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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

#201

Post by vacri »

Grishnakh wrote: post #162
falcolas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate why you are expressing the negativity you are... but that's not going to help us either. 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. So, instead of deciding to do nothing but accept this as inevitable... do something. Contribute to Diaspora. Convince your friends and family to use email i…

>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'.

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

#202

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #196
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please explain where I must contradict the parent post.

Then thank you for agreeing with me?

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

#203

Post by kazinator »

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…

Exposing async I/O is largely a trivial hack, if the filesystem is already asynchronous under the hood, allowing I/O to proceed in parallel with computation. It's mostly about separating the request placement for I/O from being notified about completion or optionally waiting. The wherewithal to cob together this sort of mousetrap was in the Linux kernel since the early dawn, pretty much.

1990 POSIX didn't have aio_read and all that; it came later. A lot of this stuff was being standardized in parallel with the progress being made in Linux. According to the 1997 Single Unix Spec (Issue 2), the aio stuff came from the 1993 real-time extensions to POSIX. [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/aio_read....] "Derived from the POSIX Realtime Extension (1003.1b-1993/1003.1i-1995)". This was bleeding edge POSIX in the mid 1990's, and didn't exist when Torvalds started.

The performance optimization requirements of large databases aren't the be-all and end-all of "non-toyness", anyway.

The Linux people were decent at optimizing for the cases that their user base cared about. E.g. Linux exploded as a web server OS all over the world, so there was a lot of focus on decent networking, and tricks like serving a static file right out of the kernel and whatnot.

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

#204

Post by aminok »

I see a lot of promise in distributed Turing Complete blockchains like Ethereum giving a nonproprietary and decentralized alternative to centralized services. There is a positive feedback loop where the more smart contracts are uploaded to the blockchain, the more useful it becomes, and the more people upload their programs to it to utilize that functionality. All of these smart contracts necessarily make their code accessible to the public, in being hosted on a public blockchain, and are copyleft, since there's no way enforce IP law on their use.

It could conceivably neutralize the forces that enable big government and big business.

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

#205

Post by spc476 »

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…

An Android phone is running more than one operating system. A friend of mine who worked in the cell phone industry provided a bunch of details which I quoted on my blog: http://boston.conman.org/2013/01/22.2

TL;DR: Android phones have at least two separate CPUs, one to run the applications, the second one the actual phone portions, each running their own operating system.

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

#206

Post by ajsalminen »

gaius wrote: post #8
deng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has no lineage in common with Linux. That's not what he wrote. In its initial release, OS X did depend heavily on free software (Samba, Apache, GNU, etc.), which again thrived because of Linux.

It would be more accurate to say Linux thrived because of them! Samba IIRC predates Linux too, as does the GNU project, Apache is based on the original httpd which was built on... Drum roll... NeXTStep. In 1990, before Linux existed.

What many of these comments seem to be missing is that I don't think Doc Searls meant Linux the kernel when he said this. He meant Linux the OS (which some want to call GNU/Linux as he mentioned) with all these parts included.

All of these components played their part in the rise of the OS and benefited from each other. The Linux kernel as well as things like the GNU project were absolutely necessary for this ecosystem to becoming a reality and that is what OS X benefited from as well.

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

#207

Post by throwawaykf05 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #177
dragonwriter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.

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

#208

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

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.

Or 15 hours or days later, after they've fixed the inevitable issues with installing *nix on a Windows PC.

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

#209

Post by wtbob »

simonh wrote: post #46
dTal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume that the author is following the usual convention of referring to GNU/Linux as simply "Linux", I don't think it's unfair to say that OSX draws heavily from the free software ecosystem. Take a look in /usr/bin on an OSX machine and it's pretty much the free software kitchen sink. Emacs AND Vim even. The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything.

If he meant GNU why didn't he say so? Linux has nothing to do with OSX, whether you call it Linus or GNU/Linux. > The only reason Unix is popular for a workstation at all nowadays is because Linux runs everything. And at a stroke the entire history of Sun, Solaris and Sun OS is brushed under the carpet as though it never existed. Yes. I give up. You win. Workstations only exist because of Linux. I think I need a litt…

> And at a stroke the entire history of Sun, Solaris and Sun OS is brushed under the carpet as though it never existed.

I don't think Sun is responsible for Apple's choice of a Unix. I was around in the late 90s, and Linux really was an amazing workstation — far more so than a Sun, because the value for money ratio was incredibly good.

I also remember when OS X first came out (and before that, mklinux), and the selling point was that it was a Unix, like Linux.

I'd still rather have a Linux workstation than a Mac. Linux gets out of my way and lets me work. Solaris never did that (oh, the days of Solaris 'packages' …), and OS X still doesn't.

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

#210

Post by AnthonyMouse »

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #207
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 .

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.

> The claims define what a patent covers.

And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works.

And you're confusing the value of the market with control over it. It's possible to have a total monopoly on some useless junk nobody wants.

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