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Sourceforge links to a rather extensive report on FOSS by an individual named Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who describes his project as: ...to take a brutally honest look at the failures of the open source community and demand that we begin to recognize them instead of continuing to ignore the parts that aren't working correctly.
This is the first step in fixing some of the problems that frustrate us all as GNU/Linux and *BSD users.
Maybe it's time for a great re-examination of our processes and attitudes, and think about what needs to be done to create great software instead of continuing to perpetuate old mistakes on the basis that tradition, politics, rhetoric, and dogma are more important than critical thinking. Interesting excerpts below the fold.
The Business Model: It is indeed very difficult to be profitable by selling support services associated with free, open-source software. The individual customer is unlikely to be willing to pay, and the corporate penetration of Linux is mediocre, especially in North America, where Red Hat would be the only Linux trusted for large-scale deployments, with a second choice being Novell.
Mandriva is left as the only purely European Linux vendor, struggling for profitability while the recent releases 2007 and 2007.1 Spring seem to be less buggy than usual. Hype vs. real needs:The lack of focus on basic user needs is deplorable. We can have spinning cubes in Linux, yet Evolution is unable to provide with visual notification when new mail arrives. Even Microsoft is better at that. Freedom and myths:GNU/Linux (the way Richard Stallman likes to call it) is primarily about freedom, so that a Linux user should ideally refrain from playing MP3, MPEG, AVI, WMV or WMA files or streams. He or she should also not be using closed-source software such as Acrobat Reader, Flash, RealPlayer, or maybe Opera too.
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There are not so many heroes in the real life. Probably 90% of the individual users are using what should be called "illegal codecs" (some small distros that are not backed by any company can even provide them out of the box), and some corporate users (and some of the individuals too!) have chosen to pay for the commercially-licensed players offered by Mandriva, Turbolinux, and Linspire.
Freedom is too a matter of choice. Practical choice, not revolutionary programs. This makes the "purified" gNewSense distro sponsored by FSF a political product, and nothing more. The Awakening: When something is broken (power management), they don't fix it, but when something works (sysvinit), they're trying to break it. I am afraid this is the way Linux works nowadays. Maybe they need a different way of awakening to discover what is really important... The lost battle of the GPLv3:
I am one of the believers in the idea that the BSD licenses and the closely related MIT/X11 license are the true promoters of freedom in software, and not the [GPL]...
What resembles the most with the GPL is the way the Communist governments in Eastern Europe started the social reform after 1945, inspired by the Bolshevik ideology: only the poor should have access to the available resources, the rich shouldn't have anything and they should go to jail and to detainee camps!
The way the GPL denies any proprietary usage of the licensed code looks really Bolshevik. Good stuff.
posted by Noel Le @ 11:05 PM | Free Culture Movement
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