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By xjlittle at 2006-12-16 22:11
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Free and Non-Free, Developers and Users
What do Linux users want? What do Linux developers want? What do all Linux distributions want?
Let's examine the first question. What does any user of any technology product want? They want it to do what everyone else's will do: play music whether it's streaming or on their local hard disk, play videos in the same manner as music, read email, browse the web, generate photo albums and so on. And they don't want to read a book or search for hours on the web about how to install the software, deal with dependencies and all of the other things we frequently see when trying to get an application to work.
Taking this a step further they want their computers to do this in a format that is available to them. That means mp3, quicktime, wmv and so on for music and videos. That also means doing these things without a big hassle. These formats are are readily available for Linux. So what's the problem?
What do Linux developers want? They want the operating system stable and they want to provide the users with what they want – up to a point. That point is where the free and non-free (patent encumbered) software starts to affect all of us. The developers only want to use free software (patent unencumbered) to build the distribution. The users for the most part don't care about such things and they certainly don't want to hear a lot of bickering about it. They want the computer with the software to just work with the formats that are readily available to them.
What do distributions want? Given the many statistics, posts and articles about increasing Linux desktop usage, growth patterns and all of the other data available, distributions want more users. This is the rub. At this point it becomes a marketing question. How does any product get more people to use it's product? Making it cost less is not an issue here. Ease of use however is a very strong issue.
Making Linux easier to use with readily available multimedia formats puts us squarely in the non-free software arena. Without question developers control what the distribution contains in the form of any application that is included. How then is this conflict between what users want and what developers want going to get resolved so that Linux gains even more ground in desktop usage?
There is no pat answer to this question. I have ideas as I'm sure many of you do. How about not including the non-free software but putting the instructions on what packages to use to accomplish certain tasks in the installation documents and the software in the repositories? Better yet package that software together and make it a one package scenario. I'm sure that there are many ways to accomplish this task so that users find it much easier to get the setup that they want and need for their everyday computer usage.
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Another thing Id like to point out is that we are developing completely free/open and easy methods for most of was previously is in the non-free software arena (e.g., codecs: wmv9, mp4; drivers: nvidia-3d is in infancy, ntfs write is reliable/stable, open drivers for loads of wireless chipsets, including atheros, conextant, broadcom, intel, and others have either been reversed engineered or petitioned for or both). The primary job of the distro is to implement these in an unobtrusive way. That said, as new patent-encumbered technologies arise, free/reverse-engineered implementations will always be at least a small step behind.
Distros like Xandros and Linspire should have no problem with that since they can pass the cost on to their customers. End users should be able to install them if the owners are willing to grant them free (as in beer).
The "free" distros should concentrate on making it easy for end users to insert them, but they should not be including them in their packages.
Another thing Id like to point out is that we are developing completely free/open and easy methods for most of was previously is in the non-free software arena (e.g., codecs: wmv9, mp4; drivers: nvidia-3d is in infancy, ntfs write is reliable/stable, open drivers for loads of wireless chipsets, including atheros, conextant, broadcom, intel, and others have either been reversed engineered or petitioned for or both). The primary job of the distro is to implement these in an unobtrusive way. That said, as new patent-encumbered technologies arise, free/reverse-engineered implementations will always be at least a small step behind.
You are correct-things are much easier in many ways than what they used to be. A heartfelt thanks to the maintainers and the people who setup the repositories so that most and in many cases all of the dependencies are readily available. However finding or knowing what you need sometimes is not so easy. The ipw2200 driver is a good example of this. There are two pieces to this-a module and firmware. The module is included in the kernel. I've read several posts though where users were frustrated at trying to figure out what was missing and how to get it.
I did not mean to imply the Linux developers are in any way behind with the development of drivers free or non-free. Frankly I think that they do an execellent job of staying up with newly released hardware.
Distros like Xandros and Linspire should have no problem with that since they can pass the cost on to their customers. End users should be able to install them if the owners are willing to grant them free (as in beer).
The "free" distros should concentrate on making it easy for end users to insert them, but they should not be including them in their packages.