'Commercial Partners'

[Andy Green]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com>:
>> The existing one seems to have better metrics for assessing 
>> compliance, less danger and greater longer-term stability.
> 
> Well, maybe.  Unless the consequence is that we never reach the mass
> market at all, in which case Very Bad Things are likely to happen down
> the road.  Like, no video cards we can actually use at above VESA
> resolution.

I don't see any evidence for this for 2D.  The problems all seem to be 
to do with 3D acceleration hardware in the past, present, and presumably 
in the future.  And that in turn, like everything this thread touches, 
seems to come down in the end to patents.

>> They will want their encrypted Blu-ray and HD-DVD. 
> 
> We don't know that yet.  A ruinous format war that turns consumers 
> off both still looks like a fairly likely outcome.

IMO it is too sexy to die, but who knows.

>>                                    They already want 
>> their DVD now and that has to come by a dangerous contraband.
> 
> True.  I don't know how to solve that problem.

There is a licensed player for Linux that can be purchased, but this is 
just another sign of what I refer to below.

>> so lacking WMA is a dealbreaker for such folks.
> 
> How many of them do you think there are, as percentage
> of the population?

Fair and increasing amount.  Both iTunes and the other licensed 
traditional digital music download sites are sending out ONLY locked-up 
content that demands ownership of a Windows or AAPL OS and a portable 
playback device that was created by AAPL or pays license fees to MSFT. 
Every time you hear about a digital download, like the 1 Billion sent 
out from iTunes you're hearing about something that can't be played 
under Linux without being cracked and potentially violating laws in the 
US and Europe.  (They are cracked, it is not a technical problem.)  The 
problem is that having invested in these bogodownloads they act as an 
anchor to the existing OS, assuming the French can't save us.

>>> QuickTime is somewhere in the middle.
>> For people who got to trailers.apple.com Quicktime is a dealbreaker, not 
>> in the middle.
> 
> There can't be a lot of those, as Windows doesn't do QuickTime (at 
> least it didn't last I checked).  That holds the damage down to 5% or so.

As somebody else pointed out it does, but in case you meant 'out of the 
box', then this serves as an illustration of the lure of content, since 
stuff like HDTV res trailers at trailers.apple.com means Quicktime has 
quite good penetration on Windows boxes, I found this perhaps slightly 
dogdy breakdown for 2004

Macromedia’s Flash - 98%
Viewpoint Media Player - 64.3%.  (<-- possible dodginess)
Shockwave - 58.1%
Windows Media Player 9 - 57.5%
RealNetworks RealPlayer - 46.5%
Apple’s QuickTime - 43.1%

http://www.danavan.net/weblog/archives/bye_bye_quicktime.html

People who want that hot content like HDTV new movie trailers (and DVD 
playback) won't be told they shouldn't have it for the reasons you 
earlier deployed against telling people they shouldn't have mp3 -- and 
we can't provide it due to patent licensing.  This is why I said there 
is no end to that path of trying to make everyone happy, and that by 
defining winning as doing that, you can never win.

The basic schism is that you can't have a Free OS under liberal license 
that includes fundamentally proprietary, patent-protected technologies 
in a freely redistributable form unless the patentholders allow it. 
Patentholders like MSFT and AAPL have no motive to allow it, quite the 
opposite.  Patentholders like the DVD consortium are actively monetizing 
their patents in the form of licenses and will call Security if you 
suggest you get one for free that anyone can distribute and copy.  RHAT 
react to this fact by retrenching just behind the red line (as best they 
can assess it) beyond the range of attack and grow the OS outside of 
such patentholder influence as far as possible.

>> This just illustrates how fuzzy it is to define the distro on a "wanker 
>> perception" scale rather than objective criteria.
> 
> Still, the consequences of failure to do so would be a serious problem
> in the middle- to long term.  If we can at least hold the number of
> nontechie users who find Linux useless down to 1 in 10 or so we can
> avoid this.

The is little chance of achieving a 90% proportion of really nontechie 
users who even heard of Linux, let alone regard it as useful.  Quite 
possible 90% of such folks do not quite know what "windows" is. 
However... Linux is hidden away in PVRs and so on that a lot of people 
are using already.  Nokia 770 is another example, I guess many users are 
unaware they use Linux.  Maybe one day soon 90% of people will be using 
Linux daily just outside of the desktop-based paradigm, but they won't 
know it or of it.

-Andy

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