Revolution OS

Comment by Wilco Jansen on March 3, 2010 at 5:58am

Absolutely...most funny part is when Eric Raymont tells about his elevator encounter with the Vice President Consumer Products of Microsoft..."Who are you?" and he replies "I am your worst nightmare", love it.

Comment by HarryB on March 3, 2010 at 7:13am

But in spite of the nightmares, Windows still essentially "owns" the laptop/desktop market and is still very competitive in the server market. The nerds and hackers among us can provide a long list of reasons why Linux, BSD Unix, or even Apple's OS X are better than Windows. Which is fine, but we often forget that we are a small minority of the millions of people who use PCs on a daily basis.

So why hasn't Linux and other OSS captured the hearts and minds of all yet? I hear predictions every year that this will be the "breakout" year OSS but it never comes to pass.

Comment by Ewout Wierda on March 3, 2010 at 9:41am

Ubuntu is well on the way.. but MS and Apple keep on upping the ante when it gets close. I'd be on Linux all the time if all sort of small things would be polished up.
Interesting to see how Stallman wants to push the GNU name.

Comment by HarryB on March 3, 2010 at 11:14am

I use Ubuntu on daily basis along with Win 7...both have their pros and cons. In general, you still have to be a bit closer to the iron and silicon to really be able to cope with Linux (or at least be on speaking terms with someone who speaks shell and command line lingo). ;-)

Have never used Apple OS X or its predecessors and probably never will because it runs on proprietary, sole-source hardware.

Stallman and GNU - Would GNU be a success without the Linux kernel? Probably not as the original GNU kernel never saw the light of day!

Comment by Herman Peeren on March 3, 2010 at 11:53am

Yes, Richard Stallman is a human being too... with an ego. What I learn from his GNU/Linux-remark: in the open source world it is important to give credit to them who deserve it. Well, he got the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation in 1999 (on this video).

BTW: this video is allready from 2001! So, for instance, from before .NET.

Something else I found remarkable: almost at the end of the video, when the interviewer asked Linus how he thought about it that others (like Red Hat Company) have made more money with Linux than he did himself, he called it a win-win situation. For if he had not made it free software, others would not have made money with it and he would not have had the software he wanted.

Comment by Amy Stephen on March 3, 2010 at 12:24pm

I really do love that video, watched it a few years ago.

Having lived through Microsoft's most vicious years of marketing, I am glad there are now choices that MS cannot kill off by undercutting the price or buying out the competition. Their system-wide license agreements to avoid costly and embarrassing site audits felt much more like coercion than a way to reduce cost.

Free software may not have beaten Microsoft, but I find that to be a ridiculous goal. What free software has provided is a reasonable choice to Microsoft, and in doing so, is helping Microsoft be more accountable to customers. That is a very worthy goal and something thousands and thousands of little people volunteering in the trenches can feel very good about. Quite amazing to see a distributed volunteer base effect change of that magnitude and significance.

Definitely agree with HarryB - Ubuntu, as sweet as it is, is not user friendly enough to "beat" Microsoft for the masses. I don't even use it because a) I *hate* operating system issues and b) I can't seem to get my wireless network and dual monitors working. So, here I am actually WANTING to jump into the pool, someone who has adopted tools that can run on Ubuntu without missing a beat - and even I can't seem to find the time needed to make it happen.

Now, if HarryB were my neighbor, then, perhaps if I watched his dogs for him while he and his wife were at their annual music festival, MAYBE I would also be running Ubuntu.

Comment by Ewout Wierda on March 3, 2010 at 3:47pm

Ubuntu saved my laptop from the bin. It came with a lethal combination of Vista and HP ware. I found Ubuntu amazingly easy to install and adding software in the latest version is like adding a Firefox addon. I had some trouble getting the graphic gadgets to work because I have an ATI card, but that was nothing compared to the Windows misery I had. And now my laptop looks like Apple, does Windows things, and it costs less. I even found replacement for my Outlook. But, no polished windows, and like I said all these small things that are different do form a barrier.

I think Linus was right about the win-win situation - certainly if he gets paid for speaking. But I also think it was a sub-optimal sum, and ideally he would have gained more from it all. That is the thing that bothers me in the way copyleft freedom software has worked out: the more successful software is, the less the author gains in proportion to the gain of others. As the documentary shows, the origins of open source is informal sharing. In that situation, every author gained, although even then the better coders would get less back then they gave. But in today's environment of proprietary software and commercial use of open source software, in which few people can really afford to code a lot without income, the pure copyleft solution is just not giving enough weight to the author's interests. The open source definition protects the integrity of code, but the GPL as predominant licence does not give the author the same protection. I think addressing this fundamental disconnect of software from creators is what must be what drives open source evolution in this decade. In the end, people is all that matters.

Comment by Herman Peeren on March 4, 2010 at 3:12am

Why businesses stick to Microsoft an other propriety software? I think:
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• The main part of open source has until now not offered much innovative business solutions. Open source software became available as an alternative for existing technologies (operating system, webserver, programming languages, etc.); it has been more following existing solutions than bringing new ones.
• By the time the open source version of a solution became available to be used in a business situation (so: stable and enough trained professionals available to get / keep it running), many companies have allready invested quite a lot in the existing solutions; like Sharepoint for instance. Much custom software has been made for their platform. Those companies are only going to switch over to open source if the costs of the switch (maybe rewriting custom software, buying new software, getting everything installed and running without much interuption of the ongoing business) outweigh the coming costs, taking the former investments into account. So, I expect more new companies to embrace open source than existing ones. But because the old companies are not going to switch easy, they provide examples for new companies how things can be done by proven technology; so even some new companies will follow the "old" solutions. It will take some time before new competitors in the market that embrace open source, and therefore have lower costs, will perform better and show the benefits of switching to open source. In the meantime, propriety software is also coming with new solutions too, also because their roadmap is more based on a market for general business solutions. So, I expect it to take a while before open source is common practice.
• There even is an active lobby against open source, like recently when IIPA was equating open source to piracy and therefore condemning countries like Indonesia that propagate the use of open source software; see e.g. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/big-content-condemn...
  

Comment by Ewout Wierda on March 4, 2010 at 3:27am

Re the lobby against FOSS: I suppose that is why the US is called the land of opportunity! -;)

Comment by Herman Peeren on March 4, 2010 at 4:22am

Yes, poor citizens of the US: they have to earn a lot of money to pay the health insurance... ;-)

it's a vicious circle.

Serious: the basic paradigm and values of open source are different from that of closed source. As long as the two systems are seperated there is no problem. Reality is that both live in the same world. It becomes confusing when we measure one system with the values of the other. In a way Ewout is mixing both worlds too in his remark about the win-win situation: optimising profit (in money) by an individual is more related to closed source competitive values than to open source cooperative values and the benefit of the whole (which may sound like communism to some people who don't see any disadvantages of a market economy). Yes, we have to be realistic about the world we live in. As Ewout puts it very well: "in today's environment of proprietary software and commercial use of open source software, in which few people can really afford to code a lot without income..." etc. But maybe even within our capitalist system there could be some goals and principles that are more valuable than just individual profit maximization and the protection of that interest.

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