I was watching Revolution OS (the BEST documentary, it's about the GNU/Linux and the rebels against SUN, Micro$oft and UNIX OS's) and they mentioned this "Letter to Hobbyists" where he ranted against the groups about "stealing software that developers slaved over" and crap. Go ahead, read it, he gets pretty ticked off, lol.
Click to view attachment

This Documentary inspired me about the Open Source Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. It's a great Documentary. Go ahead and google it.

"Rebel against the Software Totalitarism giant, because the war isn't won until the Redmond gates fall..." (just thought of that....lol )

The dash in Micro-Soft gives me serious doubts about this letter's validity.

I'm quite sure that's how it was called at first. Of course i can't find anything backing that up right now ( wikipedia), but if i'll do i'll let you know.

It WAS originally called Micro-soft, short for Microcomputer Software, but that was very short lived

Out of sheer boredom, I read the whole letter. I'd say his claims are fairly justified. A 90% software piracy rate is nothing short of pathetic. I don't know how exaggerated his claims are, but I'd be fairly pissed at the hobbyist market as well if their piracy reduced the value of my time to $2/hour. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Also, just exactly how does people pirating BASIC relate to the *nix subforum?

Maybe because much of what Mr Gates wrote in that letter was proven wrong by open source software?



Yes, it was written (Linux, for instance, and not only for the hobby market).



Everybody but him considered that normal at the time. Software was shared between people who had written it.



32 years later we can shout: YES, IT CAN BE DONE! And the result can be even better than what you have achieved, Mr Gates!

But most Open Source developers are 42 year old ex-hippies who live in thier moms basements and dont have real jobs.

cant agree more kiko,
if i spend my sparetime into programming something, i want to get paid for it
whats so bad for it? if you use it often, buy it

most of the opensource software is crap in all ways. 13 years development of gimp, and it still cant do more then for example paint.net and this project startet 2004. its also free.
i installed debian a few days ago and i wanted to install pidgin. well it needed 100mb of dependancies so it could install this little application. if gnu/linux doenst get some standards into his system, especially a basesystem with libraries which dont get an update every day, it will continue to suck like it does today.

But at the end of the day, where it matters the most, we have yet to see a free open-source OS (or distro) that is worthy to replace Windows as a desktop OS on a mainstream level.

It's a sad reality, really.

Those are just your opinions. There are hundred of thousands of people who use OSS and are perfectly happy with it.
And what about OSS on servers? Is that crap as well?

Uhm, it's not really 'just my opinion'.

It's a fact that (semi-)closed-source OS's are predominate in the desktop market.

OSS isn't crap, though, and Rockviech is very foolish for saying that.

However you wrote "we have yet to see a free open-source OS (or distro) that is worthy to replace Windows as a desktop OS on a mainstream level."
I have been using SUSE as my main desktop OS since 9.0 (2003), and at the time I already believed that SUSE was better than XP.
I know people who have been using a Linux distro as their main/sole OS since much earlier than 2003.

Much Open Source Software is a load of rubbish, but it only takes a few gems to validate the methodology.

What I don't like is certain quite prominent, and also militant members of the FOSS community (like that half-wit Stallman, and to some extent Mr. Self Important himself, Linus Torvalds) who believe that all software should necessarily be free and open source. It's all very well pointing out specific examples where developers have been paid for writing open source software, but that's not a viable methodology on a large scale.

That's not freedom, that's communism. Not that capitalism is any better.

Linus has never said anything like that, he is a pragmatist. And most definitely he isn't Mr. Self Important, he is very down to earth.



Since when "sharing with your neighbour" is "communism"?
True Christian could argue that it is a true Christian principle, for instance.

Personally, I think the open source movement is great. Not for the reasons that most other people think so though. I am not a tree loving hippie, who thinks that the entire world should share, and it is the responsibility of everyone to provide for his or her neighbor. Although, my business goal in life is to start a homeless community in the United States, but that is a different story.

I love capitalism. Only the strong survive is a great way of looking at things in my opinion. All of the open source software is doing one thing and one thing only in my eyes. That is driving Microsoft and Apple to enhance their software and end products. Competition is the root of all evolution. It creates fierce competition and an overall better end product for the consumer. Whether it is an Apple, Microsoft, or even a BSD (or linux) based system such as Solaris or SUSE.

We Europeans have become aware that capitalism is responsible for very evil things. I don't mean small or medium business.
My favorite model is socialdemocracy: it is still capitalism, but the State (should) control that the economy isn't solely in the hands of huge multinationals and the banks, and should take care of its weaker citizens.
With this kind of capitalism we have now, only a handful of people in the world are likely to benefit, certainly not you and me.

its not that i dont like the thought behind oss, but i hate how they realize their projekt and that whole gnu stuff. only projects like gnome, kde and the linux kernel itself have a hirarchy in the development, everyone can write stuff and patches for it, but the release itself is in the hand of linus torvald.

thats what i said, is missing the whole community and developers of gnu/linux. the problem we all have now are the dependencies, which are in some cases nearly never ending.

why isnt there a hirarchy for the whole basesystem of gnu/linux? thats what iĺl never understand. because of the case that everyone can fix and release again software, there are so many version out there of one type of library, which nearly doesnt differ from the original.

but you cant deny that most of the software for windows, which is also opensource or free as beer is in most case better than for gnu/linux. thats what i meant with most oss software is crap , compared to other free stuff out there.
i can only think that thats because of the always changing base where you develop your applications on.

it would be awsome of all the poeple who put so much afford into osx86 had put its afford into a newly linux/gnu system. chaning the unix dir tree, creating a good basesystem(maybe developing a framework basing on gtk or qt would be enough), an installing system (not that 10mb local and 200mb dependancies via web installing).
damn linux would rock this way well atleast im doing some of these parts currently.



im only at the point of view of a desktop enduser, so i cant say anything about that.

There's alot of flaws in the OSS OS world that make closed-source OS's more appealing... I think we're all intelligible enough here to come to our own conclusions on this. It all derives on what you mean by "better", and while the whole aspect of OSS is, in theory, better than CSS, the reality is quite different.

As you rightly say, it is a matter of how you perceive it. For me, Windows is a nightmare from too many points of view: activation (it seems that it pays better to use a pirated copy than a legal one), crashes, instability...
Underneath the surface, it is a total mess, a huge melting pot: the Registry, the DLL Hell...
You can't cleanly uninstall an application, and I have lost count of how many times installing/uninstalling software has crashed the OS (last time only 2 days ago).
OTOH, contrary to what has been said here, I find Linux (depending on the distribution) a very coherent and stable lot.
It is extremely rare that a problem in Linux crashes the OS beyond recovery.

Oh no you didn't! DONT EVEN COMPARE OPEN SOURCE/FREE SOFTWARE TO COMMUNISM! Com. FORCES you to share or you'll get thrown in jail!!!! The GPL does NOT make you share or distribute your software for free!!!!! Get over yourself! I'm a fellow OS maker, and I resent that!!!! (Im still working on my base system, made from linux)


Even though I'm American, i believe you all the way, lol!

True, true!

I didn't mean for this to get out of hand this way.... sorry. i just thought the letter was interesting!

Hey is still a better discussion than this crap!!

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?s=&...st&p=744559

nobody knows where this phsyco get all his info from!?

StiCMAN

What, Mr. 'I made the Linux kernel and all other systems are utterly rubbish'?

Yep. OK, you've never read any of his famous Usenet posts, have you?

I have yet to see a closed source application/a closed source os that runs native on at least 17 architectures.

i have yet to care about the other 16 architectures. How about you?

5 different architectures at home. What about your router or switch?

I think you have no clue about advantages and disadvantages of OSS or of UNIX, when I read the suggestion to change the UNIX dir tree I want to puke... changing to what? The crippled non-standard tree of OS X? No, thanks.

I also think all the bashing of OSS is funny, microsoft users wouldn't be in the net without OSS (freebsd tcp/ip stack anyone?). All the servers delivered with Mac OS X are OSS-projects. Strange my worthless free OS is able to read&write almost each and every filesystem, what about yours? There are so many points where your closed source software/os is ages behind... stop bashing OSS when you get so much out of it without even knowing.

Very good, pebcak.

I'm not going to hit all your points, but I'd also like to point out that OSS isn't all advantages and no drawbacks. As an example, going to your file system argument: you will never be able to use the kickass ZFS. Solaris and FreeBSD already have it, and Apple is working hard to implement it in Mac OS X. The most your precious GPL permits in Linux is a lousy userspace implementation of it, which provides completely unacceptable performance for a desktop user. OSS does have a few great things about it, but there are several huge drawbacks, so don't take that "we are better, no exceptions" snobbery attitude.

Most of you wrote about OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE, not Linux.

FreeBSD is not an opensource operating system?

And the "every os project is crap" attitude is so much better? I said there are many points, I never said overall... so many closed source software/operating systems benefit from opensource projects. People should stop being brats.

Here is the problem with open source operating systems like linux, they r not known to offer something unique in the desktop market.

An example:

Windows for games, and microsoft office.

Mac OS X for video editing and microsoft office or website designing and maybe even iworks.

Linux for.........general use only, not known for something special other than servers. OpenOffice though good can't compete in quality with microsoft office or iworks.

Linux developers need to create something that makes them unique in the desktop market.

I am surprised to read that from you, snakeeyes. How about stability, security (my best friend is being driven nutters by a virus he can't get rid of), ability to configure your OS the way you want, no serials, no activation (nightmare!)...All these are huge pluses in my book.



MS office runs perfectly well under Wine/Crossover, and it is overkill anyway for most users.

As to games, Linux has more than people tend to believe:

http://www.linuxgamingworld.com/games-catalog/

http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

http://games.linux.sk/

http://www.happypenguin.org/

(And tons more run under Cedega)



See above. As to OpenOffice it is more than enough for most users. Actually older Microsoft Office documents open better in OpenOffice than in the latest Windows Office (it isn't even compatible with itself!)



See my first paragraph. Besides openSUSE 11 is going to provide plenty of reasons to move to Linux.
Trouble is that people are lazy and ignorant.

I didn't mean this in a negative way, stability and security is great but mac os x offers stability and security as well. No serials and activation is true, but then again its not some killer feature u would change an OS for right? I mean we all can afford vista and mac osx here, no one here is that poor.

Cedega is good, but the problem is that those apps don't run natively on linux, I can wait for suse 11.0 my self, I have a brand new desktop with suse 10.3 right now and a laptop I am going to switch to suse 11 when its out.

Linux developers have made alternatives no doubt, but the thing is when I show people Mac OS X, its something everyone wants, when I show them Linux I don't get that same reaction. There must be a reason for that.

I do all my gaming in consoles so I don't need or care about windows and as for video editing, I couldn't draw a circle properly in microsoft paint so u can't really expect me to edit videos.

All I am saying is that linux needs professional software that runs natively and they should stop making things like others for example openoffice looks just like older microsoft office versions and that isn't cool. They should make something thats unique, mac osx is unique, it doesn't act or behave anything like windows does and thats what makes people want to use it.

Linux devs on the other side think that if we make stuff similar to what people r used to they will be more willing to switch. Linux should have its own styles and way of doing things.

You might have seen some people in forums that complain that linux is too different from windows so they stop using it, whereas mac os x is very different as well, but no one dares complain its different.

No serials and activation together with all the other benefits was more than enough for me.
Of course I can afford Vista, but why should I pay for crap?



Yes, but I have a friend who is capable of running games under Cedega so well that you don't notice the difference.



Here it is the exact opposite. I haven't been able to persuade one single person to have OS X installed on their computer, while there is a pretty large group of young people who use Linux.

Yeah I agree, no need to buy vista. Right now I can't wait for opensuse 11.0.

How come no body wants to use Mac OS X?

Who knows? They are simply not interested.
It could be because they never see one anywhere.
I am different because I spent 15 years of my life in the UK. The first modern age computer I used was a Mac (it belonged to a house mate).
I could see Macs in every large computer store.

pebcak, i have cisco routers you nub. I was never totally bashing OSS, a couple of my servers are running linux, i have no problems with them apart from the fact that when i update one service all the others break because of the stupid dependencies. Sure OSS is great in some areas, but when people start saying that OSS is the alpha and the omega or trying to compare OSS on the desktop with other commercial operating syte ms i cant help but laugh at thier ignorance, nowsure some peoplemay like to use linux or freebsd or solaris as thier main OS, good for them. And your point about filesystems, seriously man, who gives a {censored}. How many times in your life will you have to read from some obscure filesystem? For the average user (which is pretty much 99% of the market) OSS based desktops still have no advantage over commerical systems (apart from the fact that they are "free"), and for the other 1% ofcomputer users everything is free, why would you continue to use shitty, unstable linux when you can easily download os x or xp or vista for free, bypass activation for free, want to do photo-editing, why use crippled gimp when you can download photoshop or any other professional image editing software. same thing goes for openoffice and every other shitty copy OSS has tried to make of professional commerical software. Clinging onto the idea of free == better is just totally ignorant.

I am not trying to disagree with your argument, or with your opponent's argument in that case. Everything you said is right, for you, and not your opponent.

What I am getting at, is it depends on the user. Yes, your statements may correctly identify with the mob (the 99% of the user base), but let's not forget that the 1% of the user base is still a lot of users.

For instance, there are approximately 6 billion people living on planet Earth, let's be conservative and say every 1 out of 6 people have some kind of access to a computer, whether it be their own or one they can just use. So, 1 billion people times .01 (1%) is 10,000,000 people. Now in the scale of the 1 billion people, the 10 million people are not an awful lot. But, if you consider the hundreds of people you will come in contact with each day, and that 1 out of every 100 of those people will not be the typical user, you can really see how it could be beneficial to a significantly greater amount of people than one may actually forsee.

With that said, I am usually a major supporter of majority rules and democratic ruling (what is best for the mob, is best for all), but in the case of computer software and operating systems, it does not apply. There is way way way too many choices out there to say, "Hey world, this is what is best for everyone, and you will all use it!"

My 3 cents. I had an extra cent to give tonight...

I am not trying to say that Open Source doesnt work, I understand that some people prefer to use it over commercial based products, i just prefer to use something which i find more functional and stable.

Exactly.

By the way, I am not trying to call you out or anything, but shouldn't your signature say socialism. I understand the meaning of what you say, but my understanding leads me to believe that communism is were the state controls everyone and everything. So then, shouldn't communism be replaced with socialism, because socialism is were the state arranges and controls the equal sharing between everyone and everything (except the elite of course).

I may be wrong though...

which linux distro do u find unstable? not all open source software is bad though, firefox is the best browser, vlc and mplayer r great movie players, the problem is that open source developers try to imitate commercial stuff rather than innovate and create something new.

Linux is not a specialized platform? Not to the very least. Linux is a de-facto production platform of choice in film (visual effects, 3D, compositing, rendering). It is a very specialized field formerly claimed by SGI Irix. There is tons of ultra high end systems out there running on _nothing_ but Linux. Sure Apple is "good for video editing" with Final Cut etc. but if you want a really professional solution you will opt for FFI (flame flint inferno) and I'm sorry to inform you but it runs _ONLY_ on Linux platform (previous versions were also running on Irix). Rendering? Pixar releases a 64bit renderer only on Linux (and you are going to need more then 4gb RAM if you are going to render production shots). Crowd sim? Massive is Linux-only 64bit release.
Sure you can set up a garage animation and editing system on Os10 or Windows but if you look at 90% of hard core _production_ facilities out there you will find out they are running Linux (ILM, Pippet Studios, Weta etc. etc.) and develop custom proprietary software for their own pipelines. Tippet studio actually ditched OSX in favour of Linux on Apple hardware You can argue that desktop experience is better on Windows/OSX but you can _NOT_ argue that when it comes to mission critical professional big-budget visual productions anything can even come near Linux.
Would those guys chose Linux if it was "unstable"? Please.. You could say "yeah they use Linux because its Unix" but in truth they actually use Linux because its the most stable and feature rich operating system in the world. Those guys couldn't care less if its oss or not they use it because its rock solid, its the only platform that delivers those 4k frames with least stability issues. Why aren't they running their rendererers on Darwin (don't forget Apple's OS is actually 100% open source!)? Because of _stability_ most importantly, and speed less importantly, not because Apple hardware is "expensive".

Of course people can put what they want in their signature, but this comparison between open source and communism annoys me no end. How about a comparison between open source and brotherhood of men?



This post should be put as a sticky somewhere, as we have so many kids who talk nonsense about Linux and they don't have a clue.

Linux is feature rich and stable, I never said it wasn't. I don't think windows is good for any body, it sucks horribly, but linux devs should learn a few things from apple.

Apple knows how to offer a good desktop experience to people.

@ kiko

If your services break whenever you upgrade you are the nub. Yeah, OSS is so shitty. I mean Darwin is OSS, *BSD, OpenSolaris. Functional and stable? You ever worked on a windows machine? Everytime I have to sit on a windows computer I could run amok because it's many things but not functional and stable. Just because software is closed source or sold, it's not better. But at least 90% of the users work on windows machines, it has to be good, right?

There are advantages of Linux/*BSD on a desktop system too... e.g. a TRUE 64bit operating system and even flash works. Or maybe it's about not being limited? I mean you defend a commercial desktop which is not able to offer the choice about the focus system to it's users. Gimp may is hard to use for people coming from ps, but it's full 64bit and smp. You guys are still running 32bit binaries on 64bit machines, who is crippled? There a lot of apps using oss as a base Safari, Pixelmator, AdiumX or are open source, vlc, mplayer....

No advantages? More secure, more stable, more customizable, more user specific, free and truthfully for most people gimp, openoffice and firefox is enough. Yes, OS X is nice and pretty, OS X is stable but it's not the nonplusultra and it has one major flaw, most people aren't able to run it on their pc. Many people (that includes me) are not willing to buy a mac because of OS X, when they can have a decent desktop machine for half of the price. I won't discuss windows because it drives me nuts.

Not one of the desktops I used so far is perfect, I doubt there ever will be a perfect system. All of them have advantages and disadvantages.

In your last post you wrote a key sentence... you prefer something you think is more stable and functional, please do so. I prefer something I can mess with, something I can change and customize as deep as I want, something I can add something too till it suits my needs and wants and something that enables me to work on different architectures and with different filesystems.

I'm regulary pissed off by people who say it's all crap. I bet most of you use oss one way or another and I think it's very rude to be so "unthankful".

Don't worry. I didn't have you in mind.



QFE

I find this quite offensive since my choice not to use Linux is just that. You need to learn to be a bit less insulting, especially when somebody mentions your darling Linux, which seems to automatically put you into defensive mode.

I find your intervention in this matter very odd:

1)It was a discussion between snakeeyes and me. If anybody, he should have felt insulted.
2)In that sentence I didn't have in mind people who make an informed choice, of course. I had in mind the masses who use whatever OS is given to them, struggle with it (I had just talked by phone to a friend who has had problems for months because of a virus he can't get rid of) and yet they don't consider a change, exactly because they are too lazy and ignorant (to try and learn something new) and scared by any change in life.
Hardly anybody in this forum should feel offended, because we came here looking for a challenge and we wanted to learn (at least, if our motives were genuine).

I actually agree with Alessandro17 that most people r lazy and ignorant. I know people who can't move the windows task bar back to the bottom if u move it to the top and with people that stupid its no wonder a majority of the people still use crap like windows.