41–50 of 84 posts
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the main theme in Russia today is "replacing of imported goods and services with domestic ones". The strategy consists of 3 stages: 1. prohibit, bash, etc... foreign goods and services 2. ... 3. enjoy quality replacement by domestic manufacturers and providers. right now the stage 1 is at full swing.
They have GLONASS.
The Russians are always trying to create and solidify a US-free sphere of influence. That goes for US companies, US NGOs, you name it.
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I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post. It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software. If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company? My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't ne…
> that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work. Thus, no author distributes their GPL'd software with an expectation that they will make a profit by keeping others from using that code. So whether the main…
How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applications (also perfectly open-sourced).
If it is difficult to compete with those applications, how does it matter that they are open source?
Sure, you can make a fork of the distro which is unbundled, making it easier to replace appliactions. But, oops, hardware vendors don't want to ship the forked distro for whatever reasons. They say, "we install the image that 99% of the world uses. We don't charge anything extra; if you want something else, wipe the HD/flash and do a complete reinstall."
In this hypothetical world, would governments step in with anti-trust litigation? (Against what?)
For extra confusion points, let's add signing: suppose you can't even add an application to the distro if it doesn't have an approved signature from the upstream. (Isn't that essesentially Firefox started with add-ons?)
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> that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work. Thus, no author distributes their GPL'd software with an expectation that they will make a profit by keeping others from using that code. So whether the main…
> How would that happen, exactly? Particularly with the GPL. If an author (company or otherwise) distributes their work, they're required to also provide the source for that work. How that could happen is: Imagine in a world in which a free, open-source operating system is immensely popular, installed on most desktops, devices, servers and embedded systems. Suppose the system's distro ships bundled with some applicat…
Looks like that hardware market is not very competitive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post. It's an interesting thought experiment to extrapolate antitrust ideas onto free software. If Linux grew big enough could it attract antitrust lawsuits despite not being the product of any single company? My first impression was to draw the line at organizations that make money, but that leaves the possibility for free software growing so big as to hinder progress, which isn't ne…
> I'm assuming this is a sarcastic post. More like satirical. I just returned to this tab 56 minutes after the fact, and wanted to delete the comment, but when I clicked the delete link, "1 point" flipped to "13 points". :) My point is, why is something like GNU Emacs or GNU/Linux above anti-trust with regard to bundling? Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution, and it was so popular that it was on 99% of th…
Assuming that in this alternate world GNU/Linux wasn't malleable (either because its not open source or for some other reason I am not able to think of). I think there would be anti-trust "hoopla".
For example... Think of the negative response everyone had back when ubuntu started sending amazon data... I changed distros. I don't think just because a system is based in GNU/Linux means that it is automatically sainted.
GNU Emacs also abuses its dominant position in the editor market by shipping all this bundled Lisp code. Over twenty years ago I was a making killing, hand over fist, selling a Usenet news reading add-on for Emacs. Then those anti-trust bastards included some Lisp code which does that, and I went down the tubes. I mean, what gave them the right , you know? It's as if not only did they disrespect my sense of entitleme…
And how much has 'Yandex', whatever that is, contributed to Android? Android exists and is relatively free (as in beer and speech) because it drives traffic to Google. If you don't like it, write your own mobile operating system from scratch (good luck). Edit: actually, they'd only need their own app store if I understand the terms correctly.
Should we take what the Russian goverment says at face value, or is this part of a trend in Russian policy to turn away from the West? These are the same guys trying to ban Reddit and Wikipedia.
Google seems to be singled out and especially targeted by these antitrust allegation and investigations, I mean in the larger sense not just here where it's mostly a protectionist outcome as the fact that they technically don't have a "dominant market position" at ~50% market share is the least of it. I'm curious How a ruling like that gels with the fact that on an iPhone (the other half of the market) all services a…
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> My only question is why can't we go after Microsoft for locking down hardware in the same way. Microsoft's hardware (e.g. Surface Pro) is less locked down than the competition's version of the same (e.g. iPad). Why must ever topic devolve into Microsoft bashing?
I should clarify that here I'm not talking about Microsoft's hardware like the Surface. I'm talking about being able to buy a computer from a manufacturer without having to pay $99 for an installation of Microsoft Windows that I explicitly do not want . Some effort was made to stop this practice (of MS paying manufacturers not to offer machines without Windows), but it clearly didn't go very far in solving the proble…