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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

#171

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #164
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the current percentage of professionals , which is likely to increase. It doesn't include many "programmers" whose occupation is listed under engineering or finance or management or security, or anyone who does it as a hobby instead of an occupation. And why do you expect the students and retirees who constitute the non-working half of the population to have a different long-term composition?

That's self-reported, current occupation [0] collected by BLS. [0] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm

Please explain how that contradicts anything in the post you responded to.

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

#172

Post by dragonwriter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #169
dragonwriter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies. All "property" is government enforced monopolies, and much of it outside of IP (and especially much of the broader class of intangible personal property of which IP is itself as subclass) is also either temporary or conditional in nature.

The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. You don't own every similar parcel of land. It isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense. But a patent on a device does exactly that.

> The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power.

Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

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

#173

Post by jordigh »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157
Ace17 wrote: post #113

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. This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any k…

> 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 demonstrate originality to copyright something, but you can trademark the most unoriginal things. You have to demonstrate that something has a function before you can patent it, but you can copyright the most useless things. You need to demonstrate that something really was created where you want to regionally designate it, but you don't need to prove anything to trademark it.

Lumping them all together is like saying programming, literature, mathematics, and theatre are all the same just because they all happen to have some sort of abstraction to them.

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

#174

Post by jacquesm »

MrTonyD wrote: post #153
feld wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can write a functioning kernel. The question is if it provides all the functionality required to run complex modern software -- especially big databases, which was pretty much your defacto benchmark back then. "Linux doesn't provide these syscalls or anything comparable" might mean you go from "runs reasonably well" to "can't run on this hardware at all because the kernel doesn't know how to do these tricks wi…

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'm with you on the facts, but it was anything but a toy. Minix was a toy, linux allowed a whole raft of useful applications to be run on PCs that would have otherwise required a large investment in hardware.

Linux would have succeeded with or without Oracle, and I find it sad that you would try to re-write history to the point where it would seem that without Oracle linux would have remained a toy.

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

#175

Post by bluedino »

hrktb wrote: post #134
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.

Only speaking for myself, but I initally switched to OSX right from FreeBSD because of the similarity . At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BSD (mainly because of yahoo I think) and the ports system much easier to use than rpms for instance. Otherwise I only saw Solaris or commercial types of unix (like what came with IBM servers) in use in companies I directly worked with. I understand that linux w…

>> At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BSD

Which was interesting because then Linux became faster, and had things like better SMP support that didn't get improved in BSD to give it the performance edge until 2007 or so...

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

#176

Post by AnthonyMouse »

794CD01 wrote: post #83
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user I've got an objection to DRM: it restricts me from using products that were already legally bought-and-paid-for. I bought a Blu-Ray drive for my media computer. My friend brought over a Blu-Ray copy of "The Social Network". It turned out that we could not play the film in the drive without paying an additional fee for a proprietary, DRM-enabled Blu-Ray video player application. This is particularly bullshit…

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.

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

#177

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #172
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. You don't own every similar parcel of land. It isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense. But a patent on a device does exactly that.

> The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

> Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

And in the patent case it doesn't.

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

#178

Post by bluedino »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #111
zanny wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, Windows is still pretty much the only desktop OS for 99% of people, Nvidia has stolen large-scale compute with a holistically proprietary CUDA, and Google has hijacked the ecosystem and culture with Android and ChromeOS (the former by having vendors use the incredibly destructive model of forking the kernel and stuffing it with binary blobs rendering it stuck to that version on whatever device you have, an…

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.

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

#179

Post by vetinari »

simonh wrote: post #168
vetinari wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.

Samba, bash, screen and autofs all predate Linux and most of the rest were either initially developed on others unixes or at least at a time when Linux was far away from its current dominance. The idea that modern OSX relies in any material way on Linux is simply obviously false to anyone with a basic understanding of the history of UNIX. Linux succeeded due to its compatibility with this rich ecosystem of software,…

At the time, GNU had a problem: they had almost complete userland, but no kernel. That meant, that you needed some other expensive system to run the GNU software. Hurd was just around the corner, for years.

What Linux changed that it opened the GNU software to much wider audience. You didn't need an expensive Sun workstation, cheap (relatively, at the time) PC was enough.

With the Linux kernel and GNU software, you had a complete, usable system, that anybody could use. Many people did, and they contributed back. The development accelerated.

So technically, no, OSX doesn't rely on Linux-the-kernel. But it benefited by the increased exposure GNU software got.

(Samba is about a year younger than Linux-the-kernel.)

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

#180

Post by hvis »

dandelion_lover wrote: post #135
franciscop wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the direction are the opposite: 1. Canonical makes no money. 2. They introduce a "bad" feature to try to make money. 3. Users outrage so canonical makes it easy to cancel. 4. Users are still not happy so Canonical turns it off by default. vs 1. Microsoft makes s *loads of money from various sources. 2. They show an annoying popup urging users to upgrade to W10 (to make more money? to reduce support?). 3. They sta…

The difference is that the users of Windows have no choice. Microsoft takes advantage of the situation. Canonical has no such advantage, but they surely would like to, according to this precedent.

That is too weak a precedent to be making a strong accusation like this.

It was one misstep. They have done, and continue to do, a lot of things right.

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