Where do you get your news from? Why do you cite M$'s apparent install base of linux, one based on Linux desktop *sales*. Go read Gartner or Netcraft, the install base of desktop Linux is close to exceeding the Mac - do you see Apple desktops rolled out be the hundreds-of-thousands in Government departments and offices? No and likely you never will. And anyway that's not the point. An argument for giving back to the Unix community, from which they derive so much development capital, should not be justified by popularity alone.
Precisely, and why should we be surprised. Apple's apologists would say that by virtue of the fact they offer an alternative to the Mephistophelean M$, makes them a noble and well hearted corporation - as though they represent the Fair and Just in IT today. Albeit silly, it is impressive; representative of a very well engineered marketing charter in the face of everything we know Corporations to be otherwise.
Clearly however, Apple still follows in that old and tired legacy of the monolithic Corporation; and must do everything it can to dominate the market, eventually swelling out of it's designer altruism. Of course this is hardly suprising; the machinery that comprises a Corporation allows for little else - an 'Economy' does imply Scarcity. The bigger you grow the more you need to eat. Steve will eventually go, myths made redundant and a second in charge will take over with a zoo of very big animals to feed.
Regardless, there is everything to suggest that they will become more of an 'Ikea Lifestyle Computing' company and so have opened up a market all of their own to dominate, and why not - this is something they are really good at - making really inflexible, well working machines that users acutally like to become foolishly dependent on.
Your point about no iTunes for Linux rings true. An emblem of their off-white open-source flag. Perhaps they'll be offering less UNIX and more discounts on Intelligent Haircuts by the end of the decade.
However, patents on ideas cannot be specific. In fact they will always be abused for precisely
this reason by the paper pushing business that is any Patent Office.
Given your example in the thread below, do you imagine if another written medium, like literature for instance, would have progressed with a patent like "A method for building and resoloving the Protagonist's Catharsis." Or in music, the (algorithmic) 'Rondo' phrasal form (musical phrases A - B - A - C - A), prevalent in rock music since the 60's? These examples are analogous with the encouraged trend in what is considered patentable - where software is concerned.
Here are some examples of the current state of software patents today, the kinds of things people want to patent are in fact as loose as possible - eg a net made so large as to increase the likelihood of patent breach. In other words, the bulk of swpats are precisely not
about protecting innovation so much as encouraging the possibility of legal action. Hence we increasingly hear about software development houses becoming legal offices; it is simply better and bigger business.
Secondly a software patent is often used as a pre-emptive strike against a superceding product. Much of the software patents granted today for so-called inventions are registered precisely to protect the patent holders already inferior product - extending it's market cycle while ensuring the 'invention' never makes it to market. How does that encourage innovation, boosting the culture of software as a whole?
And from the perspective of the small developer (as you claim to be)
, here is a testimony that makes the real danger loud and clear. SWPatents discourage innovation , but also creation itself:
Agarwal Associates Ltd
As the owner/manager of a small company employing 10 people I can not afford
to do a full patent search every time I have an idea for a software product
.
As a small company our strength is in being fast and flexible. We can not be
either if every time we need to put together a bespoke solution for a clien
t we would need to spend months putting together systems for our clients tha
t avoid any software patent issues.
As a small company our strength is in being fast and flexible. We can not be
either if every time we need to put together a bespoke solution for a clien
t we would need to spend months putting together systems for our clients tha
t avoid any software patent issues.
This has a direct impact on our Clients who are also SMEs. They would not be
able to afford solutions suitable for them and would have to use a standard solution from the big players whether it was suitable or not.
UKPO claims that the new directive does not change anything but only clarifi
es the current law. If that is the case, why oppose the clause inserted by t
he European Parliament to explicitly deny patents for software? Make it expl
icit and clear for everyone!
well given the performance i need i saved around $500 cost-compared with the PB. also i asked for it blank as i wanted to put Debian on the machine.
however in retrospect i paid in Euro's thus didn't compare with the US 'discounts' on PB's. i didn't consider that at the time of posting. needless to say this Asus is a great machine and looks remarkably similar to the PB, albeit a more robust design.
http://ubuntulinux.org/works a charm, up and running in about 40 minutes. everything works with the exception of the Airport sadly. excellent performance in 3D albeit.
i have to teach on OSX from time to time. as i've been spoilt with the grace and transparency of open/black/fluxbox on Linux for a several years, i'm looking for an install-and-go *box like window manager for OSX. any suggestions? it's important that the installation is reversible..
i was considering buying a G4 lappie and putting Debian on it, as several friends have done this with great reports. however i found this better looking machine at near half the price, a robust design (carbon fibre case), incredibly fast, light and low temperature. apparently it's also won several design awards (whatever that means):
solipsistic fandom aside, the Apple titanium machines are fairly crappy anyway, several friends have paint chipped off, dented lids and they are absurdly hot. the iBooks however seem to be well made laptops.
having bought it i was surprised to find, Asus make many of the Apple machines anyway;)
if you use an integrated desktop environment like KDE or Gnome you'll find that alot of your userland problems are sorted 'out of the box'. running such a system is not my preference, however i reccommend this to new users.
i have to teach on OSX from time to time so am forced to use it, though would rather not.
somehow the would-be productivity boost of OSX totally escapes me, this 'finder' logic (ironically) has me lost within seconds - as though everything is lost in the first place. the aptly named 'expose' seems needlessly flambouyant for the simple task of finding a window - something easily done in any *box window manager for the Linux platform (even KDE-3.3+ feels more intuitive). when working i need fast, min system-hit window management: can anyone suggest an install-and-go Open/Flux/Blackbox like manager for Apple machines?
secondly, i develop 3D applications and do alot of modelling/animation (previously in Maya, now in Blender). neither OSX or windows satisfy these needs well, OSX hogging the card for things *I* would like to use it for (turning polygons) - albeit for fast 2D blitting. Winblows, being DirectEggs and VC6 biased (where game development is concerned) fails here too..
for day to day use i need an easy to maintain, fast, clean system with a good office suite, excellent image editing and video codec support. hence any Debian based distribution suits me well.
multinationals like IBM and Novell have 10 year roadmaps with Linux and will defend it just to preserve their current investment. apparently even Linus has said he'll write around patents infringed by kernel code if need be.. Linux will survive as a major player if the swpat Directive goes through - the only effects of which we'll see will be minor fluctuations in share price around court-cases.
that said, i'm more concerned about smaller.orgs like Blender and Gimp, both of which likely infringe on a few legal absurdities (like 'tiered menus' or 'a method for distributing windows to improve user performance' etc). by corollary a poor outcome for all this is that small FOSS projects hide under legal force-fields provided by larger companies in lossy 'buy into' plans (Gnome becomes the god-child of RedHat for instance). this would stifle the relative openess of it's development interests for the benefit of legal proofing.
afterall there's a market for chasing so called patent violation; figures we hear like $500,000 just to defend will likely drop to allow opportunists to reliably harvest smaller sums from appropriately smaller prey. in this way the deadliest symptom of enforceable software patents is that they discourage development.
As it stands, it's depressingly sobering...M$ has the financial clout to do a lot of damage in court
.. thankfully not here in the EU - given that software patents are generally considered destructive right up to a parliamentary level. we'll see what the new swpatent draft looks like however. see http://nosoftwarepatents.com/
also consider that the new GPL is looking closely at patents toward the end of greater resilience in court. meanwhile IBM, Redhat and Novell now provide indemnity to their enterprise linux customers where swpats are concerned, the market battlefield on which M$ would fight first.
as it stands it isn't quite as depressing as it was this time last year. anyway, it's not the court cases i worry about, it's the fact that the mere existance of software patents discourages innovation amongst many small development houses (where it all happens first).
This is one of the reasons I can't use Windows, Gnome or OSX.... there is just simply a lack of options.
i have to agree, though Gnome can't be compared to OSX or Windows for their relative lack of configurability.
some see choice as a stalwart, but generally speaking it is one of the few means a computer user can actually make their computer *their own*, not a facsimile of visions drafted up by 'HCI experts' set on homogenizing the computing experience.
really, if some of the arguments against configurability and choice were applied to people's houses, cars, relationships they'd make little sense. how is the flexibility to choose a new icon theme any worse than being allowed to paint your own house? do you own or rent your machines?
OK Let's try this "I tried installing the amazing OSX on my PC but it didn't recognise any of my hardware! So, I just installed Windows instead.."
You are really missing the point here.
Linux offers (and encourages) flexibility across many architectures, it doesn't seek to be a rarified lifestyle OS - as married to a single architecture (IBM's G* processor) as Winblows is (in fact more so. Winblows runs on the AMD's).
Time for a little chicken and egg: You buy an iBook G5 (which is incidentally made by ASUS computers) to run OSX on. When I want to run Linux, I choose hardware best suited to run Linux on. the only difference with using Linux being I have far more choices in the hardware market than you do.
BTW the G4 makes a great little linux lappie; excepting the Airport it Just Works TM. Give it a go sometime..
The thing is, I've never seen MS as a big evil company.
Sure, they want marketshare - who doesnt?
I see this atrophic concept of Market and Share coming up again and again, let's break it down shall we?
The word marketshare doesn't exist, though lately (interestingly enough) has been in wide circulation regardless.
People seem to forget this marketshare was once comprised of two words, Market and Share.
The first word 'Market' signifies an environment predisposed to maximal choice for the benefit of consumers, and also for the vendors who enjoy a large turnout on market day. M$'s concept of Market would be like going to buy fruit and vegetables on market day to find only one vendor. Disturbingly the previous vendors now all seem to be stacking shelves and helping you put fruit in bags..
The second word here is 'Share'. In the context of Market Share is perhaps best considered as the verb to share. 'To share' implicitly means 'to distribute ownership of - to partake, enjoy or suffer with others'. This word 'share' M$ simply has no concept of - except of course in the context of 'shares' (distributed ownership of the company not the market).
M$ doesn't seek Market Share, perhaps they seek this new thing called 'Marketshare' i'm not sure. One thing certain is that they seek 'Monopoly', the word I think the parent's author was looking for. Monopoly is also made of two words, Mono (a prefex signifying 'One') and Poly (also a prefix/adjective meaning 'of many atoms or parts).
It all depends which you put in front of the other and whether there's air in between.
Try 'Sharemarket' and 'Share Market' for instance, get it?
large sections of the Spanish (esp. Extremadura, Basque Country, Catalunya, Andalucia, Zaragoza), Brazilian, Peruvian, German (Munich leading), Chilean, Austrian (Vienna, Linz) and French Governments already use Linux heavily (and sometimes under mandate) in both desktop and server installations.
yes, perhaps i'm uninformed, i don't keep up with the state of XServe these days.
regardless, and keeping in line with the article, the writer asks for advice in choosing a linux distribution that satisfactorily manages LDAP for the x86 architecture. Novell's SuSE Linux does this very well.
the fact i see OSX Server as uneccessarily restrictive (largely due to hardware lock-in with the IBM range of G* processors) is secondary.
because it runs on rarified hardware, has a circus for a GUI and disallows a plethora of *possible* modifications; thus reducing the wear-in value of the system over long periods of time.
believe it or not there are reasons OSX isn't taking off in the server market...
for LDAP in a flexible purchase climate i'd chose SuSE. it's*disappointingly easy;)
Slashdot Mirror
You're quite right, the BSD community has alot more to complain about. s/LinuxFOSS/g. I was too general in my citing of the original comment.
very interesting stats, thankyou. i haven't visited itfacts for a while, great to see they have such a rich update.
Where do you get your news from? Why do you cite M$'s apparent install base of linux, one based on Linux desktop *sales*. Go read Gartner or Netcraft, the install base of desktop Linux is close to exceeding the Mac - do you see Apple desktops rolled out be the hundreds-of-thousands in Government departments and offices? No and likely you never will. And anyway that's not the point. An argument for giving back to the Unix community, from which they derive so much development capital, should not be justified by popularity alone.
Precisely, and why should we be surprised. Apple's apologists would say that by virtue of the fact they offer an alternative to the Mephistophelean M$, makes them a noble and well hearted corporation - as though they represent the Fair and Just in IT today. Albeit silly, it is impressive; representative of a very well engineered marketing charter in the face of everything we know Corporations to be otherwise.
Clearly however, Apple still follows in that old and tired legacy of the monolithic Corporation; and must do everything it can to dominate the market, eventually swelling out of it's designer altruism. Of course this is hardly suprising; the machinery that comprises a Corporation allows for little else - an 'Economy' does imply Scarcity. The bigger you grow the more you need to eat. Steve will eventually go, myths made redundant and a second in charge will take over with a zoo of very big animals to feed.
Regardless, there is everything to suggest that they will become more of an 'Ikea Lifestyle Computing' company and so have opened up a market all of their own to dominate, and why not - this is something they are really good at - making really inflexible, well working machines that users acutally like to become foolishly dependent on.
Your point about no iTunes for Linux rings true. An emblem of their off-white open-source flag. Perhaps they'll be offering less UNIX and more discounts on Intelligent Haircuts by the end of the decade.
However, patents on ideas cannot be specific. In fact they will always be abused for precisely this reason by the paper pushing business that is any Patent Office.
Given your example in the thread below, do you imagine if another written medium, like literature for instance, would have progressed with a patent like "A method for building and resoloving the Protagonist's Catharsis." Or in music, the (algorithmic) 'Rondo' phrasal form (musical phrases A - B - A - C - A), prevalent in rock music since the 60's? These examples are analogous with the encouraged trend in what is considered patentable - where software is concerned.
Here are some examples of the current state of software patents today, the kinds of things people want to patent are in fact as loose as possible - eg a net made so large as to increase the likelihood of patent breach. In other words, the bulk of swpats are precisely not about protecting innovation so much as encouraging the possibility of legal action. Hence we increasingly hear about software development houses becoming legal offices; it is simply better and bigger business.
http://webshop.ffii.org/
Secondly a software patent is often used as a pre-emptive strike against a superceding product. Much of the software patents granted today for so-called inventions are registered precisely to protect the patent holders already inferior product - extending it's market cycle while ensuring the 'invention' never makes it to market. How does that encourage innovation, boosting the culture of software as a whole?
And from the perspective of the small developer (as you claim to be) , here is a testimony that makes the real danger loud and clear. SWPatents discourage innovation , but also creation itself:
Agarwal Associates Ltd
As the owner/manager of a small company employing 10 people I can not afford to do a full patent search every time I have an idea for a software product .
As a small company our strength is in being fast and flexible. We can not be either if every time we need to put together a bespoke solution for a clien t we would need to spend months putting together systems for our clients tha t avoid any software patent issues.
As a small company our strength is in being fast and flexible. We can not be either if every time we need to put together a bespoke solution for a clien t we would need to spend months putting together systems for our clients tha t avoid any software patent issues.
This has a direct impact on our Clients who are also SMEs. They would not be able to afford solutions suitable for them and would have to use a standard solution from the big players whether it was suitable or not.
UKPO claims that the new directive does not change anything but only clarifi es the current law. If that is the case, why oppose the clause inserted by t he European Parliament to explicitly deny patents for software? Make it expl icit and clear for everyone!
Added: 2004-12-07 http://protectinnovation.ffii.org.uk/read_testimo
well given the performance i need i saved around $500 cost-compared with the PB. also i asked for it blank as i wanted to put Debian on the machine.
however in retrospect i paid in Euro's thus didn't compare with the US 'discounts' on PB's. i didn't consider that at the time of posting. needless to say this Asus is a great machine and looks remarkably similar to the PB, albeit a more robust design.
http://ubuntulinux.org/works a charm, up and running in about 40 minutes. everything works with the exception of the Airport sadly. excellent performance in 3D albeit.
here here
i have to teach on OSX from time to time. as i've been spoilt with the grace and transparency of open/black/fluxbox on Linux for a several years, i'm looking for an install-and-go *box like window manager for OSX. any suggestions?
it's important that the installation is reversible..
why? what does it offer that's better than the excellent http://yafray.org/?
i'd consider a mini, but dislike OSX (would rather run Debian). given that 'FoxConn Electronics' actually make the mini apparently:
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threa
if not guess i'd rather go with this Intel box, or the comparitively priced Shuttle.. what's a few inches anyway.. http://us.shuttle.com/
i was considering buying a G4 lappie and putting Debian on it, as several friends have done this with great reports. however i found this better looking machine at near half the price, a robust design (carbon fibre case), incredibly fast, light and low temperature. apparently it's also won several design awards (whatever that means):
l
;)
d id=148682
http://store.agearnotebooks.com/asusm6nphotos.htm
solipsistic fandom aside, the Apple titanium machines are fairly crappy anyway, several friends have paint chipped off, dented lids and they are absurdly hot. the iBooks however seem to be well made laptops.
having bought it i was surprised to find, Asus make many of the Apple machines anyway
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threa
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050114A7040.html
i don't know about the ipod, though there is an iTunes for Linux in the works via windows emulation: http://news.com.com/Startup+to+make+iTunes+sing+o
if you use an integrated desktop environment like KDE or Gnome you'll find that alot of your userland problems are sorted 'out of the box'. running such a system is not my preference, however i reccommend this to new users.
i have to teach on OSX from time to time so am forced to use it, though would rather not.
somehow the would-be productivity boost of OSX totally escapes me, this 'finder' logic (ironically) has me lost within seconds - as though everything is lost in the first place. the aptly named 'expose' seems needlessly flambouyant for the simple task of finding a window - something easily done in any *box window manager for the Linux platform (even KDE-3.3+ feels more intuitive). when working i need fast, min system-hit window management: can anyone suggest an install-and-go Open/Flux/Blackbox like manager for Apple machines?
secondly, i develop 3D applications and do alot of modelling/animation (previously in Maya, now in Blender). neither OSX or windows satisfy these needs well, OSX hogging the card for things *I* would like to use it for (turning polygons) - albeit for fast 2D blitting. Winblows, being DirectEggs and VC6 biased (where game development is concerned) fails here too..
for day to day use i need an easy to maintain, fast, clean system with a good office suite, excellent image editing and video codec support. hence any Debian based distribution suits me well.
i like to talk to my computer, not prod it like cattle.
multinationals like IBM and Novell have 10 year roadmaps with Linux and will defend it just to preserve their current investment. apparently even Linus has said he'll write around patents infringed by kernel code if need be.. Linux will survive as a major player if the swpat Directive goes through - the only effects of which we'll see will be minor fluctuations in share price around court-cases.
that said, i'm more concerned about smaller
afterall there's a market for chasing so called patent violation; figures we hear like $500,000 just to defend will likely drop to allow opportunists to reliably harvest smaller sums from appropriately smaller prey. in this way the deadliest symptom of enforceable software patents is that they discourage development.
.. thankfully not here in the EU - given that software patents are generally considered destructive right up to a parliamentary level. we'll see what the new swpatent draft looks like however. see http://nosoftwarepatents.com/
also consider that the new GPL is looking closely at patents toward the end of greater resilience in court. meanwhile IBM, Redhat and Novell now provide indemnity to their enterprise linux customers where swpats are concerned, the market battlefield on which M$ would fight first.
as it stands it isn't quite as depressing as it was this time last year. anyway, it's not the court cases i worry about, it's the fact that the mere existance of software patents discourages innovation amongst many small development houses (where it all happens first).
i have to agree, though Gnome can't be compared to OSX or Windows for their relative lack of configurability.
some see choice as a stalwart, but generally speaking it is one of the few means a computer user can actually make their computer *their own*, not a facsimile of visions drafted up by 'HCI experts' set on homogenizing the computing experience.
really, if some of the arguments against configurability and choice were applied to people's houses, cars, relationships they'd make little sense. how is the flexibility to choose a new icon theme any worse than being allowed to paint your own house? do you own or rent your machines?
..but it costs more than this.
let's just say the fact they are considering 'possible loss' in anticipation of bugs is reason enough to be concerned.
what a waste of sleep this M$ rubbish is.
funny, i thought this report from Digitimes (originally in the Apple.com website) were reliable sources:
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threa
which is from.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050114A7040.html
BTW i'm currently looking for an unbadged iBook G5 now
OK Let's try this "I tried installing the amazing OSX on my PC but it didn't recognise any of my hardware! So, I just installed Windows instead.."
You are really missing the point here.
Linux offers (and encourages) flexibility across many architectures, it doesn't seek to be a rarified lifestyle OS - as married to a single architecture (IBM's G* processor) as Winblows is (in fact more so. Winblows runs on the AMD's).
Time for a little chicken and egg: You buy an iBook G5 (which is incidentally made by ASUS computers) to run OSX on. When I want to run Linux, I choose hardware best suited to run Linux on. the only difference with using Linux being I have far more choices in the hardware market than you do.
BTW the G4 makes a great little linux lappie; excepting the Airport it Just Works TM. Give it a go sometime..
I see this atrophic concept of Market and Share coming up again and again, let's break it down shall we?
The word marketshare doesn't exist, though lately (interestingly enough) has been in wide circulation regardless.
People seem to forget this marketshare was once comprised of two words, Market and Share.
The first word 'Market' signifies an environment predisposed to maximal choice for the benefit of consumers, and also for the vendors who enjoy a large turnout on market day. M$'s concept of Market would be like going to buy fruit and vegetables on market day to find only one vendor. Disturbingly the previous vendors now all seem to be stacking shelves and helping you put fruit in bags..
The second word here is 'Share'. In the context of Market Share is perhaps best considered as the verb to share. 'To share' implicitly means 'to distribute ownership of - to partake, enjoy or suffer with others'. This word 'share' M$ simply has no concept of - except of course in the context of 'shares' (distributed ownership of the company not the market).
M$ doesn't seek Market Share, perhaps they seek this new thing called 'Marketshare' i'm not sure. One thing certain is that they seek 'Monopoly', the word I think the parent's author was looking for. Monopoly is also made of two words, Mono (a prefex signifying 'One') and Poly (also a prefix/adjective meaning 'of many atoms or parts).
It all depends which you put in front of the other and whether there's air in between.
Try 'Sharemarket' and 'Share Market' for instance, get it?
large sections of the Spanish (esp. Extremadura, Basque Country, Catalunya, Andalucia, Zaragoza), Brazilian, Peruvian, German (Munich leading), Chilean, Austrian (Vienna, Linz) and French Governments already use Linux heavily (and sometimes under mandate) in both desktop and server installations.
corporations? i didn't think that was news.
grep http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,4148,1237915,00.
i don't follow Governmental adoptions of Linux in America, the country is off my radar.
yes, perhaps i'm uninformed, i don't keep up with the state of XServe these days.
regardless, and keeping in line with the article, the writer asks for advice in choosing a linux distribution that satisfactorily manages LDAP for the x86 architecture. Novell's SuSE Linux does this very well.
the fact i see OSX Server as uneccessarily restrictive (largely due to hardware lock-in with the IBM range of G* processors) is secondary.
because it runs on rarified hardware, has a circus for a GUI and disallows a plethora of *possible* modifications; thus reducing the wear-in value of the system over long periods of time.
believe it or not there are reasons OSX isn't taking off in the server market...
for LDAP in a flexible purchase climate i'd chose SuSE. it's*disappointingly easy