[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Bear Giles]

Nate Duehr wrote:
>
> On Jul 26, 2008, at 8:46 PM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
>
>> That's not really what open source is about.  It's always been about
>> scratching your own itch.
I have to disagree.  For many people it's been about controlling your 
own data.  Vendors lock in users with proprietary formats, then either 
charge a fortune to upgrade or simply go out of business, often taking 
subscription key servers with them.  You can't legally try to 
reverse-engineer the data format since that's a violation of the DMCA.  
By "legally" I mean that you can try to find some people to quietly do 
it for yourself, but you can't share efforts with others, openly hire 
people to do so, etc.  It doesn't matter that the company went out of 
business either -- SOMEBODY has the rights to the company's IP, 
including their file formats, and they can enjoin you.

That's annoying if it's your recipe collection.  It's business-critical 
if you need that data to operate.

The fact that it's YOUR data?  Irrelevant.  The vendor never claimed 
ownership to your original data, but using their software made a 
derivative work that they can claim ownership to.  Nobody ever thinks to 
check for this in their EULA.

(BTW this is why some compiler suites can demand royalties.  It's your 
source code, but the results of the compilation is a derived work.)

That said, a lot of software is 'itch'-based.  But I think most of the 
big apps are significantly driven by concerns of vendor lock.
> Or as the blog guy would say, "But we've got jiggly windows!  You 
> don't have that!"  So what?  If it takes going to something called an 
> InstallFest (no offense to those here who particpate in the CLUE 
> ones!) to get the damn thing to have 3d acceleration, mount an 
> external USB drive, and all that... without 10 years of Linux 
> experience... something's still utterly broken in Linux... mainly, the 
> thought processes of those writing for it.  I think.
Ever try to install a commercial copy of Windows plus standard apps?  
People don't think Windows installation is difficult since they don't 
-do- windows installation.  It's handled by the vendor or the IT department.
> If you look at the lofty goals of most distros -- they have words in 
> them like "pick the best software for users" and things like that... 
> but that doesn't happen either.
Depends on the user.  1/2 :-)   We don't think twice about windows 
having different versions for "home" user, "professional" user, and 
"enterprise", but don't quite seem to make the same connection with 
Linux.  E.g., Debian can be a bit frustrating to the desktop user... 
unless they also do a lot of work on the server side.  Then it's 
incredibly useful to have the same environment on your desktop as on 
your deployment systems.  But that doesn't stop people from trying to 
compare Debian with systems designed for desktop users as though they're 
targeting after the same market.

(P.S., that "home" vs. "professional" nonsense is far more trouble than 
people give it credit for.  I prefer cheaper hardware since 
It's.Good.Enough. for my needs.  But that means I get stuck with "home" 
edition... which means I can't use it for the stuff I got it for in the 
first place.  So I have to upgrade the hardware.  But golly gee whiz, 
that means I'll also have these nifty video cards if I suddenly decide 
to get into gaming!  Grrrr.)
> Only a few apps in the entirety of everything uploaded to the world 
> have EVER been better than their commercial counterparts for speed, 
> reliability, usability, etc.  Apache is a good example, perhaps.
It's interesting that you mention apache since the web server is such a 
small element of what it does.  Mention 'apache' to most j2ee developers 
(or even java developers in general) and they'll think of tomcat (the 
j2ee server) and the massive libraries they support.  It's like, oh, 
picking up a pretty shell on the beach and not quite getting that the 
fricking ocean is part of the same thing.  In fact it takes me a moment 
to think of a library that I routinely use that -isn't- from apache.  
(Spring, and, um,....)

To be fair, that's open source, not linux, since java can run on any 
platform.