Francis Earl wrote:
On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 15:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Of course there is: provide a stable interface for drivers and cooperate
with instead of subverting the vendors that try to improve your product.
This has already happened. Greg Kroah-Hartman is leading up work to
ensure it, however they still will not cater to proprietary venders.
An interface is agnostic to what is on the other side, which is the
point of it being an interface. And going out of your way to not work
with certain others is anticompetitive behavior.
Industry can only rape users if there is no competition. Users choose
what they buy. The way to help them is to increase the available choices.
There are plenty of choices out there, users don't investigate choices
though, they go with whatever is cheaper, or whatever their friends and
co-workers are using.
There are no choices that include GPL'd code and code that can't be
redistributed under the same terms in a combined work - pretty much by
definition. That's made more money for the monopoly than any of their
own marketing moves.
Red Hat is a multi-billion dollar company today because it stood by its
beliefs, Microsoft is running scared, and are in Asia right now begging
the Chinese government to pay for Linux so that software doesn't become
entirely valueless.
I'm sure MS understands perfectly why Linux can't include everything.
Why cater to the companies that don't get it yet just because users
whine and run to a distro that does cater to them?
You can't choose to cater/not cater. You either present a usable
interface and give the user the freedom to decide what to put on the
other side, or you don't. The rest is just side effects.
> They're still
reporting bugs on FOSS software, they're still working on FOSS code, who
cares. Let those with a vested interest in Linux do what they think is
right, and let the Ubuntu's of the world that just package the result
worry about trying to get Linux onto your Mom's desktop.
The particular details of what makes one users system work today aren't
the point. The point is whether the user is free to use any components
or not.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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