If The Reg was claiming it, most likely it is true. They generally don't make stuff up. If it is a mistake on their part it doesn't mean they made it up. And until you can get a response from The Reg on your comment you shouldn't be accusing them of lying.
If The Reg was claiming it, most likely it is true. They generally don't make stuff up. If it is a mistake on their part it doesn't mean they made it up. And until you can get a response from The Reg on your comment you shouldn't be accusing them of lying.
Apple's hardware is the same as everyone elses. They use the same components, chipsets, etc.
They produce a modified version unix as the core OS and then create a propriety desktop manager.
There are some changes to the hardware such as the chip which is used to determine if the OS is running on an Apple board. But the video, ram, HDD, sound, and every other component is just like every other PC. Just comes in a different external package.
Microsoft is not distributing open source software. This is not an open source product. It can't be used on multiple platforms. It can't be modified and freely distributed. It is not open source.
Microsoft does openED source where you can view the code but never use it outside of your project and never on another platform other than Windows.
Open Source was defined around 15 years ago in the attempt of ensuring that the definition for open source was long standing.
Microsoft and open source together is an oxymoron.
Microsoft claimed in 2007 that Open Source was dead and that Linux was dead. Their attempt to do this was about the time they claimed that open source violated 235 of their patents. Then they refused to state which ones even though the consumers world-wide asked for it.
They were the same company that sued TomTom and backed the company with funding for SCO to sue IBM and other linux backers.
We do not, in open source, put any trust in Microsoft nor do we let them attempt to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Open Source by closing it or limiting it. They are trying to get big business to think that the only acceptable form of open source is that which is defined by Microsoft.
Everyone should be objecting to Microsoft and this 100% of the time.
Vista was all that bad. It still is. Vista has problems that you can't imagine. You can get Vista up and running and working pretty well, but after a while some things will just start to flake again. Video Cams are one of these examples. Printers another. Networking is another. Applications, such as XBMC, VLC, etc also have issues that are fixed and then broken again.
And that's probably right considering they have over a billion installs and are a convicted monopolist that got there by criminal practices of which they were found guilty.
They have sales and activations as a means, as well as update requests.
Since there are no sales essentially of Linux that would accurately represent the market share then the activations would be the next piece. Even then, that wouldn't be that accurate as most OEM installs don't require activations.
The only other would be update requests from unique hardware signatures from unique IP addresses.
It wasn't possible to get oem support at the time. Microsoft was found guilty of criminal monopolistic practices due to some of their licensing agreements which essentially made it impossible for OEMs to include any OS other than DOS/Windows on them, or even to sell a computer without their OS. It wasn't till 1999,roughly, that this changed.
Secondly, Linux isn't developed by one entity so it would be impossible to get OEM support unless a couple distros at the time had the clout to handle large contracts.
In reality, we have the issue due to how Microsoft used criminal activities to gain a monopoly and then killed all the competition that would be up and coming.
They continue today by claiming things such as Linux allegedly violates 235 of Microsoft's patents--all the while when asked which of their patents these 235 include they refuse to answer claiming that it would unleash hell upon them due to everyone and their brother claiming those patents invalid. If they are valid, mind you, there'd be no reason for them to worry about the challenges. A company that makes as much profit as Microsoft could easily handle any challenges brought out.
The Linux industry has not indicated an intent to attack the patents. They simply want to eliminate the violations, if they are truly there. They'd rather remove or work around things and move on than play war games with Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft wins due to FUD because businesses and potential developers stop their efforts in fear of being sued, such as with TomTom.
UT3 was supposed to have a Linux client released at the official launch. That didn't happen. It's been a year now. They've made some excuses but don't seem to give reasonable reasons for making it happen. It was when the pressure was off that allowed them to relax their efforts.
I take the relaxing of pressure to mean that Linux was working toward growth in other areas. And it is. Desktop Linux is fantastic. KDE 4.2.2 and the latest Ubuntu with gnome are extremely popular today as represented by the massive pull/push to get it downloaded and installed. What's neat about this latest 9.04 of ubuntu is that so few people had signficant enough problems to complain about. Now we should see some push toward a much more attractive interface and then onto other areas. Mark Shuttleworth recently addressed the idea of running windows programs under wine stating too much focus or reliance is a bad thing and that Linux must stand on its own two feet. It is those reminders that encourage us to pressure the UT3 developers back onto the linux platform.
And hell, customizing Linux is a lot of fun and the choices endless. We'll migrate off that back to important issues soon enough and we'll aggravate all the windows fanbois to no end while doing it.
Your argument does nothing more than bring up the question of the chicken or the egg. Which comes first?
Development for Windows, when DOS was preeminent, had these same influences, and the costs were as high (in a relative sense). If target audience size were the case and the size of the audience wasn't large enough and it was an important factor, we'd have no Windows. There were other, a lot of other, influences back then and a perception that to fail to develop for Windows now meant failure in the future even though there was no real evidence of it. The same goes for Macintosh. If marketshare was the only key factor we'd have no applications other than those provided by Apple.
Apple had a few tricks up their sleeves. They had a couple technologies that would become indespensable to the future, those being Postscript (WYSIWYG) and laser printers. Those two alone drive Apple's success for a while. Microsoft tried to counter with their own font technologies and HP came out with PCL. But for the next 5 or so years it was Apple on top of it all. When truetype became widely available and mostly free we had a change occur.
Unfortunately Linux has no hidden trick up their sleeve as the industry has simply degenerated into a series of oligopolies and monopolies where almost no new ideas or technologies are making their way to the desktop in order to entice consumers. We all pretty much read our mail, chat, browse the web, write, calculate our spreadsheets, manage our friends and consume content (play music and videos).
Apple's implementation of the GUI was revolutionary and from that point forward we have had nothing but evolutionary change. Once the key apps were written and everyone else copied them there wasn't much variation on new ideas.
Suffice it to say, Microsoft had to know this and had to be planning on the day when the development of technologies flattened out to the point that they needed only keep their product lines up to date in order to hold dominance, of course, all the while, trapping everyone into proprietary document formats.
The first thing tought to me in marketing class is that your USP can't be money. It need not even be audience size. What is a USP? USP is your unique selling proposition. If you base your USP on money over the long haul you will loose. You can't succeed over the long haul by trying to sell the cheapest product. You have to have something other than money as your USP.
Little things go a long way. Sometimes just removing support for say OpenGL from the OS will make a difference in how that technology survives over the long haul. If it is perceived to be a dead end then development will end.
30 million Linux users is a signficant number of people to program for. It is not the lack of a target audience large enough. Back when we were adopting Windows after DOS we had a far smaller target audience and that continued for a couple years that way, yet development continued.
There are other influences at play here and just becoming aware of them is key. The more we talk the better we become at understanding how things work and succeed.
In reading the threads of the past few days it is abundantly clear that Linux is dying, that it is dying fast and it has no choice but to go no where. At least that's what some would have you believe. But just the opposite is true. It is growing by leaps and bounds. Picking up 20,000 users overnight isn't an unheard of thing.
Are there influences bantering for redirection away toward other choice than Linux? Of course. Prior to the growing success of Linux you would never had heard of Microsoft giving away Windows for you to use for free for a year. We'd also still have Vista (the turd--when it's brown and it floats and smells bad it's a turd).
These influences are not short lived. They have been ongoing for a long time. When I say a long time I mean a long time, and they happened a long time before anyone realized that Microsoft was engaged in this "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactic. I'm sure that in the late 80s and early 90s if everyone knew what Microsoft had planned and was actually engaged in they would not be in the position they are in today. Hell, if computers came without an OS pre-installed Microsoft wouldn't be what it is today.
When you are a behemoth and you set things in motion little competition comes from it either over the short or long haul. This is just the way things are.
The example of DirectX correlates directly with the proprietary document formats they incorporated into Office. The example of the court system and other government entities requiring it are also prime examples of how a closed format can force everyone to a given product, even when there are competing products. You will almost never find a large private entity or otherwise that will accept documents in ODF even though it is an ISO format. I'm not saying it is unheard of, I'm just saying that it is nearly inexistent. It is a direct cause and effect. Business and government require documents in a given format, you own the format, you lock the format so that only your product works with it, and everyone will be required to learn and use your product.
That's why there was such a significant push to ensure that governments no longer accepted closed proprietary formats for documents--because it was unfair to the competition and to the consumer to require them to purchase such an expensive product.
If the industry standardized on ODF, which is an open, free, complete and rather significant format, we'd have no need for closed proprietary applications such as Office, unless Office could provide something significantly beyond what the open free product provides.
Microsoft is the direct cause of the absence of games developed for other platforms. Unfortunately DirectX and OpenGL are not critical technologies in a massively thriving industry. Gaming is still limited to a small audience. That means, that as long as there's no critical elements associated with it thing'll be free to continue the way they are because even standardizing, using the ISO (which has been perverted by Microsoft already) to create a standard won't make any difference. You must realize that Microsoft understands this. Clearly, they do. Clearly you don't.
Directx via wine isn't the answer. If that were the case then all windows games would run under wine just fine. Unfortunately they do not, not even close. Wine is a hack at best, though a good one. It is incomplete. You can't compare a hack to the real thing, no matter how you look at it.
I read your statement about OpenGL and couldn't help but wonder how much money you have to develop for two different APIs, to test, to regress, to support, etc. You should know better. You're not really helping and you are just obfuscating the real problems.
APIs and formats that are closed are bad and tend to lock consumers into certain platforms. If DirectX was available for other platforms you'd have almost every game available on every platform. Come on, you have to see this--you can't be an astroturfer or a MS fanboi. Think dude.
Only one person eluded to the idea of Microsoft having a monopoly in gaming. They don't. That's clear, but they do have a monopoly where they are using that monopoly to create another one in gaming and other industries, which, in the US happens to be illegal.
The problem in this case is Microsoft using it's ability through the OS to lock you into a platform by incorporating technologies. If the directx API was opened up to the world and anyone on any platform could use it that'd be a different matter. It would be like them opening up their document formats fully free of patent encumberances. If the DirectX API was open and free we'd have cross platform gaiming, instead, we have developers only developing for one platform.
When Sun licensed Java to Microsoft the agreement was that they would not modify it to make it platform specific. Microsoft agreed to that. In the next couple of years they just ignored it and began to extend it to make it so that java applets would only run under Windows.
They were sued and lost and had to pay Sun billions, and on top of that Microsoft was ordered to remove their version of the Java VM. If they had complied they would still have a VM for Windows, but instead they wanted to "embrace, extend, extinguish" the major competitor (at the time) to their OS dominance. Technically you would not need developers, developers, developers if everyone was developing for java, rather we'd have developers developing for computing instead of a single platform.
Governments govern. That's why they are called governments. When a company abuses it's position/role then they have to be governed. You go to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and convince them to go back on a decade of abuse and then we won't need any government governing them.
Not everyone believes that, and many of us believe there's a place for paid software in the OS. I would even pay for an OS as long as it isn't created by a company that has abused the industry and created a monopoly through criminal practices. The last thing we need is all open source software. We need commercial software as well. It's great to know that commercial software is available.
We should never be put in a position where we are being locked into a product because of formats such as document, programming, etc. We need to ensure that these are open and free so that software competition can thrive once again in the world.
When a software company becomes a monopoly for a key component that controls virtually every aspect of our computer then something is wrong because that software company will make decisions against the interests of society, such as the WGN/WGA, the 47+ programs that collect information and send it back to Microsoft (including the date/time and your IP address), massive DRM at the heart of the OS and militarily drafting (so to speak) of the hardware companies to incorporate circuitry into their designs to keep you, the owner of the product (once paid for) from altering it, just so they can protect content providers against you. Who's to say what else they may have done in light of the way that the federal government abused the phone companies forcing them to install hardware/software into their systems so they can spy on American citizens.
Frankly, as long as we have discussions about linux the more we spread the word. Microsoft doesn't talk about Linux anymore because when they did people looked at it as a viable competitor. That leaves it up to us to fill the gap. I think we are doing just fine.
Keep talking--if you disrespect linux and show you know little and are just biased the linux community talks more to correct you. If you talk positively about linux you'll have the linux community talk more and support you. So even those who are totally biased and haven't even looked at linux in 2 years are helping linux grow marketshare as long as they keep talking and there are those of us willing to take the time to enlighten others about the flaws in their arguments.
You can't count the number of downloads. That's pretty much worthless. I download firefox and keep up to date installers and I install it on absolutely every computer that comes into my shop for repairs. Then I discuss with my customers exactly why they should be using it instead of IE.
If linux distro's could be easily configured or came pre-configured with a perfect system to defeat companies such as media sentry there'd be a much greater use of Linux by those folks too.
It would not. Massive sampling is what is necessary. That means tens of thousands of sites, not a few which are officially set up to support a specific browser.
Hopefully you'll take that Linux use with you to your job as an attorney and then encourage the use of it and open standards via your employees and the court system, thus encouraging competition and ensuring that vendor "lock in" is minimized.
It's more important that we have competition than we have Linux but both would be just cool.
One thought that came to mind was regarding the intelligence of the people in your class. If they were presented with Linux would any switch? Would they just say that they don't have time to learn another OS or what? Would that be considered a strength on their part or a failure.
I can say that I have also put it on many casual users systems over the past year that are using it as their primary desktop. Everyone that does this is a win for Linux as it spreads things out a lot. People took their computer use home. They then demanded better computers at work. This meant that the average person drove the direction we are in. Getting the average person aware of Linux now that software has matured on both sides of the fence will be the catalyst to growth in market share for Linux.
Just talk about Linux to family and friends and you'll really make a difference over the long haul.
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If The Reg was claiming it, most likely it is true. They generally don't make stuff up. If it is a mistake on their part it doesn't mean they made it up. And until you can get a response from The Reg on your comment you shouldn't be accusing them of lying.
If The Reg was claiming it, most likely it is true. They generally don't make stuff up. If it is a mistake on their part it doesn't mean they made it up. And until you can get a response from The Reg on your comment you shouldn't be accusing them of lying.
Apple's hardware is the same as everyone elses. They use the same components, chipsets, etc.
They produce a modified version unix as the core OS and then create a propriety desktop manager.
There are some changes to the hardware such as the chip which is used to determine if the OS is running on an Apple board. But the video, ram, HDD, sound, and every other component is just like every other PC. Just comes in a different external package.
You should be modded down for being a dumb shit and posting a quote to his comments out of context.
Read the whole fucking thing dude.
Microsoft is not distributing open source software. This is not an open source product. It can't be used on multiple platforms. It can't be modified and freely distributed. It is not open source.
Microsoft does openED source where you can view the code but never use it outside of your project and never on another platform other than Windows.
Open Source was defined around 15 years ago in the attempt of ensuring that the definition for open source was long standing.
Microsoft and open source together is an oxymoron.
Microsoft claimed in 2007 that Open Source was dead and that Linux was dead. Their attempt to do this was about the time they claimed that open source violated 235 of their patents. Then they refused to state which ones even though the consumers world-wide asked for it.
They were the same company that sued TomTom and backed the company with funding for SCO to sue IBM and other linux backers.
We do not, in open source, put any trust in Microsoft nor do we let them attempt to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Open Source by closing it or limiting it. They are trying to get big business to think that the only acceptable form of open source is that which is defined by Microsoft.
Everyone should be objecting to Microsoft and this 100% of the time.
Vista was all that bad. It still is. Vista has problems that you can't imagine. You can get Vista up and running and working pretty well, but after a while some things will just start to flake again. Video Cams are one of these examples. Printers another. Networking is another. Applications, such as XBMC, VLC, etc also have issues that are fixed and then broken again.
Vista is just that bad. It's a turd.
And that's probably right considering they have over a billion installs and are a convicted monopolist that got there by criminal practices of which they were found guilty.
No they do not.
They have sales and activations as a means, as well as update requests.
Since there are no sales essentially of Linux that would accurately represent the market share then the activations would be the next piece. Even then, that wouldn't be that accurate as most OEM installs don't require activations.
The only other would be update requests from unique hardware signatures from unique IP addresses.
It wasn't possible to get oem support at the time. Microsoft was found guilty of criminal monopolistic practices due to some of their licensing agreements which essentially made it impossible for OEMs to include any OS other than DOS/Windows on them, or even to sell a computer without their OS. It wasn't till 1999,roughly, that this changed.
Secondly, Linux isn't developed by one entity so it would be impossible to get OEM support unless a couple distros at the time had the clout to handle large contracts.
In reality, we have the issue due to how Microsoft used criminal activities to gain a monopoly and then killed all the competition that would be up and coming.
They continue today by claiming things such as Linux allegedly violates 235 of Microsoft's patents--all the while when asked which of their patents these 235 include they refuse to answer claiming that it would unleash hell upon them due to everyone and their brother claiming those patents invalid. If they are valid, mind you, there'd be no reason for them to worry about the challenges. A company that makes as much profit as Microsoft could easily handle any challenges brought out.
The Linux industry has not indicated an intent to attack the patents. They simply want to eliminate the violations, if they are truly there. They'd rather remove or work around things and move on than play war games with Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft wins due to FUD because businesses and potential developers stop their efforts in fear of being sued, such as with TomTom.
EQ was released 10 years ago and there's great difficulty in getting it to work under wine and linux, if you can.
UT3 was supposed to have a Linux client released at the official launch. That didn't happen. It's been a year now. They've made some excuses but don't seem to give reasonable reasons for making it happen. It was when the pressure was off that allowed them to relax their efforts.
I take the relaxing of pressure to mean that Linux was working toward growth in other areas. And it is. Desktop Linux is fantastic. KDE 4.2.2 and the latest Ubuntu with gnome are extremely popular today as represented by the massive pull/push to get it downloaded and installed. What's neat about this latest 9.04 of ubuntu is that so few people had signficant enough problems to complain about. Now we should see some push toward a much more attractive interface and then onto other areas. Mark Shuttleworth recently addressed the idea of running windows programs under wine stating too much focus or reliance is a bad thing and that Linux must stand on its own two feet. It is those reminders that encourage us to pressure the UT3 developers back onto the linux platform.
And hell, customizing Linux is a lot of fun and the choices endless. We'll migrate off that back to important issues soon enough and we'll aggravate all the windows fanbois to no end while doing it.
Your argument does nothing more than bring up the question of the chicken or the egg. Which comes first?
Development for Windows, when DOS was preeminent, had these same influences, and the costs were as high (in a relative sense). If target audience size were the case and the size of the audience wasn't large enough and it was an important factor, we'd have no Windows. There were other, a lot of other, influences back then and a perception that to fail to develop for Windows now meant failure in the future even though there was no real evidence of it. The same goes for Macintosh. If marketshare was the only key factor we'd have no applications other than those provided by Apple.
Apple had a few tricks up their sleeves. They had a couple technologies that would become indespensable to the future, those being Postscript (WYSIWYG) and laser printers. Those two alone drive Apple's success for a while. Microsoft tried to counter with their own font technologies and HP came out with PCL. But for the next 5 or so years it was Apple on top of it all. When truetype became widely available and mostly free we had a change occur.
Unfortunately Linux has no hidden trick up their sleeve as the industry has simply degenerated into a series of oligopolies and monopolies where almost no new ideas or technologies are making their way to the desktop in order to entice consumers. We all pretty much read our mail, chat, browse the web, write, calculate our spreadsheets, manage our friends and consume content (play music and videos).
Apple's implementation of the GUI was revolutionary and from that point forward we have had nothing but evolutionary change. Once the key apps were written and everyone else copied them there wasn't much variation on new ideas.
Suffice it to say, Microsoft had to know this and had to be planning on the day when the development of technologies flattened out to the point that they needed only keep their product lines up to date in order to hold dominance, of course, all the while, trapping everyone into proprietary document formats.
The first thing tought to me in marketing class is that your USP can't be money. It need not even be audience size. What is a USP? USP is your unique selling proposition. If you base your USP on money over the long haul you will loose. You can't succeed over the long haul by trying to sell the cheapest product. You have to have something other than money as your USP.
Little things go a long way. Sometimes just removing support for say OpenGL from the OS will make a difference in how that technology survives over the long haul. If it is perceived to be a dead end then development will end.
30 million Linux users is a signficant number of people to program for. It is not the lack of a target audience large enough. Back when we were adopting Windows after DOS we had a far smaller target audience and that continued for a couple years that way, yet development continued.
There are other influences at play here and just becoming aware of them is key. The more we talk the better we become at understanding how things work and succeed.
In reading the threads of the past few days it is abundantly clear that Linux is dying, that it is dying fast and it has no choice but to go no where. At least that's what some would have you believe. But just the opposite is true. It is growing by leaps and bounds. Picking up 20,000 users overnight isn't an unheard of thing.
Are there influences bantering for redirection away toward other choice than Linux? Of course. Prior to the growing success of Linux you would never had heard of Microsoft giving away Windows for you to use for free for a year. We'd also still have Vista (the turd--when it's brown and it floats and smells bad it's a turd).
These influences are not short lived. They have been ongoing for a long time. When I say a long time I mean a long time, and they happened a long time before anyone realized that Microsoft was engaged in this "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactic. I'm sure that in the late 80s and early 90s if everyone knew what Microsoft had planned and was actually engaged in they would not be in the position they are in today. Hell, if computers came without an OS pre-installed Microsoft wouldn't be what it is today.
When you are a behemoth and you set things in motion little competition comes from it either over the short or long haul. This is just the way things are.
The example of DirectX correlates directly with the proprietary document formats they incorporated into Office. The example of the court system and other government entities requiring it are also prime examples of how a closed format can force everyone to a given product, even when there are competing products. You will almost never find a large private entity or otherwise that will accept documents in ODF even though it is an ISO format. I'm not saying it is unheard of, I'm just saying that it is nearly inexistent. It is a direct cause and effect. Business and government require documents in a given format, you own the format, you lock the format so that only your product works with it, and everyone will be required to learn and use your product.
That's why there was such a significant push to ensure that governments no longer accepted closed proprietary formats for documents--because it was unfair to the competition and to the consumer to require them to purchase such an expensive product.
If the industry standardized on ODF, which is an open, free, complete and rather significant format, we'd have no need for closed proprietary applications such as Office, unless Office could provide something significantly beyond what the open free product provides.
Microsoft is the direct cause of the absence of games developed for other platforms. Unfortunately DirectX and OpenGL are not critical technologies in a massively thriving industry. Gaming is still limited to a small audience. That means, that as long as there's no critical elements associated with it thing'll be free to continue the way they are because even standardizing, using the ISO (which has been perverted by Microsoft already) to create a standard won't make any difference. You must realize that Microsoft understands this. Clearly, they do. Clearly you don't.
Directx via wine isn't the answer. If that were the case then all windows games would run under wine just fine. Unfortunately they do not, not even close. Wine is a hack at best, though a good one. It is incomplete. You can't compare a hack to the real thing, no matter how you look at it.
I read your statement about OpenGL and couldn't help but wonder how much money you have to develop for two different APIs, to test, to regress, to support, etc. You should know better. You're not really helping and you are just obfuscating the real problems.
APIs and formats that are closed are bad and tend to lock consumers into certain platforms. If DirectX was available for other platforms you'd have almost every game available on every platform. Come on, you have to see this--you can't be an astroturfer or a MS fanboi. Think dude.
Only one person eluded to the idea of Microsoft having a monopoly in gaming. They don't. That's clear, but they do have a monopoly where they are using that monopoly to create another one in gaming and other industries, which, in the US happens to be illegal.
The problem in this case is Microsoft using it's ability through the OS to lock you into a platform by incorporating technologies. If the directx API was opened up to the world and anyone on any platform could use it that'd be a different matter. It would be like them opening up their document formats fully free of patent encumberances. If the DirectX API was open and free we'd have cross platform gaiming, instead, we have developers only developing for one platform.
When Sun licensed Java to Microsoft the agreement was that they would not modify it to make it platform specific. Microsoft agreed to that. In the next couple of years they just ignored it and began to extend it to make it so that java applets would only run under Windows.
They were sued and lost and had to pay Sun billions, and on top of that Microsoft was ordered to remove their version of the Java VM. If they had complied they would still have a VM for Windows, but instead they wanted to "embrace, extend, extinguish" the major competitor (at the time) to their OS dominance. Technically you would not need developers, developers, developers if everyone was developing for java, rather we'd have developers developing for computing instead of a single platform.
Governments govern. That's why they are called governments. When a company abuses it's position/role then they have to be governed. You go to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and convince them to go back on a decade of abuse and then we won't need any government governing them.
Not everyone believes that, and many of us believe there's a place for paid software in the OS. I would even pay for an OS as long as it isn't created by a company that has abused the industry and created a monopoly through criminal practices. The last thing we need is all open source software. We need commercial software as well. It's great to know that commercial software is available.
We should never be put in a position where we are being locked into a product because of formats such as document, programming, etc. We need to ensure that these are open and free so that software competition can thrive once again in the world.
When a software company becomes a monopoly for a key component that controls virtually every aspect of our computer then something is wrong because that software company will make decisions against the interests of society, such as the WGN/WGA, the 47+ programs that collect information and send it back to Microsoft (including the date/time and your IP address), massive DRM at the heart of the OS and militarily drafting (so to speak) of the hardware companies to incorporate circuitry into their designs to keep you, the owner of the product (once paid for) from altering it, just so they can protect content providers against you. Who's to say what else they may have done in light of the way that the federal government abused the phone companies forcing them to install hardware/software into their systems so they can spy on American citizens.
Someone indicated yesterday in their usual uneducated manner that there was the potential to have 9000% of the market share sometime in the future.
What's their primary desktop OS?
Frankly, as long as we have discussions about linux the more we spread the word. Microsoft doesn't talk about Linux anymore because when they did people looked at it as a viable competitor. That leaves it up to us to fill the gap. I think we are doing just fine.
Keep talking--if you disrespect linux and show you know little and are just biased the linux community talks more to correct you. If you talk positively about linux you'll have the linux community talk more and support you. So even those who are totally biased and haven't even looked at linux in 2 years are helping linux grow marketshare as long as they keep talking and there are those of us willing to take the time to enlighten others about the flaws in their arguments.
You can't count the number of downloads. That's pretty much worthless. I download firefox and keep up to date installers and I install it on absolutely every computer that comes into my shop for repairs. Then I discuss with my customers exactly why they should be using it instead of IE.
If linux distro's could be easily configured or came pre-configured with a perfect system to defeat companies such as media sentry there'd be a much greater use of Linux by those folks too.
Precisely what I mean when I say that business doesn't understand the licenses.
It would not. Massive sampling is what is necessary. That means tens of thousands of sites, not a few which are officially set up to support a specific browser.
Hopefully you'll take that Linux use with you to your job as an attorney and then encourage the use of it and open standards via your employees and the court system, thus encouraging competition and ensuring that vendor "lock in" is minimized.
It's more important that we have competition than we have Linux but both would be just cool.
One thought that came to mind was regarding the intelligence of the people in your class. If they were presented with Linux would any switch? Would they just say that they don't have time to learn another OS or what? Would that be considered a strength on their part or a failure.
I do, I do. /Raises hand.
I can say that I have also put it on many casual users systems over the past year that are using it as their primary desktop. Everyone that does this is a win for Linux as it spreads things out a lot. People took their computer use home. They then demanded better computers at work. This meant that the average person drove the direction we are in. Getting the average person aware of Linux now that software has matured on both sides of the fence will be the catalyst to growth in market share for Linux.
Just talk about Linux to family and friends and you'll really make a difference over the long haul.