I should point out that the bulk of my investment income is made from Linux and other Open Source products, and I haven't lost yet (I've been investing in Linux as a whole for almost 15 years). I am looking at this from a business POV, and ROI POV. For comparison, let's look at Microsoft over the last 15 years.
Micro$oft has twice been convicted of monopolistic tactics and is currently involved in three other cases of a similar nature, two of them are statewide class action suits as well. They have been found in violation of many different patents and copyrights, with untold numbers of settlements where they ended up paying the plaintiff. They have over promised and under delivered 6 OS's, one of which was found to have violated the BSD network stack, which cost them a pretty penny. They have purchased a license to Unix technology, which may or may not be valid any longer, to the tune of somewhere around $30 million. They have installed software onto their customer's systems without permission, or gained permission under false pretenses which is going to lead to yet another series of law suites.
So looking at it as an investor, I would say that Linux is a much safer investment than Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has the potential for a larger ROI, but Linux appears to me to be much safer.
There are looming possibilities of "patent claims" and "copyright infringement" against linux and the components that various distributions include. As a Linux OEM, I would think that fact poses significant risk to your business. It only takes one weird case/judge/lobby such as the old JPG copyright scares, etc to potentially put you at legal risk.
First thing to understand is that so far, there has not been a single proven case of patent infringement against Linux. Many people have claimed patent infringement against various packages on Linux and of those, there has been only two; MP3/4, which was IMO an unethical and barely legal patent, and DeCSS, though DeCSS wasn't really a patent claim when you get down to it.
Instead, what you have is someone like Micro$oft claiming that Linux violates their patents, but refuse to produce or defend the patents. You have people like $COX claiming that Linux violates their copyright, but refuse to demonstrate the violations, and when forced to by a judge, the judge effectively laughed them out of court. Please note that I am not saying that Linux doesn't violate any patents or copyrights, however, the simple fact is that, no one has been successful at proving that it does.
It should also be pointed out that there are quite a few companies who have come out and offered Linux both patent protection and patent amnesty, should it be determined that Linux is somehow violating their patents. This is the critical piece as most, if not all of these companies, are now donating code directly to Linux and the Open Source movement. Such notables as Novell, IBM, and SUN.
Finally, as a distributor, you have an ethical obligation to defend your clients from these patent / copyright claims, however, you also have the right to choose what packages you will distribute and support, but even more importantly you have the right to choose what not to distribute and support. One of the tricks with Ubuntu is that they tell you upfront that they do not distribute MP3/4 or DeCSS packages, nor will they defend their customers from claims in reference to these packages.
This is really nothing new for Prince. He is a true artists, you may not like his music, but his goal is simply to spread his art to as many people as possible. A few years ago he did something similar which garnered him the all time CD sales record. He sold an album, for $75 - $150, and with each album a person bought, they also received a concert ticket, so while the sale was officially for the CD, the true cost was for the concert.
Contrary to what the RIAA wants you to believe, artists do not make their money on CD sales, in fact most artists actually lose money on their first two albums and over 90% of them never get their second album which leaves them in debt to the RIAA for life. Instead artists make their money on concerts. If you don't believe me, you are welcome to read the blogs of the Magnatune founder and his wife, the band Wilco, the singer Courtney Love, and the band Liquid Blue. There are many others with similar blogs, interview comments, etc.
There are quite a few mis-understandings in your comment, which I would guess, are the same mis-understandings held by the bozo from Mass.
1. Microsoft has proven over and over again, that they do not adhere to their own document standards. Because of this a document that you create today in M$ office, may be readable next year in M$ Office 2007, but what about in 2015? 2030? Additionally, due to the way M$ works, you cannot implement a version of their "standard" in your own software without paying a fee, and as they have demostrated, you pay the fee, they change the format, you have to pay again.
2. Microsoft created an "Open Standard" document format which they submitted for evaluation, however, there were 3 keys that failed to meet the minimum criteria, A) Would not be available until the next version of M$ Office. B) Required a license from M$ to use. C) Was not compatible with any existing "Open" license or agreement, as such it could not be used in StarOffice, OpenOffice, kOffice, Gnumeric, etc, and even then, if M$ changed their license, it could not be implemented until M$ finalized the standard. ODF is already supported in at least 3 office suites, and two of those support it natively as well as their own standard.
3. No office package out there supports only a single document format, however, none of them support their competitor's formats at anything more than basic level. Because of this, though you could read a WordPerfect document in Word, you may not be able to properly edit it while retaining all of it's embedded information. Same thing going the other way. Now, to make matters even worse, no single document format out there, save ODF, supports all office functions in a single format. In M$ Office, you have a Doc fomat, an Excel format, a PPT format, etc. ODF is a single format specification that can be used by all of them.
4. The reason a standard is needed, is quite simply to save our documentation for the future. We cannot be sure that M$ will still be around in 40 years, 50 years, 100 years, so relying on their "Open Standard", which as stated previously requires a license from M$ to use, may not be legally usable in the future. With ODF, since it is a true Open Standard, as in the public domain now, means that it can be used legally at any time and for any reason.
Now, on a different tack, This is simply a document format / storage standard. This is not an application standard, which the bozo from Mass is implying. By saying that all documents must be stored in ODF, does not mean that you have to use any one application to do it, simply that the application you use, must store the document in the ODF format.
Strangely, there is very little training needed to move the average user from Windows to Linux. The average user browses the web, writes a couple emails, and maybe does some word processing / spreadsheet work. All of these tools already exist and use the exact same key strokes as their Windows counterparts.
A little over 5 years ago, I migrated a couple of small companies (less than 50 employees each) from Windows to Linux. At the time, there were a lot fewer desktop applications available, but even then, there was very little training required. The only real training needed was for the software developers and system administrators. The software developers were used to the Borland and Microsoft IDE's while the system administrators were simply used to the way Microsoft did system administration.
Not sure what distro's you tried this with, but every one I use and have used over the last 4 years has done this flawlessly on over 95% of the applications that the average user will need.
I recently installed OpenOffice on Suse, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, and Slackware... Worked right out of the box.
I recently installed Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Firefox, both just worked right out of the box.
Now to address your commnet a bit better. What you are describing is the same exact issue that caused various companies to create "installers". Believe it or not, it wasn't all that long ago that you had to do the very same thing to get the GUI to show applications in Windows.
Additionally, you are making the assumption that since you had trouble, that the average newbie will as well. Well, guess what... I used to teach true newbies and teaching them how to do what you are talking is very very simple, and the time requirements are almost exactly the same between Winblows and various Linux GUI's.
Finally, I am using KDE to write this, of the over 200 applications in my menu, I had to create the start scripts for exactly 2 of them, MySQLcc and a program I wrote myself to suspend my laptop to disk. So based on that, 99% of the application launchers on my system were created automagically by the system for me.
PS. In another post you make a comment about Firefox and Thunderbird being the most sucessful OpenSource projects ever... Please go check your facts, they are sucessful, but not even in the top 10. You want to the see the most sucessful? Check out the HTTP headers on the Slashdot server.;)
Been using Linux a very very long time, have even written drivers for it and ya know what? No where in the code have I seen anything in the Linux Kernel that has anything to do with copy/paste functionality.
Now, I stated it that way for a very simple reason. You, yourself, are demonstrating the same kind of mindset that these "enemies" are demonstrating. Linux is not, nor will it ever be the desktop, the distribution, or the applications, instead Linux is, and always has been the OS that those things reside upon.
What you are referring to instead is the desktop application or desktop shell. Now, while these may have various inconsitencies, guess what? They are all user configurable.
If you want your KDE and your Gnome apps to play nicely together, simply configure them to do so. This is what the Linux movement is really all about... The ability to choose and decide for yourself what you want the system to do.
Also keep in mind too, that there is always more than one way to acheive an end. Just because it's what you know, doesn't mean it is the best, or that it is even comfortable to others. For example, I was using fdisk a few days ago and one of my old buddies looked over my shoulder and told me I was stupid for using it instead of parted. Just because she has no idea how to use fdisk does not mean that I shouldn't be allowed to use it.
Finally, one of the real beauties of Open Source is that if you don't like the way something works, you are given every tool you need to fix it. Well, if you want a single common clipboard system, jump in and help us create it.
cacert.org is doing everything these guys are, and then some. cacert.org is free, but with a much higher level of personal confidence than Verisign, Thawt, or any others that I know of.
Additionally, with cacert.org, you are able to get more than just server certs and keys.
Greetings,
After having worked at Intel, and participating in one of the big Intel / Linux strategy sessions, I really don't see this as a major change / depoarture from their strategies for the last few years.
Intel's reason for asking that laptop manufacturers not to bundle Linux has simply been due to a limitation in the Linux Kernel. Prior to 2.6.8, Linux's support for the Centrino's capabilities has been somewhat sparse and a bit unreliable.
Due to this, Intel, rather than fight through a couple million support calls, decided to ask OEM's to simply not bundle Linux until someone had a chance to get the needed changes into place.
Now, that the linux kernel has this ability, Intel is more than happy to begin recommending Linux on Centrino's. Currently, there are around 35 OEM's who already produce and sell fully Linux compatible Centrino laptops, in fact, I am using one right now to write this.
Contrary to what many might believe, Intel doesn't want to remain tied exclusively to Micro$oft, and has instead been a huge benefactor of the Open Source community. While I was at Intel, they were actively recruiting people to create, manage, and participate in Open Source projects, and would even go so far as to release these people to "quietly" move huge chunks of Intel code into Open Source projects. OpenGL, GCC, PostgresSQL, MySQL to name a few.
For those of you are are using GCC 3.4+, you may have noticed a huge performance increase when running on Intel processors, this comes from, in large part, to Intel working with the GCC group to move large chunks of ICC into GCC.
Will say it again... Strange, I don't see the big deal
Greetings,
Anyone have a URL for a non-iTunes version of these guy's music?
Never heard of Wilco before this article, but seeing a Band that appears to get it about the Internet makes me want to check em out.
For a long time now I have been following the whole 'Music Sharing Is Evil' fiasco and every time I hear the BS about lost sales, I thin about Baen Books. For those of you not aware of it, Baen books publishes all of their books online, (www.bean.com) for free as well as regular purchased hard copy. One of the things that Baen has proven over the last couple of years is that their online books have actually improved their total sales of hard copy books.
Slashdot Mirror
I should point out that the bulk of my investment income is made from Linux and other Open Source products, and I haven't lost yet (I've been investing in Linux as a whole for almost 15 years). I am looking at this from a business POV, and ROI POV. For comparison, let's look at Microsoft over the last 15 years.
Micro$oft has twice been convicted of monopolistic tactics and is currently involved in three other cases of a similar nature, two of them are statewide class action suits as well. They have been found in violation of many different patents and copyrights, with untold numbers of settlements where they ended up paying the plaintiff. They have over promised and under delivered 6 OS's, one of which was found to have violated the BSD network stack, which cost them a pretty penny. They have purchased a license to Unix technology, which may or may not be valid any longer, to the tune of somewhere around $30 million. They have installed software onto their customer's systems without permission, or gained permission under false pretenses which is going to lead to yet another series of law suites.
So looking at it as an investor, I would say that Linux is a much safer investment than Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has the potential for a larger ROI, but Linux appears to me to be much safer.
First thing to understand is that so far, there has not been a single proven case of patent infringement against Linux. Many people have claimed patent infringement against various packages on Linux and of those, there has been only two; MP3/4, which was IMO an unethical and barely legal patent, and DeCSS, though DeCSS wasn't really a patent claim when you get down to it.
Instead, what you have is someone like Micro$oft claiming that Linux violates their patents, but refuse to produce or defend the patents. You have people like $COX claiming that Linux violates their copyright, but refuse to demonstrate the violations, and when forced to by a judge, the judge effectively laughed them out of court. Please note that I am not saying that Linux doesn't violate any patents or copyrights, however, the simple fact is that, no one has been successful at proving that it does.
It should also be pointed out that there are quite a few companies who have come out and offered Linux both patent protection and patent amnesty, should it be determined that Linux is somehow violating their patents. This is the critical piece as most, if not all of these companies, are now donating code directly to Linux and the Open Source movement. Such notables as Novell, IBM, and SUN.
Finally, as a distributor, you have an ethical obligation to defend your clients from these patent / copyright claims, however, you also have the right to choose what packages you will distribute and support, but even more importantly you have the right to choose what not to distribute and support. One of the tricks with Ubuntu is that they tell you upfront that they do not distribute MP3/4 or DeCSS packages, nor will they defend their customers from claims in reference to these packages.
Greetings,
This is really nothing new for Prince. He is a true artists, you may not like his music, but his goal is simply to spread his art to as many people as possible. A few years ago he did something similar which garnered him the all time CD sales record. He sold an album, for $75 - $150, and with each album a person bought, they also received a concert ticket, so while the sale was officially for the CD, the true cost was for the concert.
Contrary to what the RIAA wants you to believe, artists do not make their money on CD sales, in fact most artists actually lose money on their first two albums and over 90% of them never get their second album which leaves them in debt to the RIAA for life. Instead artists make their money on concerts. If you don't believe me, you are welcome to read the blogs of the Magnatune founder and his wife, the band Wilco, the singer Courtney Love, and the band Liquid Blue. There are many others with similar blogs, interview comments, etc.
Greetings,
There are quite a few mis-understandings in your comment, which I would guess, are the same mis-understandings held by the bozo from Mass.
1. Microsoft has proven over and over again, that they do not adhere to their own document standards. Because of this a document that you create today in M$ office, may be readable next year in M$ Office 2007, but what about in 2015? 2030? Additionally, due to the way M$ works, you cannot implement a version of their "standard" in your own software without paying a fee, and as they have demostrated, you pay the fee, they change the format, you have to pay again.
2. Microsoft created an "Open Standard" document format which they submitted for evaluation, however, there were 3 keys that failed to meet the minimum criteria, A) Would not be available until the next version of M$ Office. B) Required a license from M$ to use. C) Was not compatible with any existing "Open" license or agreement, as such it could not be used in StarOffice, OpenOffice, kOffice, Gnumeric, etc, and even then, if M$ changed their license, it could not be implemented until M$ finalized the standard. ODF is already supported in at least 3 office suites, and two of those support it natively as well as their own standard.
3. No office package out there supports only a single document format, however, none of them support their competitor's formats at anything more than basic level. Because of this, though you could read a WordPerfect document in Word, you may not be able to properly edit it while retaining all of it's embedded information. Same thing going the other way. Now, to make matters even worse, no single document format out there, save ODF, supports all office functions in a single format. In M$ Office, you have a Doc fomat, an Excel format, a PPT format, etc. ODF is a single format specification that can be used by all of them.
4. The reason a standard is needed, is quite simply to save our documentation for the future. We cannot be sure that M$ will still be around in 40 years, 50 years, 100 years, so relying on their "Open Standard", which as stated previously requires a license from M$ to use, may not be legally usable in the future. With ODF, since it is a true Open Standard, as in the public domain now, means that it can be used legally at any time and for any reason.
Now, on a different tack, This is simply a document format / storage standard. This is not an application standard, which the bozo from Mass is implying. By saying that all documents must be stored in ODF, does not mean that you have to use any one application to do it, simply that the application you use, must store the document in the ODF format.
Greetings,
Strangely, there is very little training needed to move the average user from Windows to Linux. The average user browses the web, writes a couple emails, and maybe does some word processing / spreadsheet work. All of these tools already exist and use the exact same key strokes as their Windows counterparts.
A little over 5 years ago, I migrated a couple of small companies (less than 50 employees each) from Windows to Linux. At the time, there were a lot fewer desktop applications available, but even then, there was very little training required. The only real training needed was for the software developers and system administrators. The software developers were used to the Borland and Microsoft IDE's while the system administrators were simply used to the way Microsoft did system administration.
Greetings,
;)
Not sure what distro's you tried this with, but every one I use and have used over the last 4 years has done this flawlessly on over 95% of the applications that the average user will need.
I recently installed OpenOffice on Suse, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, and Slackware... Worked right out of the box.
I recently installed Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Firefox, both just worked right out of the box.
Now to address your commnet a bit better. What you are describing is the same exact issue that caused various companies to create "installers". Believe it or not, it wasn't all that long ago that you had to do the very same thing to get the GUI to show applications in Windows.
Additionally, you are making the assumption that since you had trouble, that the average newbie will as well. Well, guess what... I used to teach true newbies and teaching them how to do what you are talking is very very simple, and the time requirements are almost exactly the same between Winblows and various Linux GUI's.
Finally, I am using KDE to write this, of the over 200 applications in my menu, I had to create the start scripts for exactly 2 of them, MySQLcc and a program I wrote myself to suspend my laptop to disk. So based on that, 99% of the application launchers on my system were created automagically by the system for me. PS. In another post you make a comment about Firefox and Thunderbird being the most sucessful OpenSource projects ever... Please go check your facts, they are sucessful, but not even in the top 10. You want to the see the most sucessful? Check out the HTTP headers on the Slashdot server.
Greetings,
Been using Linux a very very long time, have even written drivers for it and ya know what? No where in the code have I seen anything in the Linux Kernel that has anything to do with copy/paste functionality.
Now, I stated it that way for a very simple reason. You, yourself, are demonstrating the same kind of mindset that these "enemies" are demonstrating. Linux is not, nor will it ever be the desktop, the distribution, or the applications, instead Linux is, and always has been the OS that those things reside upon.
What you are referring to instead is the desktop application or desktop shell. Now, while these may have various inconsitencies, guess what? They are all user configurable.
If you want your KDE and your Gnome apps to play nicely together, simply configure them to do so. This is what the Linux movement is really all about... The ability to choose and decide for yourself what you want the system to do.
Also keep in mind too, that there is always more than one way to acheive an end. Just because it's what you know, doesn't mean it is the best, or that it is even comfortable to others. For example, I was using fdisk a few days ago and one of my old buddies looked over my shoulder and told me I was stupid for using it instead of parted. Just because she has no idea how to use fdisk does not mean that I shouldn't be allowed to use it. Finally, one of the real beauties of Open Source is that if you don't like the way something works, you are given every tool you need to fix it. Well, if you want a single common clipboard system, jump in and help us create it.
cacert.org is doing everything these guys are, and then some. cacert.org is free, but with a much higher level of personal confidence than Verisign, Thawt, or any others that I know of.
Additionally, with cacert.org, you are able to get more than just server certs and keys.
Greetings,
After having worked at Intel, and participating in one of the big Intel / Linux strategy sessions, I really don't see this as a major change / depoarture from their strategies for the last few years.
Intel's reason for asking that laptop manufacturers not to bundle Linux has simply been due to a limitation in the Linux Kernel. Prior to 2.6.8, Linux's support for the Centrino's capabilities has been somewhat sparse and a bit unreliable.
Due to this, Intel, rather than fight through a couple million support calls, decided to ask OEM's to simply not bundle Linux until someone had a chance to get the needed changes into place.
Now, that the linux kernel has this ability, Intel is more than happy to begin recommending Linux on Centrino's. Currently, there are around 35 OEM's who already produce and sell fully Linux compatible Centrino laptops, in fact, I am using one right now to write this.
Contrary to what many might believe, Intel doesn't want to remain tied exclusively to Micro$oft, and has instead been a huge benefactor of the Open Source community. While I was at Intel, they were actively recruiting people to create, manage, and participate in Open Source projects, and would even go so far as to release these people to "quietly" move huge chunks of Intel code into Open Source projects. OpenGL, GCC, PostgresSQL, MySQL to name a few.
For those of you are are using GCC 3.4+, you may have noticed a huge performance increase when running on Intel processors, this comes from, in large part, to Intel working with the GCC group to move large chunks of ICC into GCC.
Will say it again... Strange, I don't see the big deal
Greetings, Anyone have a URL for a non-iTunes version of these guy's music? Never heard of Wilco before this article, but seeing a Band that appears to get it about the Internet makes me want to check em out. For a long time now I have been following the whole 'Music Sharing Is Evil' fiasco and every time I hear the BS about lost sales, I thin about Baen Books. For those of you not aware of it, Baen books publishes all of their books online, (www.bean.com) for free as well as regular purchased hard copy. One of the things that Baen has proven over the last couple of years is that their online books have actually improved their total sales of hard copy books.