Once again a Linux zealot scares the masses away. Letting somebody know they need to "get a little backbone" is not the most constructive way to attract people to a new platform. I'm on your side here being an avid fan/user of Red Hat personally and trying to encourage it's use professionally. Judging by Mike's comments about his opinion on the fact the he does not believe it's the appropriate time to go after the desktop market, it's clear that Red Hat also believes this.
Red Hat knows better than anyone which direction they should go in from a business stand point. I was just trying to give my opinion as a user who would like to see things go a certain direction. I do know that there are many other Red Hat users who feel the same way so I'm not alone here. In any event, thanks all for the input. Todd -----Original Message----- From: Jef Spaleta [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 9:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 11:17, Todd Booher wrote: > Personally, I think you guys are selling yourself short in this > market. People (including myself) are really looking for an > alternative to closed source software for our daily computing needs > and feel that red hat is very close. shrug I use open source software for all my daily NEEDS right now, unless its mandated to me to use something else by my job. But when I have a choice to get something done i use linux(i leave it up to you to figure out which linux distro). But digital entertainment isn't a NEED. games, movies and music and a good chunk of the crappy digital multimedia universe are entertainment based and have nothing to do with NEEDS. I can just as easily turn all the computers off and play with a bag of marbles instead when i NEED to be entertained. > As for the philosophical reasons, being true to the GPL is > commendable, I just wish their was another way to 'have our cake and > eat it too." There is something you need to understand. Revolutions are more about self-sacrifice than persistantly whining to people to give you what you want. If you want to support alternatives you have to stop supporting the status-quo. The patent encumbered multimedia codecs are what is standing in the way of open source multimedia. Stop using those codecs...show a little backbone...show a little self-sacrifice. Go buy a crappy ogg capable portable player....donate money to xiph.org's codec projects. Think about this...where would we be if MS had patented the Word document fileformat? Don't laugh...the US patent office, isn't exactly the most forward thinking of organizations...im sure MS could have patented all its document fileformats if it wanted to (and will in the near future). Throw out all the GPL and GPL-like licenced code out there that would be affected by that change...where does that leave the larger open source community in terms of compatibility with MS Office? Would we really have usable open source applications out there that could legally handle those patented file formats? Personally i'd think we be better off if MS had patented their file formats...we'd have had an open standard replacement agreed on by now for open source documents. Just as we are seeing the ogg vorbis become the open standard for music...and hopefully soon xiph's ogg tarkin video codec will stop being vapor and be a real alternative for video. for open source to succeed on the desktop...there is a need for open source multimedia codecs. MS pushed their own codecs for years...apple pushes theirs. Open Source needs their own open technology, relying on other people's technology to underpin the open source desktop is a losing argument in the end...when MS and apple and others like thompson with mp3 (the jury is out on real...the helix player has merit, but the codecs are still closed) start encombering their technology even more to lock out the open source competition. It will not work that way. Something like the vorbis collection of open codecs are the ONLY way to succeed at this world domination thing, in the end. And Red Hat's management seems to be smart enough to gauge both market demand, the legal issues and the important technical issues. I'm not very fearful that Red Hat won't still be around to build a kick ass open source consumer desktop product, when all the pieces are ready. I'm sure there are a lot of people at Red Hat salivating at the idea of a real consumer desktop "product" in the future...in fact I see the ramped up new RHL development cycle changes that focus on new tech faster, as a way to push desktop development ahead with a certain timeline in mind for a home user product. The next couple of years will be interestingly painful to watch. But like I said I for one get all my daily computer NEEDS done in linux right now. I might not be able to do online banking with Quicken, or play all those FPS games that windows has..but i get done what i NEED to get done. -jef"16 gigs of oggs on disk in the bossogg jukebox"spaleta -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
