Comments on: Humanity to Others’ Agenda

By: Needs Sunlight

Needs Sunlight — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:54:10 +0000

@dyfet : That was very well put and would be the essential part of the message to Canonical’s management, if it can be gotten past the monoguard.

By: dyfet

dyfet — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:07:58 +0000

Well, my whole presentation at LibrePlanet2010 is about how to replace Skype with free software, for voice and video, as a distributed user controlled participatory network with security and privacy .

By: your_friend

your_friend — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:28:36 +0000

Skype has it’s own repository, so there’s nothing Ubuntu has to do. This is one of those areas where the forces of evil have free software backed into a corner, no video chat client in Lenny seems to work. Ekiga works but their server site has been DDoS’d or has other technical problems. I tried for months and will try again but Skype has something that works for people who run out of options.

A better solution would be to find a way for Skype to be free software. There are many services the company offers that have nothing to do with the client – ordinary phone connection, voice mail boxes – that are the sources of their revenue and should not suffer from client freedom. In a free world, they will soon enough have competition and might as well keep building a business model that can survive rather than one built on patent litigation and other foolishness that no one wins.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:12:15 +0000

Privately, it first came to my attention that Shuttleworth had interacted with Microsoft 2 years ago in order to discuss codecs. But he never really gave up; I just hope he wakes up and acknowledges the Mono/Moonlight problem.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:08:47 +0000

IMHO, Microsoft might buy just a portion of Novell.

http://boycottnovell.com/2010/01/10/restructuring-consequences/
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/04/29/on-microsoft-buying-linux-company%E2%80%9D/
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/04/25/novell-microsoft-takeover/

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:06:41 +0000

No, I think the problem here is Skype proliferation. SFLC might have something to say about it, as they did when people cheered/celebrated other proprietary software coming to GNU/Linux.

By: your_friend

your_friend — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:04:00 +0000

I would not say that Microsoft does anything very well but the more you deal with their ecosystem and non standards, the more power they have over you.

By: NotZed

NotZed — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:01:38 +0000

Ekiga now too? Damn. What are they trying to do, turn it into default microsoft windows install?

Pretty soon all you’ll end up with is a couple of crappy games, a ‘ms paint’ clone, a browser and a ‘notepad’.

By: dyfet

dyfet — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:46:57 +0000

Yes, those were the ones I was thinking of. I think there were a few others as well that went down that path to oblivion. Of course, the Novell/Microsoft patent deals are clearly a means of passage to such oblivion. And it seems regardless of how strong, successful, and effective once Suse was an enterprise distro before, Novell has clearly managed to drive it toward a similar fate. Maybe they see their future as a Microsoft subsidiary; Mono Inc?

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:40:12 +0000

Xandros/Linspire is a good (or bad) example.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:38:59 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth warned about it himself around 2007… or maybe it was O’Grady in a Ubuntu event. Maybe both. I can’t recall for sure.

By: dyfet

dyfet — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:32:14 +0000

Put another and more broad way that the MBA’s might understand, you are no longer being focused on what actually differentiated you in the market, and your at best able to do something poorly that others already do very well. It seems a loss-loss proposition.

By: dyfet

dyfet — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:26:08 +0000

True. If you offer to run “X”, then you immediately open yourself to a comparison to users asking why “can’t I run both X and Y then” like they can “there”. It both confuses users about what the point was in the first place, and disappoints their expectations. At the same time it looses marketshare from those who did care primarily about freedom.

Having thought about it, this may well be why most of the distro’s that had tried being partially proprietary or offering some or select proprietary applications had failed miserably in the marketplace to date.

By: your_friend

your_friend — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:25:49 +0000

You would bother with Ubuntu because it’s technically a better platform, is not owned by a malicious company and has a richer collection of software and features. Every step towards software freedom that a user takes, the better their computing environment gets.

The seductive question is, “With all of these applications running on GNU/Linux, why does anyone bother with Mac or Windows?” That is a market tarpit that can suck down a healthy company because Microsoft will continually move the goal posts. The answer to the question is that you really can’t run all of those applications like you want and are better off with free software that you can. Non free software will never give you exactly what you want.

By: Dennis Murczak

Dennis Murczak — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:11:27 +0000

You are hitting the nail on the head: In their hunt for more end user market share, they now try to appeal to people who don’t specifically want freedom but a replacement for a proprietary platform. It will backfire on Canonical and make more users badmouth Linux because they expected a Windows/Mac ripoff.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:09:52 +0000

I think it’s more of a Novell/Microsoft problem, not a GNOME one.

By: dyfet

dyfet — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:00:41 +0000

It is VERY true that we do not need newly written GNU/Linux applications that have proprietary dependencies. I was looking at this as a cross-platform application, and there may be reasons why the author(s) made this choice that are unknown, even if they are ones I may personally not agree with. One thing I fail to understand is why it is even in GNOME, or of course why tomboy, etc, are, either. Hence, it speaks to me of the continued failure of the GNOME project.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:12:40 +0000

It should not be too hard for C# developers to adapt to the real thing (Oracle's Java). Why use an imitation of it? I'm talking about building applications from scratch here, as opposed to porting some. "Shouldn't we leave the [Microsoft] elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren't going to leave us alone."

--Jeremy Allison, LCA 2010

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:09:47 +0000

The issue I see here is that if Ubuntu becomes more like Linux Mint, it will struggle to be better Mint than Mint.

I personally use Kubuntu at the moment.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:06:49 +0000

That’s the point raised by some Fedora users when ESR made a scene.