He gives the story of Watson vs Sherlock. But what if sherlock was someone's open source/free project. What is the difference from the viewpoint of the "sharecropper" between having the rug pulled out from under you by a new piece of software that gets added to windows and a free version that someone develops. To the end user, they both look free (as in beer of course.)
He certainly didn't make his point, whatever it was.
One could point out that on controlled platforms one always faces the threat of competetion from the platform itself, and you can't fight back because the competeting app is shipped with the platform and has access to interfaces you don't know about. While on Free Software platforms at least everyone competes equally.
But that didn't make sense with his remarks about Sherlock and so on. If he wrote Sherlock for Linux he would discover that a crappy but
What is the difference from the viewpoint of the "sharecropper" between having the rug pulled out from under you by a new piece of software that gets added to windows and a free version that someone develops. To the end user, they both look free (as in beer of course.)
Exactly. If you're trying to sell the same piece of software to a lot of people, you can divide your costs among a lot of customers. But you're always at risk that someone will write something that fulfills the same requirements for free. Ev
"Are You a Sharecropper? If you're developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform"
"How Not to be a Sharecropper If you develop server-side software that runs on Unix (by which I mean any platform that runs bash and creates processes with fork()"
What about Apple's OS X, which runs on BSD-based Darwin? (An open source operating system.)
What about Safari, the browser created by Apple from the Konqueror Open Source project? They took open source code and made it better. An
If Sherlock was someones open source/free software, then it would not be distributed and "integrated" into the OS. Thus both apps would have to compete on fair grounds. On OS should be a totaly open and application agnostic foundations. An OS needs to have all of its internals available for anyone to build upon and not as a means for a monopoly to take over another part of the playing field. Look at how much MS is controlling and how much more they are taking. They "integrated" a browser to suck up that market and broke away from being standards compliant to lock 90% of the desktop market into using thier browser. They are now "integrating" media player to steal the market way from WinAmp and RealPlayer. They have now purchased an anti-virus app to "integrate" into the os to kill off McAfee and Norton. The sad thing is that Norton and McAfee have put all thier eggs into the MS platform and then MS does a move like this and will render Norton's and McAfee's offerings almost worthless. This is the major problem with a monopoly and this is why I don not support them. I am amazed at how many people continue to be blind to this fact. If people started moving to an OS that was open and agnostic to what applications a user wants to run, then the hardware and software vendors would follow and have thier products on those platforms in no time. They will go where the demand is. For the most part they have stayed with the MS platform because of the monopoly. Every new consumer PC that has been sold for years has only been allowed to have an MS OS on it. MS will not stop until they own every major IT market or we stop them. The government will not stop them because all MS has to do us up thier
bribes [opensecrets.org]
like they did during thier anti-trust case and they will be fine. Start to learn Linux and/or *BSD now. Get your friends and family members to do the same. Email hardware and software makers demanding support for Linux/*BSD. This is the only way to bring choice back.
Gnome is strict about what apps get to be part of the default desktop. That is why there are 1,000s of text editors, yet only one, gedit, is a part of gnome. It does what is needed. If a user wants more apps, then the USER gets to choose, not Gnome. This is also the reason for sites like 5th Toe [lyrical.net], which is for Gnome compliant apps that are not part of the default desktop.
People have demanded for a long time that Microsoft improve security and reliability. Adding AV to the OS certainly helps with that, at the price of hurting the existing providers.
The business of Microsoft "lock-in" with IE is nonsense. The only sites where I have troubles with Mozilla, Opera, or even older versions of Netscape is those run by Microsoft's own server products. I have yet to run into a website powered by Apache, Cold Fusion, Tomcat, J2EE implementations, or any of a hundred other produc
Is it the job of an OS to provide AV detection? What is wrong with MS just leaving it to Norton and McAfee? Those two companies have spent tons of money on R&D and keeping up with the latest viruses. Now MS will use thier monopoly to destroy the market for those two companies and remove competition and choice. However, I use Linux exclusively at home so I don't worry about getting viruses.
I do think that thanks to Mozilla being such a great browser that more sites are doing better. However, that
Although I can understand the argument of Netscape (free software) vs. integration of IE, what is so bad about an OS including a suitable anti-virus program if the cost is not significantly affected? It greatly increases security (100% of win users now have anti-virus software), streamlines services (norton and mcaffee can focus on research and sell content to microsoft), and reduces costs (1 purchase, no extra packaging, no redundancy, etc...)
In the anti-virus market, the real innovation is in finding and
Except Sherlock already existed for many years on the Mac OS - Sherlock 3 was to many a simple extension of the "Web Services" concept both earlier versions of Sherlock, Watson, and many other apps had been toying with.
I still have a Watson license... and every damn time I fire it up there's an annoying update notice... I can't use the app without it annoying me. Watson is free to innovate, but it's been stagnant for over a year now and I'm not sad Apple rolled a similar GUI Web Services app into the OS..
Unix is the worst operating system; except for all others.
-- Berry Kercheval
We're all potentially... (Score:5, Insightful)
He gives the story of Watson vs Sherlock. But what if sherlock was someone's open source/free project. What is the difference from the viewpoint of the "sharecropper" between having the rug pulled out from under you by a new piece of software that gets added to windows and a free version that someone develops. To the end user, they both look free (as in beer of course.)
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:2)
One could point out that on controlled platforms one always faces the threat of competetion from the platform itself, and you can't fight back because the competeting app is shipped with the platform and has access to interfaces you don't know about. While on Free Software platforms at least everyone competes equally.
But that didn't make sense with his remarks about Sherlock and so on. If he wrote Sherlock for Linux he would discover that a crappy but
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:1)
Exactly. If you're trying to sell the same piece of software to a lot of people, you can divide your costs among a lot of customers. But you're always at risk that someone will write something that fulfills the same requirements for free. Ev
Apple? What? (Score:1)
If you're developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform"
"How Not to be a Sharecropper
If you develop server-side software that runs on Unix (by which I mean any platform that runs bash and creates processes with fork()"
What about Apple's OS X, which runs on BSD-based Darwin? (An open source operating system.)
What about Safari, the browser created by Apple from the Konqueror Open Source project? They took open source code and made it better. An
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:2)
If it was an add-on for Gnome, the Gnome people could put a competitor into the framework/default install.
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:2)
Careful what you wish for (Score:2)
People have demanded for a long time that Microsoft improve security and reliability. Adding AV to the OS certainly helps with that, at the price of hurting the existing providers.
The business of Microsoft "lock-in" with IE is nonsense. The only sites where I have troubles with Mozilla, Opera, or even older versions of Netscape is those run by Microsoft's own server products. I have yet to run into a website powered by Apache, Cold Fusion, Tomcat, J2EE implementations, or any of a hundred other produc
Re:Careful what you wish for (Score:3, Informative)
I do think that thanks to Mozilla being such a great browser that more sites are doing better. However, that
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:0)
In the anti-virus market, the real innovation is in finding and
Re:We're all potentially... (Score:1)
I still have a Watson license... and every damn time I fire it up there's an annoying update notice... I can't use the app without it annoying me. Watson is free to innovate, but it's been stagnant for over a year now and I'm not sad Apple rolled a similar GUI Web Services app into the OS..