser performances. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie aren't going to stop trying so hard because they get paid $1 million per film instead of $20 million per film. Hell, you might get big name actors to work a bit longer before retiring.
But King Kong pulled in $500M.
As long as movies make hundreds of millions of dollars, the self-infatuated monstrosities known as "stars" will want a giant cut, even if the movie itself doesn't make that much. And they can't count on just getting a piece of the profit pie, because the studios manipulate the books in such a way that there *is* no "profit," at least not that the stars and directors and writers can share.
Any /.'ers have more info about Microsoft's format?
Get thee to Groklaw, my curious friend. The debate, along with fine technical details are found there.
On the other hand, the consortium (if you will) proposing a universal open document standard sounds more open and the proof will be in the implementation. Still, I'd like to know more specifically what that standard proposal is in detail.
The implementation is here. It's called "ODF," the "Open Document Format." It is the default file format of the Open Office suite of applications; KOffice is also moving (or *has* moved, I'm too lazy to look) to that format, as well. IBM's office suite will implement ODF.
Again, Groklaw has a lot of information, including pointers to the official specification.