+1 Insightful
I rather liked Charlie Demerijian's story on L'Inq today: Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift: A match made in hell. It's all too rare to read in the meeja the sort of screw-ups that I encounter almost daily on the world's dominant hardware & software platform.
I have personally encountered 2 of the big problems that Charlie bitches about in this piece: of OEM Windows "restore" CDs which can't be used if the system hardware has been modified, and RAID controller install CDs - and all sorts of other driver installers too - which are so very inflexible as to be completely useless. Dell was at one time particularly bad at offering driver downloads which are DOS executables that will only expand onto a DOS floppy in drive A:, which is little help if you're not running DOS or any DOS-compatible OS or don't have an A: drive - or for a host of other possible reasons. It's so bad that there are legions of spam-ridden websites like driverguide.com that try to charge you for drivers for kit you've paid good money for, and offer legions of alternative versions, mislabelled and inaccurately described by hapless users who don't know what they're doing - and shouldn't have to.
In this case, Charlie was forced into using a Linux solution, just from expediency.
In more general terms, though, this is one of the main reasons that I think that Free software, especially operating systems, is going to win out.
Manufacturers continue to close down the options available in their hardware and software: closed-source drivers, development docs only available under NDA, hardware protection mechanisms and OSs which incorporate support for these because of pressure from large influential industry lobby groups like the RIAA. For once, a Stallman epithet is entirely justified: it really is more honest to called "Trusted Computing" Treacherous Computing. It's all about not trusting the user and restricting what they can do, so that your computer will no longer do its best effort at what you tell it to: it'll do what its makers permit you to do and nothing more.
It's getting to the stage where things are easier to do on Linux. Sometimes, because the commercial OSs won't show you error messages (because that betrays faults in their products, same as putting a reset button on an IBM or Compaq computer was an admission that sometimes PCs crash).
Or because the drivers come in 27 different variants, because companies won't admit that their 4673XYZ interface card is actually the exact same combination of controller, RAM and a bit of firmware that all their competitors sell, and that, of course, there are 86 different versions for every different country they're sold in. So it's often easiest to bypass the makers' drivers and use something generic.
Of course, a help database is a proprietary asset, so you have to pay for access to it, and pay for betas, and pay for test/eval versions of the products. And it wouldn't look good to have a website which listed all the known faults and problems with a product, would it?
And then there's the buy-in factor. Yes, the new version of the product has all these cool new features, but to get best use from them, you'll need to buy this ancillary product as well. And the special server back-end. And the add-on package that adds features to the back end. Yes, it really is a £200 product, honest, it's just that to get the best out of it, you need to buy an additional £1,500 worth of other products.
And you need the new version, because all your rivals will have it, and your suppliers and customers, and you must run the same as them to be compatible.
It's the same argument as that terrifying new Carling advert featuring wheeling flocks of starlings while the soundtrack sings of "living for the weekend". The slogan: "BELONG". You must do this, simply because everyone else does this. There's safety in numbers. Conform.
An interviewer said to me recently, "well, no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft." "No," I responded, "but some people should have." He was visibly shocked. It's almost like swearing in a church.
Vista is not going to help. Already, I note to my great amusement, there are sites talking (warning: even Slashdot rated the grammar as bad) about Vista R2, "Fiji", which will add back in the missing bits and fix the broken bits. And it's not even shipping yet! Hilarious. And yet also tragic.
Windows Media Player has "Digital Rights Management" built in - it's just one good reason not to use it. It's there in XP and it'll be worse in Vista. It's there in OS X, too. Hint: if you use iTunes to rip your music, nip into the preferences and set the format to MP3 not Apple's encumbered one.
It's no longer harder to install Linux than Windows. It's easier. Sure, with one of the distros, such as Ubuntu, that eschews proprietary formats like MP3 and DVD, you have to frig around a little installing the codecs to play them and Flash and Real and so on, but it's already vastly less mucking around than a new install of XP involves to make sure it has antivirus, antispyware, unencumbered handlers for all the same formats and on.
But finally, and most importantly, with Free software, there's an open interchange of ideas and technologies. If someone implements something well, others can just take it and use it. This is where the GPL is a strength, for all that the old-timers still fear its "viral" influence, like superstitious mediaeval peasants making warding signs against the evil eye. Algorithms are the DNA of software, and only Free software has sex: only it can spread and swap and exchange its genes without let or hindrance. Proprietary software is like the poor old dandelion: it's sterile, so it can't interbreed with its kin. That doesn't mean it's not successful: ask anyone with a lawn. But the dandelion's flowers are a relic: it doesn't exchange pollen with other individuals, its seeds are clones of the parent. For as long as conditions still suit it, it does great, but it can't change any more. It can't even get rid of that showy yellow flower, which is now a waste of energy; the flower doesn't do anything any more, except squander the plant's resources feeding insects that it can no longer use to ferry its genes around.
When conditions change so that they don't suit the dandelion species any more, it's helpless: individuals can no longer swap genes amongst themselves. Every single plant is a unique, isolated germ line. Any changes it makes, any favourable mutations, it can only ever keep to itself. It can still evolve, but disbarred from sex, it's like a mammoth in a tar pit: constrained to terribly slow movement, and so probably doomed. It might escape but smaller nimbler animals have a much better chance.
Ever wonder why Vista is five years after XP, when it was meant to be out by 2003? This is why. It's sterile, isolated, so it can only change from within. Think Apple are going to trade technologies with MS? Yeah, right. If one has a good idea, the other has to copy it, reinvent it from the ground up, rewrite it from scratch, because otherwise, it'll fall foul of patents and IP restrictions. It happens - OS X's "Fast User Switching" is ripped straight off from XP, the task switcher from LiteSwitch which was ripped off from Windows 95, whereas Vista's Aero is a rip of Apple's Quartz and the Vista Sidebar is a "re-interpretation" of Apple's Dashboard, which in turn came from Konfabulator.
All redone from scratch.
If these apps and OSs were free, masses of developer time wasted on reinventing the wheel could have been spent on genuinely new features - or even on quashing bugs.
Not incidentally, this is why software patents are a really bad idea, too.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu, on $10M a year and a few dozen employees, has put out five releases since 2004. Because the changes in Ubuntu are shared with SUSE and Fedora and Mandriva. Heck, Linux is interbreeding with Solaris and AIX and IRIX and all sorts, too.
In the end, Free software is going to run rings around closed-source stuff, in just the same way that we mammals survived the disaster that killed off the dinosaurs: evolution.
Mammals didn't come after the dinos: they coexisted for tens of millions of years. But then conditions changed, and the energy-spendthrift, cold-tolerant mammals lived and prospered while the great reptiles were marginalised.
Evolution is the most powerful force for selection of beneficial change in the known universe. And evolution is powered by sex. It probably took billions of years for evolution to come up with sex among single-celled organisms. It's rather hard to tell. But about seven hundred million years ago, after two or three billion years of life on Earth, evolution took off like a rocket and a million new forms of life happened. It's continued ever since. The engine of life itself is photosynthesis - we all feed on solar radiation, and it powers all our technological civilisation too - but the engine that powered the development of all life on Earth is evolution and that works best with sex.
Free software is sexy. Closed stuff isn't. Not any more. The world's moved on.
The bacteria never went away; they're still the most numerous organisms, still the bulk of the biomass. But the biggest, the fastest, the smartest, the most colourful - all the interesting exciting stuff - has moved onwards and upwards and away.
Closed-source software will never die, but it's been out-evolved. It just hasn't realised it yet. It's a big, slow-moving, lumbering beast. Powerful, deadly, dangerous - but rather slow to catch on.
I have personally encountered 2 of the big problems that Charlie bitches about in this piece: of OEM Windows "restore" CDs which can't be used if the system hardware has been modified, and RAID controller install CDs - and all sorts of other driver installers too - which are so very inflexible as to be completely useless. Dell was at one time particularly bad at offering driver downloads which are DOS executables that will only expand onto a DOS floppy in drive A:, which is little help if you're not running DOS or any DOS-compatible OS or don't have an A: drive - or for a host of other possible reasons. It's so bad that there are legions of spam-ridden websites like driverguide.com that try to charge you for drivers for kit you've paid good money for, and offer legions of alternative versions, mislabelled and inaccurately described by hapless users who don't know what they're doing - and shouldn't have to.
In this case, Charlie was forced into using a Linux solution, just from expediency.
In more general terms, though, this is one of the main reasons that I think that Free software, especially operating systems, is going to win out.
Manufacturers continue to close down the options available in their hardware and software: closed-source drivers, development docs only available under NDA, hardware protection mechanisms and OSs which incorporate support for these because of pressure from large influential industry lobby groups like the RIAA. For once, a Stallman epithet is entirely justified: it really is more honest to called "Trusted Computing" Treacherous Computing. It's all about not trusting the user and restricting what they can do, so that your computer will no longer do its best effort at what you tell it to: it'll do what its makers permit you to do and nothing more.
It's getting to the stage where things are easier to do on Linux. Sometimes, because the commercial OSs won't show you error messages (because that betrays faults in their products, same as putting a reset button on an IBM or Compaq computer was an admission that sometimes PCs crash).
Or because the drivers come in 27 different variants, because companies won't admit that their 4673XYZ interface card is actually the exact same combination of controller, RAM and a bit of firmware that all their competitors sell, and that, of course, there are 86 different versions for every different country they're sold in. So it's often easiest to bypass the makers' drivers and use something generic.
Of course, a help database is a proprietary asset, so you have to pay for access to it, and pay for betas, and pay for test/eval versions of the products. And it wouldn't look good to have a website which listed all the known faults and problems with a product, would it?
And then there's the buy-in factor. Yes, the new version of the product has all these cool new features, but to get best use from them, you'll need to buy this ancillary product as well. And the special server back-end. And the add-on package that adds features to the back end. Yes, it really is a £200 product, honest, it's just that to get the best out of it, you need to buy an additional £1,500 worth of other products.
And you need the new version, because all your rivals will have it, and your suppliers and customers, and you must run the same as them to be compatible.
It's the same argument as that terrifying new Carling advert featuring wheeling flocks of starlings while the soundtrack sings of "living for the weekend". The slogan: "BELONG". You must do this, simply because everyone else does this. There's safety in numbers. Conform.
An interviewer said to me recently, "well, no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft." "No," I responded, "but some people should have." He was visibly shocked. It's almost like swearing in a church.
Vista is not going to help. Already, I note to my great amusement, there are sites talking (warning: even Slashdot rated the grammar as bad) about Vista R2, "Fiji", which will add back in the missing bits and fix the broken bits. And it's not even shipping yet! Hilarious. And yet also tragic.
Windows Media Player has "Digital Rights Management" built in - it's just one good reason not to use it. It's there in XP and it'll be worse in Vista. It's there in OS X, too. Hint: if you use iTunes to rip your music, nip into the preferences and set the format to MP3 not Apple's encumbered one.
It's no longer harder to install Linux than Windows. It's easier. Sure, with one of the distros, such as Ubuntu, that eschews proprietary formats like MP3 and DVD, you have to frig around a little installing the codecs to play them and Flash and Real and so on, but it's already vastly less mucking around than a new install of XP involves to make sure it has antivirus, antispyware, unencumbered handlers for all the same formats and on.
But finally, and most importantly, with Free software, there's an open interchange of ideas and technologies. If someone implements something well, others can just take it and use it. This is where the GPL is a strength, for all that the old-timers still fear its "viral" influence, like superstitious mediaeval peasants making warding signs against the evil eye. Algorithms are the DNA of software, and only Free software has sex: only it can spread and swap and exchange its genes without let or hindrance. Proprietary software is like the poor old dandelion: it's sterile, so it can't interbreed with its kin. That doesn't mean it's not successful: ask anyone with a lawn. But the dandelion's flowers are a relic: it doesn't exchange pollen with other individuals, its seeds are clones of the parent. For as long as conditions still suit it, it does great, but it can't change any more. It can't even get rid of that showy yellow flower, which is now a waste of energy; the flower doesn't do anything any more, except squander the plant's resources feeding insects that it can no longer use to ferry its genes around.
When conditions change so that they don't suit the dandelion species any more, it's helpless: individuals can no longer swap genes amongst themselves. Every single plant is a unique, isolated germ line. Any changes it makes, any favourable mutations, it can only ever keep to itself. It can still evolve, but disbarred from sex, it's like a mammoth in a tar pit: constrained to terribly slow movement, and so probably doomed. It might escape but smaller nimbler animals have a much better chance.
Ever wonder why Vista is five years after XP, when it was meant to be out by 2003? This is why. It's sterile, isolated, so it can only change from within. Think Apple are going to trade technologies with MS? Yeah, right. If one has a good idea, the other has to copy it, reinvent it from the ground up, rewrite it from scratch, because otherwise, it'll fall foul of patents and IP restrictions. It happens - OS X's "Fast User Switching" is ripped straight off from XP, the task switcher from LiteSwitch which was ripped off from Windows 95, whereas Vista's Aero is a rip of Apple's Quartz and the Vista Sidebar is a "re-interpretation" of Apple's Dashboard, which in turn came from Konfabulator.
All redone from scratch.
If these apps and OSs were free, masses of developer time wasted on reinventing the wheel could have been spent on genuinely new features - or even on quashing bugs.
Not incidentally, this is why software patents are a really bad idea, too.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu, on $10M a year and a few dozen employees, has put out five releases since 2004. Because the changes in Ubuntu are shared with SUSE and Fedora and Mandriva. Heck, Linux is interbreeding with Solaris and AIX and IRIX and all sorts, too.
In the end, Free software is going to run rings around closed-source stuff, in just the same way that we mammals survived the disaster that killed off the dinosaurs: evolution.
Mammals didn't come after the dinos: they coexisted for tens of millions of years. But then conditions changed, and the energy-spendthrift, cold-tolerant mammals lived and prospered while the great reptiles were marginalised.
Evolution is the most powerful force for selection of beneficial change in the known universe. And evolution is powered by sex. It probably took billions of years for evolution to come up with sex among single-celled organisms. It's rather hard to tell. But about seven hundred million years ago, after two or three billion years of life on Earth, evolution took off like a rocket and a million new forms of life happened. It's continued ever since. The engine of life itself is photosynthesis - we all feed on solar radiation, and it powers all our technological civilisation too - but the engine that powered the development of all life on Earth is evolution and that works best with sex.
Free software is sexy. Closed stuff isn't. Not any more. The world's moved on.
The bacteria never went away; they're still the most numerous organisms, still the bulk of the biomass. But the biggest, the fastest, the smartest, the most colourful - all the interesting exciting stuff - has moved onwards and upwards and away.
Closed-source software will never die, but it's been out-evolved. It just hasn't realised it yet. It's a big, slow-moving, lumbering beast. Powerful, deadly, dangerous - but rather slow to catch on.