One more reply on a very important point: On May 17, 1:40 pm, Dick Wall <[email protected]> wrote: > This also reinforces the problems of selling Linux to people. Since no > amount of open source effort can (legally) make Linux able to play > fairplay videos (or music), or NetFlix movies, to name but a couple, > of course that's going to put some people off buying it. This is not a > "these companies should support us" play, this is a "why do these > companies actively discriminate against us" question. The numbers here > should make it clear that a Linux Netflix player, for example, would > find more potential machines to run on than the iPad has (both sales > last month, and massive number of sales in the 2.5 years since > netbooks started taking off) yet not only does such a player not > exist, there is no way to actually write one. Mono has added the video > support necessary to play videos using Silverlight, but the DRM is > still held hostage so it cannot do so. Do you see where my (and others > in the OSS community) frustration comes from?
Indeed. This is exactly what Eric S. Raymond was writing about in "World Domination 201" <http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/world- domination/world-domination-201.html>, which I've mentioned before. His proposed solution was that a foundation with money and lawyers behind it was needed to license codecs on behalf of Linux users everywhere. He unfortunately overlooks DRM as part of this (it's weird -- DRM appears early on in the article, but once he gets into the proposed solution, he doesn't mention it again), and as we've covered, DRM appears to be the critical problem. One other thing about ESR's essay. He wrote it in 2006, anticipating that the move to 64-bit OSs made for a "do or die" time for Desktop Linux. In fact, the abstract on his "essays" page reads: "This paper, written with Rob Landley, explains why 2008 is a deadline for popular Linux acceptance on the desktop, and examines the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve that." Clearly, the deadline has been missed, although the importance of 64-bit may have been less critical than it appeared at the time. On the other hand, nobody back then would have predicted the rise of such tightly controlled platforms as iPhone OS, nor their manifest popularity. --Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
