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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

#241

Post by lifeisstillgood »

alanwatts wrote: post #236
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Violence and war are unequal - the strong (and male) take from the weak the old the young and the nursing. Laws are a compact between the strong and the rest, that with defence from the strong we will get peace and sharing and status. Status is the coinage society bribes the strong to prevent them just taking all they want. At some point society manages to produce through peace and trade more than could be stolen and the deal becomes profitable for both sides.

And different guards guard each other. Balance of power etc

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

#242

Post by MrTonyD »

visitor2035 wrote: post #234
MrTonyD wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that factory sure was impressive, wasn't it? I would sometimes go out of my way just to visit - hoping that they were running (it took a long time to get it started, and after that it took a long time to get it stable. Really, it was Sony and their manufacturing expertise that finally got us working.) I remember sitting up in the "control room" while they used the GUI to directly control the robots on the factory floor - watching the robots move in the dimly lit factory. It may be common now, but at the time that was "state of the art".

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

#243

Post by Grishnakh »

simonh wrote: post #229
Grishnakh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can they not understand it? If the consultant does his job, the software will work. Any idiot user can tell if the software actually runs or not. People hire mechanics to fix stuff all the time, even though they don't really understand how their cars work. They do know when their cars aren't working though. You're trying to convince me that ordinary people are utterly incapable of hiring experts to perform servic…

How do they know how much work the change will take? How will they know what a reasonable fee is for completing it? How can they verify the solution's quality beyond a limited demo in controlled circumstances? Even if the payment was kept in escrow by a third party, how can they be sure they draft the requirements for payment in such a way that they can avoid a technically valid but practically useless end product? T…

And how is this different from taking your car to a mechanic with some odd problem that isn't easily diagnosed?

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

#244

Post by jacquesm »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #190
MrTonyD wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. When I started doing the port of Oracle to Linux I had been reading the newsgroups - and they had been claiming POSIX compatibility. But system calls were missing many options, and entire sections of library code were missing. I'd run POSIX compatibility testing, so I knew that something didn't make sense. I kept posting to the news groups - mentioning that I was trying to port some software and hoping that…

>> I kept posting to the news groups Which news groups were those? They (and your posts) should still be around somewhere.

I've found one post in comp.linux.os.development.

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #227
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by AnthonyMouse »

794CD01 wrote: post #232
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then in your example there isn't software competition.

And there is no law prohibiting anyone from publishing free software that could run the game, unlike in the DRM case.

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

#247

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #227
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

> Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

In theory that's the test, but it doesn't actually work. In practice market power isn't binary. There is always a substitute for anything if you jack the price up high enough. And a monopolist would jack the price right up to that point, so that increasing it any more would cost sales.

But the zero volume case is the divide by zero case anyway. A test isn't going to give you a yes or no, it's going to give you NaN. That doesn't mean there is no market power, it only means you can't tell without a buyer. And in the patent case, as soon as there is a buyer there is market power.

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

#248

Post by snaky »

rpdillon wrote: post #96
lmm wrote: post #55

We lost Linux. The big thing about Linux was that you could swap out pieces of it for better ones if you wanted. "Linux is about choice" - vi or emacs, KDE or Gnome and so on. OSX doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. And in these days of systemd, Linux doesn't even have that any more.

I would argue Android does have that...replaceable launchers, dialers, address books, a full open-source repository of apps (F-Droid) and built-in side-loading of APKs make it more open than any other mainstream mobile OS, even if it isn't perfect.

What is not replaceable is Google PlayServices framework, that is analog of systemd.

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

#249

Post by 794CD01 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #246
794CD01 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then in your example there isn't software competition. And there is no law prohibiting anyone from publishing free software that could run the game, unlike in the DRM case.

There is software competition to perform basic functions. There is not software competition for some more specialized cases because one competitor is far superior to the others.

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

#250

Post by digi_owl »

sievebrain wrote: post #62
the8472 wrote: post #42

I think what's contributing to the whole hourglass thing is that browsers do not play nicely with native/low-level primitives. It's bascially yet another waist above the OS waist (browser APIs) and the IP waist (HTTP). Develop a nice decentralized solution? Maybe it involves some UDP multicast? Forget the browser. Want to have two devices on the network talk to each other? Bounce it through a cloud provider. Want to…

The browser is a terrible app platform that 'won' primarily because the incredibly minimal levels of holistic design in it meant everyone could agree on it, because doing so gave power to nobody in particular. The downside of that approach is, well, it's just a mishmash of things that don't work well or fit together properly. It's not even really decentralised. From the birth of the web it was driven by Netscape, the…

There was also the case that admins routinely blocked all ports on the company firewall, except for 80 (http). Thus funneling anything and everything through the browser became the easiest way.
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