Everything I have read about Feynman indicates the man is a great teacher, and loves to share his knowledge. Which parts of that indicates that he would prefer to have his work locked in and made unavailable to some portions of the world?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

Go read it yourself.

After that, do you think a teacher would say “you can learn my shit, but only if you use my rich user experience” or do you think a teacher would say “you can learn my shit, here ya go, period”?

However, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the open source and the free software movement have it’s roots even as early as the 70′s? So it’s not like Feynman lived in a time where the concept of free or open source software is completely foreign to people.

Why I am curious whether Feynman has been documented publicly as being a supporter of free software is because the article above, as well as some commentators, make it sound like he sure would of been a slam dunk supporter.

“Does Feynman, who is now in his grave, know that Microsoft is exploiting his good work to pollute the Web and deny access to his lectures if the viewer uses a Free operating system like BSD or GNU/Linux? Would he have approved this?”

“I can’t help but think Feynman would have been all in favor of FLOSS”

Unless someone proves to me otherwise, I am going to assume that no one here really knows one way or another what Feynman’s position would of been on free software. There is no way we would know whether Feynman thinks his good work is being exploited. All this is conjecture at best.

Primus also used crappy Bay Networks 3599 (if I recall correctly) dial-in modem banks. Worst shit in the world, hardly worked with anything. You can have a good modem bank and a bad customer modem, or a bad modem bank and a good customer modem, but you can’t have bad both. This was when WinModems were just coming in, so guess what all the tech support calls were about.

That was my first job in IT. Tech support regularly won awards for customer service. And we deserved them, because you had to be a goddamn genius to get that shit to work.

And think about mini-win and things like XP embedded, where, it is possible to strip out bits and pieces like media player (gasp!) and IE (double gasp!). So it is entirely possible. But people like Jonathan would not want us to be able to use these things even if we want to, because we would not have the “user experience” they want to lock us into.

Seriously, if I were a monopoly, this would be what I’d be doing too. Screw the users, they can have any color they want as long as it’s black.

Thanks for your thoughtful replies.

IMO, I think the problem with free and open source software (as well as standards like HTML5, I suppose) is that due to the collaborative and open nature of the development model, it’s incredibly difficult to get consensus. Thus, it’s reasonable to expect innovation and progression in free software to lag behind innovation and progression in proprietary software.

HTML5 is certainly the way to go for the future, but I’m just afraid that as the specifications currently stand, it’s still gonna be pretty tough for an HTML5 app to reach feature parity with Flash or Silverlight anytime soon. Not to mention, like you say, it’s still at least 2 years away from being ratified as a standard.

And speaking of porn and Silverlight, have you seen Playboy Archives yet?

http://www.playboyarchive.com

“Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood).”

–Stephan Wenger, Nokia [PDF]

(By the way – in all the discussion of Nokia’s similar odious lying bullshit about Ogg Theora and Vorbis, no-one called attention to Nokia benefiting from the AAC patent pool.)

I’m not sure how one would do a ‘l33t rich application like Jonathan describes for the Feynman lectures entirely in free software. What he describes is indeed massively cool and something like it would be well worth having.

HTML5 isn’t finished and won’t be for two years; at least there are two implementations of it in moderately wide use, being Gecko and WebKit, and one can write stuff that works in both those.

Gnash barely implements large chunks of Flash (my personal test: do Weebl’s Stuff animations work? No they don’t), so writing to that subset of Flash strikes me as likely to be way too painful in practice.

I’d probably ask a designer who does this stuff how they’d do it in the currently available Gecko/WebKit subset of HTML5. Then they’d look at me funny and give me their best professional advice to use Flash because everyone has Flash.

Basically, someone has to trailblaze doing unbelievably cool shit in the current version of HTML5, show how they did it and lead the way. I suspect this will require high-quality HTML5 Rich Internet Application authoring tools.

As for popularising Silverlight, I still advise sponsoring porn that requires Silverlight. Ideologically highly questionable, but likely to spread the plugin faster than anything else I can think of. The Internet is for Porn, after all.

(Would also work for Ogg Theora. At this point I’m glad Free Software doesn’t have the money for that sort of thing.)

That is pure conjecture with absolutely zero to back it up.

Here is one example of hard proof.

And I suppose you blame Apple for not bundling Ogg in OS X too.

Yes, Apple has its special (and complex) media relations with Microsoft. See Comes vs Microsoft antitrust exhibits for details. Codec patents are a form of “pool”, or collusion.

That is pure conjecture with absolutely zero to back it up. And I suppose you blame Apple for not bundling Ogg in OS X too.

It’s so easy for one to just start shouting loudly and dismissing other people’s arguments as spin or antitrust exhibits or whatever. It’s not as easy to actually have a sound debate.

At least I respect David Gerard’s opinions. I actually learn something from reading his commentary.

As I noted, if it had been Flash based, that probably would have been “good enough” for everyone and you could have done as fancy an interface as with Silverlight.

Silverlight may be a better replacement in technical terms – I’d be surprised if it wasn’t, given it was created to be – but Flash is already on every desktop and Silverlight isn’t. That may not be fair, but it’s also the market: Flash >90%, Silverlight ~20%; most people won’t need to install software to play Flash, most people will need to install software to play Silverlight. If you’re doing rich internet application stuff at present, Flash can be presumed, Silverlight can’t.

(Silverlight stat from RIAstats, which is disproportionately visited by Rich Internet Application developers; general proportion I’d expect to be lower.)

Old news, nice spin. Antitrust exhibits show it coming right from the horse’s mouth.

So it seems to me that there is no acceptable solution that is 100% satisfactory then?

If you use Ogg, it will exclude the millions of desktop PCs and Macs that don’t have either the necessary Ogg codecs or Firefox 3.5 or XiphQT or Java (which is not ubiquitous) installed. And like you said, the last thing we want is to have users being prompted to install something else, right?

And we can’t use proprietary plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight.

IMO, as commentators (me included), it’s always easy for us to point out flaws and critique, but it’s a lot more difficult to come up with a workable solution.