> However, no, I don't think the average person cares whatsoever about the
> approval process, drm (beyond playing their mp3s on another device) or
> anything else to do with this. I think this is evident in the sales
> figures, let alone if you talk to the average non-geek about it.
Agreed. That's the scary part and the reason why the FSF is really
concerned about all this iPhone/iPad business. The computer world
is moving away from traditional computers (laptop/desktop) where people
who care about their freedom are well-served, towards smartphones and
web-clients which use far-away internet services to store and compute
(Google Docs, Facebook, you name it). It is becoming very difficult to
keep control over your own documents, data, ...
> I am not an apple fanboy, I use linux nearly exclusively. However, we
> just have to look around to see which way the wind is blowing, and I
> think our "app store" is a great feature the FSF should be using to
> counter apple's marketing. "Need to edit photos? There's a .deb for that".
I can't imagine the FSF advertising such a thing, but Ubuntu could.
> This is all about marketing, not hardware or software or anything
> else. The consumer is taught to love these things, that they are
> a sexy sexy thing to own. Nothing else matters beyond perhaps price
> and availability.
Actually, the hardware is well-designed (maybe not from a hardware-guy
perspective, I wouldn't know about that, but from a user perspective
it's small light, sufficiently powerful, with good battery life); and
the software is also similarly well designed: it seems to be
sufficiently reliable, it's usually very reactive, consistent,
predictable, flexible enough for many/most uses, yet minimalist enough
to get up to speed very quickly.
They're not the only ones who can do things right, but there is some
real quality behind the marketing: marketing alone is never sufficient.
> Except to geeks. I agree it is our place to talk about it and make
> a fuss, but I don't expect that will change anything, and we will
> march further and further down this road of closed fascist
> software distribution.
If it were only for the device, I wouldn't care so much. The problem is
that it is linked to a change in distribution of things like music,
books, videos, which have turned from being physical objects, to being
purely electronic and with DRM several important uses become impossible
(and often illegal, thanks to all those new brain dead copyright laws).
> However, hopefully someone else will be marching in the other direction,
> maybe it is android, maybe it is openmoko or someone similar. It is
> windows vs linux all over again, but now on the mobile side, and with a
> different competitor.
I wouldn't count on Android: it's open source and couldn't care less
about users's freedom (at least most/all Android phones seem to follow
similar locking ideas as the iPhone's, so in the end you end up just as
free as if it were an iPhone).
> You notice you can't buy a netbook running linux anymore at major
> stores?
Yes, the companies who were selling them have discovered that it's not
good business (they got *really* high return rates). Two reasons for
that:
- GNU/Linux is not good enough at advertising itself so currently to
most people. Where Apple manages to survive the "oh no, this only
runs on Windows so it won't work on my machine", GNU/Linux tends
not to.
- GNU/Linux systems still aren't nearly as user friendly as they'd need
to be for that kind of market. Windows may not be better, but that's
compensated by the awesome number of people around you who have some
knowledge of it and can help you out when you have a problem.
Basically, when a user has a problem, there are 3 possible cases:
- he's using Windows, in which case he'll blame himself and look for help.
- he's using Apple, so he'll blame the fact that what he needs is
unjustly favoring Windows.
- he's using GNU/Linux, in which case he'll clearly lay the fault on
this Open Source idea.
Stefan
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