Open source products need to be more usable to replace corporate stuff

You know one thing I love about Linux and FreeBSD? The stuff they have for playing DVDs doesn't try to enforce all that region-coding and DRM crap.

I can just stick a DVD in the drive, and hit "play". Boom, it plays.

Gosh, what a novelty. [img]tongue.gif" border="0[/img]

Was that the code which people wore on T-shirts?

Science has never tended to thrive when its methods, practitioners, and instruments were monopolized by the ruling classes.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]You mean like those who understand how Linux works?[/b]

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Only economists would ask such a question.

Something like that.

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Why exactly is it progressive to insist on Linux over Windows? How do we get from

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I'm glad you asked. And I have but one word for an answer: literacy.

Don't you wish that one word was the last word? Alas, but it needs some meat on the bones, I suspect.

The most important aspect of Open Source is the distribution of the code. Under the closed source system you are only ever expected to be a consumer.

In the Open Source paradigm, you are offered the choice to also be a producer.

To use an analogy, if software was literature, under the closed source system you would be sold talking books and the words and the language that created those books would be available only to those with the dollars to license access.

With Open Source, everyone has access to the code. To read the language, to experiment, to play, to learn, to create, to pass from passive consumer to active producer. To write the words within the spoken books, so to speak.

That doesn't imply that acceptance of Open Source means one must read the code to learn to create anymore than an ability to read must necessarily lead one to the classics.

What it does do is it puts the choice, and the tools to realize the potential of the choice, before you. It offers you the choice of a computer literacy beyond being able to click your way to the MSN chat window.

ETA: It is important to note that there is an incredible open source community no further away than your Internet connection who give freely of their time and knowledge to help anyone interested in learning. There is a tremendous respect for learning and the desire to learn even for "newbies", for anyone who thought they'd like to learn to create through code.

[ 03 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

I did. You ignored it. Let me repeat it: literacy.

Didn't I do that?

Let me try another way.

Would you agree that literacy is a key to reducing poverty? If yes, wouldn't it sort of follow that literacy in a "knowledge economy" would also lead to reducing poverty?

Would you suspect that people from an environment where the underlying language of software is readily and freely available as well as the tools to read and write that language would have a stronger "knowledge economy" literacy than those in an environment who have very little or highly controlled access to the same language and tools?

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This is the part I don't get. What ideas does Windows not allow me to express?

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Let's take a simple Windows game like Mine Sweeper. How was that created? What does the code look like? Can you see it? Can you read it? Can you alter it? If you alter it, do you have the tools to compile it?

For a simple Open Source game, like Frozen Bubble, the answer to every question above is "yes" and at no cost. The code comes with the game as part of the license agreement.

Could you, Stephen Gordon, have been as successful an academic if you did not, from an early age, have free and ready access to the alphabet, the printed word, and pen and paper as you wished or as you were instructed?

The open source model makes the alphabet, the language, and the tools to use them, pen and paper, available to anyone who wants them.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]Don't say you weren't warned.[/b]

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I wasn't warned!

And Stephen - do you only do research, or do they let you lecture?

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]
eta: We're talking about the choice of a freaking OS. There's [b]no subject at all[/b] that I can imagine wishing to investigate that depends on whether to use Linux or Windows.
[/b]

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How about if you want to investigate the way an operating system works which means you're investigating the way software actually interacts with hardware? That's rather an important issue in the world of technology, don't you think?

If you want to investigate Linux and see exactly how it polls the keyboard, sends characters to the screen, reads a file from disk and does all those other things that an OS does, you can download the source code and read it. If you want to know the same things about Windows, you can try and get a job at Microsoft and hope to get either a high enough executive position or a spot on the team that actually works on the operating system. Outside of that, you're not getting near the source code and you'll only find out what Microsoft cares to tell you. Sometimes that isn't very much.

[ 03 August 2008: Message edited by: pogge ]

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Why exactly is it progressive to insist on Linux over Windows? How do we get from

1) 'If only people switched from Windows to Linux'

to

2) 'then poverty and inequality will be reduced'?

Please be advised that if your answer consists of 'only assholes would ask such a question', then I will feel free to respond in kind.

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I'm not sure who you were referring to when you made these statements.

I do not use the term "open source". I use the term "free software" and when I mean "free" I am referring to the four essential freedoms outlined by the FSF that are enshrined in the GNU General Public License.

Stephen have you ever actually read a software license? I have. I read them all the time.

If you did, then you'd find that proprietary software licenses are mostly full of stuff telling you what you can't do.

"This software is licensed and not sold" is a common statement in most Microsoft "End User Licensing Agreements" (EULA's).

With proprietary software you can only use it in the manner that the software vendor says you can.

You can not study the software source code and find out what it's doing i.e. whether its spying on you..."phoning home to Mama" or what have you.
And since you don't have access to the source code, it's impossible to change it to meet your needs if you want/need to.

You are forbidden to share the software. In most cases you are only allowed to install the software on a single machine and make a backup copy. If you want to install the software on more than one machine you need to purchase licenses that allow you to do that.

If you are running a network, you may be limited as to the number of simultaneous connections you can make to that computer. With Windows XP for example, that limit is ten computers.

If you want to build a "server" computer, in the "Windows world" for example you need to buy a "Windows Server" license...something that costs alot more than a "desktop" Windows license.

With free software, there is no difference between using that computer strictly as a "desktop" or using it as a "server".

And it goes without saying that you are forbidden to help your community by taking the software and modifying it and releasing your own version of that software.

If for example, I'm the head of IT for the government of a small impoverished African country, and I need some kind of customized software application to perform some function, with free software I am free to take an existing free software application and modify it to meet my needs.

I might need some help and so I collaborate with other free software developers across the net to build my special software application.

Maybe the modifications I've done are really nifty...and so I'm free to release what I've done and it might just help the IT department in the government of the country next door to me.

Maybe they come up with some really nifty ways to improve the application...and then I take their modifications and incorporate it into mine...and so one and so forth.

This can be done with free software because the software license gives us the freedom to do this.

With proprietary software these freedoms don't exist and therefore none of this is possible. At best I can go to the proprietary software vendor and "beg" them to include a certain feature...and then wait and see if by chance they've done it.

I also have to "beg" to see if they might give me a break on licensing fees as well. Maybe they will give me a break...maybe not. Or maybe they do "this time" to get me "hooked" on their software...and then when the inevitable "upgrade" comes out I have to pay full price for that.

Free software offers the possibility that folks in less developed countries can develop software that meets unique local needs.

Those needs may be as simple as having software written in their own native languages. For example there is no Microsoft software written in Dzongkha (the language of Bhutan). It isn't economically feasible for Microsoft to do that. They will never be able to recover in sales what they would spend on translation costs.

There is however a version of the GNU/Linux operating system that's been written in Dzongkha.
That means that the Bhutanese people are no longer excluded from the use of computers.

There are other neat things that can be done like the
[url=http://ltsp.org]Linux Terminal Server Project[/url]

All you need is one fairly good "shiny new" or reasonably new computer...and the rest of the computers running on the network can be "thin clients"....even old 486's.

This allows you for example, to computerize an entire classroom at very low cost.

Yes there is a "Windows Terminal Server", but you are required to pay licensing fees for each computer that connects to the terminal server...and licensing fees for the proprietary applications that you might be running.

LTSP deployments are going on right now in places like Brazil.

In fact the Brazilian government is in the process of making 52 million computers available for school kids...all running GNU/Linux.

My prediction is that in ten years time, Brazil will be one of the world's major centres of software development. From the "get go", Brazilian kids will be using software that they are "free to hack" ... and they will hack.

Meanwhile kids in North America will be too busy defragmenting their hard drives.

If you're really interested in having a discussion (and not simply making snide oneliners), have a look at this video of an address made by Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Centre...it's from the fall of 2006.

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8]Eben Moglen - Software and Community in the 21st Century[/url]

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Whereas, less developed countries like Cuba benefit from using open source software and inexpensive OS's like Linux and its variations.

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Cuba's support of GNU/Linux is still more rhetoric than reality. Those few Cuban radio stations that stream audio still do so with (yuk) Windows Media Player...often using the proprietary "MMS" protocol instead of "http".

The free software revolution in Latin America is being lead by the Brazilians.

[ 03 August 2008: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

First, I'm a huge fan of free software, open-source software, etc. Especially since I use it all the time. (Open office, VLC for watching avi's, etc.)

But the analogy with health care does not work. The reason is this: The state has a strong duty to provide free health care to everyone; moreover, health care is such a basic right, that the state has a duty to regulate this industry.

On the other hand, neither state nor anyone else has a duty to provide free open-source software to everyone.

It seems that the comic opera also known as the French State has gone entirely in the other direction from open source computing.

The Fall of France

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On 25 May 2009, the French Defense Department’s operational IT arm DIRISI signed a contract with Microsoft. The contract aroused consternation then and it arouses consternation still.

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The minor Union Populaire Républicaine Party (anti-European Union, anti-NATO) naturally was appalled. Its spokespersons claimed that an NSA Director had disclosed publically in November 2009 that NSA had participated in the development of Microsoft’s Windows 7.

“To utilise the Microsoft operating system at the breast of the Defense Ministry permits NSA to read as an open book our defense strategy and eventually to oppose a sovereign action of France. Given the domination that the American Empire exercises on the West, this decision effectively constitutes wilful submission, and we’re paying for the privilege to boot.”  “To top it off, Windows is the system the most susceptible to virus attacks. Let us recall that part of France’s air naval arm was incapacitated in [January] 2009.”

Of note here as well, as another example among many others, is the precipitous decline of nation states as soverign entities.  And to think there may have been times where many of us would have welcomed the decomposition of nationalism based and sustained within the zenophobic confines of national boundaries, but it seems as if Capitalism as a controlling mechanism has the ability to shit upon all such hopes.  It is capable of appropriating any desire and mutating it for it's own use.