LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 20:50:06 +0930

Re: Aunt Nelly (was Re: Re: Re: bsd- easier than you think)

On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 07:05:40PM +0930, isplist@adam.com.au wrote:
> didn't take long for her well-meaning friends to come over and install MS-
> Office. This was so that they could be more comfortable when helping her out 
> with her PC or emailing documents.
> 
> In a vacuum, open source definately has the goods where user-friendliness is 
> concerned. In a human network, it's still defeated by groupthink and lack of 
> adherence to open standards in one of the key areas that makes personal 
> computers useful to most people. If there was a open document format as 
> uniformly accepted as JPEG (for example) then Open Source would have no 
> problems in the perceived 'user friendly' department.


John,

That's the point. It's the file formats and network protocols that matter -
not the GUI, not the API, not the internal kernel interfaces (device-kernel
etc.) and not the licence conditions. It's interoperability that matters.

If linux achieved over 50% of market share, the big players would form a
consortium to "guide" linux to have everything that they want, and then
we would have to write another linux, which is really a programmers' 
operating system, not so much an ordinary user system.
If linux achieves even 30% or market share, I predict that most linuxistas
will take refuge in BSD as a system that nerds can be comfortable in.

When MS got taken to court, the lawyers shouldn't have demanded that a few 
pathetic little API functions be revealed so that competitors could
write competing applications on the MS "platform". They should have demanded
that every protocol and file format used by MS should be open and free.
__That's__ what would remove their unfair monopoly position.

Instead of asking for a look at the source to MS code, China, for example,
should have asked for the complete spec for all file formats and protocols.
Who in their right mind wants to look at other people's spaghetti?!

When IBM had more than 50% of the hardware market, they had a reputation
for attending all standards meetings with the express purpose of
frustrating and slowing down all efforts at standardisation. True standards
were not in their commercial interest. The samba project and star office are
examples of how much effort is required to break open the comms and file
format definitions, and how important this is. Monopolies hate standards,
because it's standards that give you freedom, not licence lawyers.

Linux can only take over the world by becoming _not_ linux.
I just wish that linux advocates would stop to think about _why_ they
want to take over from MS. If it's to guarantee the survival of linux,
then that's not the right way to do it. "You are on the way to destruction!"
http://www.topology.org/images/gifs/0wing_intro.gif

When I inter-work with people in the real world, the number 1, 2 and 3
problems that I encounter are file format incompatibilities,
followed closely by minor protocol problems - like that the MS users insist
on putting a whole paragraph on a single line. Grrr...

Anyway.....

CHeers,
Alan Kennington.

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