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We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

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Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#231

Post by gaius »

vacri wrote: post #201
Grishnakh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something. Oh please, this is a terrible comparison. AOL was constantly mocked by general internet users, and finally died simply because it became obsolete thanks to other ISPs, web services like Gmail, etc. All of which are big companies. Yahoo died (it's dead now, but…

> MySpace died (again, another zombie) because of the rise of Facebook, which again, is another huge company. Well... now it's a huge company. It's not like Facebook was a pre-existing massive corporation that decided to pivot and 'do this social media thing'.

If you overlook that they were backed by In-Q-Tel, doesn't get much more massive than that.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#232

Post by 794CD01 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #176
794CD01 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with selling hardware and software separately. This is the kind of laziness that gave Windows a desktop monopoly.

There's nothing wrong with software competition, but that's not what this is. Otherwise you would be able to get software that does that under a free software license.

Depends on what kind of software you want to buy. I can buy a computer without an operating system. I can then buy an OS separately. If I want to use that OS to run a web browser, I have many options. If I want to use that OS to run the new Tomb Raider game, which is published by Microsoft, I must buy Windows.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#233

Post by 794CD01 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #192
794CD01 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with selling hardware and software separately. This is the kind of laziness that gave Windows a desktop monopoly.

There's everything wrong with selling hardware that cannot work for its intended purpose without additional proprietary, for-profit software. Would you buy a car if you had to pay again to receive a steering wheel, a transmission, or a key ? No. Or to take an analogy closer to home, NVIDIA and ATI both sell graphics cards. They also both distribute proprietary device drivers as binary blobs. They do not charge money…

It is not the responsibility of the hardware seller to know what your intended purpose is. To continue on your graphic card example, perhaps I want to buy them to use in my custom bitcoin mining operation, for which I have created my own more firmware that provides greater efficiency. I would then appreciate not being forced to pay extra for general-purpose graphics software I do not need.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#234

Post by visitor2035 »

MrTonyD wrote: post #82
gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

I visited the NeXT factory in Fremont when it was making cubes. For fairly obvious reasons at UCB Sun workstations were everywhere. I was asked by some of the people giving the tour what it would take to get departments to go with their boxes. I said access to source was something we had come to expect but it was out of the question.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#235

Post by [deleted] »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #219
alanwatts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric. It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place. This is quite obvious when studying tribal cultures as compared to civilized cultures. It's also worth noting the inherent distributed organizational design of tribal cultures as compared to…

Anthropology long ago over turned the "noble savage living in peace" idea that you seem to be promoting here - violence, rape and theft were and are common - even look at chimpanzees our closest cousins. Power law distributions of wealth come from economics, and laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and greed.

[deleted]

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#236

Post by alanwatts »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #219
alanwatts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric. It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place. This is quite obvious when studying tribal cultures as compared to civilized cultures. It's also worth noting the inherent distributed organizational design of tribal cultures as compared to…

Anthropology long ago over turned the "noble savage living in peace" idea that you seem to be promoting here - violence, rape and theft were and are common - even look at chimpanzees our closest cousins. Power law distributions of wealth come from economics, and laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and greed.

Violence and waging war is/was commonly considered an honorable deed by many tribal cultures.

Pathological inequality is not.

>laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and greed.

The fallacy of this statement is that laws are just words in paper which have no power to enforce itself.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#237

Post by Ace17 »

jordigh wrote: post #173
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies. It also lumps together many unrelated things. There is no big trouble with trademarks. Copyright itself isn't even a problem, the problem there is DRM. But software patents are unredeemable. They aren't all the sa…

There's also a bunch of other mostly unrelated stuff that gets called intellectual property, such as regional designations (e.g. "designed in California") and ship hull designs, which receive their own special treatment: https://www.quora.com/Why-were-boat-hull-designs-specificall... Each of these "intellectual properties" has its own special nuances and treatments, and often completely different laws. You have to de…

Dude! programming, literature, mathematics and theatre are all "text stuff"!

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#238

Post by stephenr »

ethbro wrote: post #76
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most of the early adopters of osx that I knew at the time were actively seeking out a unixy desktop because they worked on software eventually destined for Linux servers and didn't like the available desktop options for Linux. Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

This is a critical point. There are probably people on this board who were born after Ubuntu/Linux desktop UX received attention. For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

You're suggesting there are younger than 11 year olds reading hacker news?

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#239

Post by ethbro »

stephenr wrote: post #238
ethbro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a critical point. There are probably people on this board who were born after Ubuntu/Linux desktop UX received attention. For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

You're suggesting there are younger than 11 year olds reading hacker news?

Wouldn't surprise me if there's at least one. Always outliers.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#240

Post by digi_owl »

bluedino wrote: post #178
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is still the desktop OS for the majority because you can't walk into Best Buy or Frys and buy a Linux laptop or desktop. There was a small window with the early netbooks, but that's it. My kingdom for the ability to walk into Frys and buy Dells XPS 13 with Ububtu.

>> you can't walk into Best Buy or Frys and buy a Linux laptop or desktop. Nobody has a reason to. Not at least to buy one over a Windows 10 PC (or a Mac, or a Chromebook). The people who want/need to will just buy one, stick a USB stick with Ubuntu on it and go about there business 15 minutes later.

That still puts cash in Microsoft's pocket, unless each one go through the rigamarole of getting a refund.
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