| |||||||||||||
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation)2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation)Posted Dec 14, 2011 20:36 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)In reply to: 2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) by geuder Parent article: 2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation)
You can buy N9's instead -- they will last you longer! (And are really, really wonderful. Although my N950 is even more wonderful, for me.)
More on topic, Bruce Willis is definitely right here.
If anything, he's underestimating how problematic 2011 will turn out to be, with the defection of Nokia and Intel and the disappearance of Sun.
Nokia was nurturing this whole ecosystem of smaller open source companies around Maemo and MeeGo, but now they have decided that instead of that being a success factor, the reason MeeGo failed was involving third party contractors, instead of doing everything in-house. I expect a lot of these companies to get into trouble in 2012. There's no way anyone is going to make money developing a virtual keyboard for MeeGo anymore.
Tizen is even more still-born than WebOS or MeeGo, if only because Samsung has always had the philosophy of doing everything in-house, sharing nothing, but also because Tizen is already making mistakes like assuming that Qt is just a widget toolkit, which can be replaced by something like EFL. And I'm seeing zero real investment in any area of Tizen.
OpenDocument was dealt a big blow when Oracle fired all OpenOffice people -- not to mention that losing all those developers for OpenOffice must be a hit -- no matter how upbeat the news about LibreOffice is presented. And yes, OpenDocument is important for the free desktop.
MeeGo's death means, basically, that the last chance to get real devices based on a open-source, Linux-based platform in the hands of paying consumers is gone. That chance we've blown -- in my opinion in no small measure thanks to infighting within people working on MeeGo. Just remember Arjen van de Ven's idiotic "remember, this is NOT a MeeGo device!" post on LWN when the N9 was finally announced.
And that means that I expect that organizing conferences like the Desktop Summit will become a lot more difficult, when there are no rich companies, like Intel and Nokia, that have a real interest in the Linux Desktop anymore.
Sponsorship for organizations like KDE e.V. and the Gnome Foundation will be more difficult. Less sponsorship means less sprints means less work done.
And finally, all the ear-splitting whining by hidebound fossils with chalk instead of red blood in their veins about all the wonderful new stuff free software's flagship projects like KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu have released this year makes the whole free software "community" feel like a horrible, soured, stagnant place to be, instead of a hotbed of innovation and just plain fun. Think of what that does for all our efforts to find new participants!
No, looking at the big picture, not a good year.
(Log in to post comments)
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 14, 2011 21:21 UTC (Wed) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]
Apologies for my own whining...
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole desktop computing paradigm is shifting, with most casual users heading to mobile and online solutions, which, as you point out, are not open and have to a large extent reinvented the wheel rather than building on existing work. The huge economic crisis is certainly dampening the mood as well.
However, there is still going to be a nucleus of people that have to do real work with computers. I do expect free software to make slow progress in this group. The coming explosion of extraordinarily cheap and hackable computers (Raspberry Pi etc) may also help to open up a lot of hardware.
And as Bruce says: Debian is still plugging away.
Happy holidays...
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 2:10 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The coming explosion of extraordinarily cheap and hackable computers (Raspberry Pi etc) may also help to open up a lot of hardware. It remains to be seen what the consequences of Raspberry Pi specifically will be. The custodians of that project seem intent on silencing any discussion of openness: even though one might accept assertions that there is little practical benefit to be gained from knowing what the internal architecture of the proprietary video functionality is, there are serious questions about maintenance and sustainability raised by people like Alan Cox who deserve somewhat more than a brush-off and easily made assurances that binary blobs will be made available in a timely fashion for kernel updates. And from various oblique remarks from other communities one gets the impression that the exercise is some kind of loss-leader for Broadcom, right up until the point when various vested interests (do I have to name the corporation most likely to be affected?) intervene and attempt to subvert/direct the project to serve their own ends. That isn't to say that a lot of people won't buy Raspberry Pi as a very cheap gadget for doing stuff that they otherwise might be spending a fair amount more money on, which itself could be seen as a success for technology proliferation, but I have my doubts that the exercise will be sustainable. Naturally, other chipset vendors will pitch products at low prices, maybe even profitably, and we can only hope that some of them produce hardware that can be sustainably maintained indefinitely, not just for as long as the vendor deems necessary.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 5:04 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
for this to be a loss leader for broadcom they would need to be pricing this differently than they do for anything else.
while I don't like binary blob drivers, there are currently no fully open video drivers in the embedded space, so would you rather have the raspberry pi with binary blob drivers or no raspberry pi at all?
some people would rather have nothing rather than something with 'bad' drivers. I am not in that camp.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 13:03 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] for this to be a loss leader for broadcom they would need to be pricing this differently than they do for anything else. At least in terms of the SoC pricing, they are apparently selling them below the usual price for the quantities involved. One of the obstacles for the open hardware movement is getting low quantities of components at reasonable prices. For example, the GTA04 device which replaces the Neo FreeRunner is expensive partly because they cannot commit to large volume production. while I don't like binary blob drivers, there are currently no fully open video drivers in the embedded space, so would you rather have the raspberry pi with binary blob drivers or no raspberry pi at all? I don't really have an opinion on whether I want the device at all. For a short window of time, my Intel desktop chipset was probably dependent on binary-only driver support, although I suppose that the driver converged once more with the published sources quite quickly, and one does what one needs to do to get one's hardware functional, but depending on binary drivers can be very inconvenient in my experience. We can only hope that open drivers eventually show up. Perhaps AMD's offerings and the embedded market might start to overlap a bit more.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 5:37 UTC (Thu) by gnu (subscriber, #65) [Link]
> The coming explosion of extraordinarily cheap and hackable computers
> (Raspberry Pi etc) may also help to open up a lot of hardware.
I am afraid, Raspberry Pi has a lot of proprietary hardware components as well (from Broadcom). I haven't seen any documentation of the main CPU on their website yet. I will be happy to be proved wrong. Without such information, I don't really buy the idea of "hackable computers".
One of the smallest and cheapest computer that runs GNU/Linux right now is the Beaglebone from TI. Sure, it also has some propreitary components like the 3D graphics. But most other parts are open, entire Technical Ref Manual is online.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 16:16 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
how do you define 'hackable computers'
if you define it as people being able to write new drivers for it, then the proprietary stuff is a problem.
however, if you look at a slightly wider picture than just the low-level drivers, the fact that everything else on the system has the source available and can be modified, and the machine is cheap enough for people to have their own and therefor not have to worry about breaking the family computer and interfering with other people, then this is very hackable.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 16, 2011 13:48 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
After all, consider the machines these are explicitly modelling themselves on, the Spectrums and C64s and Ataris and BBCs that launched the microcomputer revolution. These things had no publically visible schematics, the OS was closed and no-source-available, the language interpreter similarly, hell on the C64 almost all the hardware was undocumented. That didn't stop people: they picked it apart and wrote books about it and soon were doing amazing wizardly things with that mass of undocumented code.
My only worry is that the hardware even in a simple thing like the Raspberry Pi might be too complex for interested third parties to pick apart like that, or (worse yet) people who pick it apart might get hit with lawsuits. (Can you imagine what would have happened to the microcomputer revolution if Sinclair and Commodore and Acorn had had the same inclination to sue people for reverse engineering as some hardware companies have these days? There wouldn't have *been* a microcomputer revolution.)
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 16, 2011 17:47 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] It's worth noting that Commodore published as a general-availability item the Programmer's Reference Guide, which had (at least some) information about directly driving the SID and the VIC-II (including mentioning tricks like using the raster interrupt to get more than eight sprites at once), connector pinouts, and so forth. But yes, picking apart a modern graphics or sound chip would likely be a rather more... daunting endeavour than picking apart the VIC-II or the SID.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 16, 2011 20:01 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
while it didn't have a circuit diagram down to showing the individual caps on the motherboard, it did have quite detailed information on how the chips connected to each other and how to program them.
It didn't have the source for the OS, but it did have instructions for how to switch the ROM completely out of the address space and run whatever you wanted on the bare hardware.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 17, 2011 22:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
True. I'd forgotten that lovely contraption. But it wasn't long after that that people had cycle-accurate information about the SID chip, enough to fix the bugs in the book and annotate it extensively. Do that with a modern graphics card.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 17, 2011 15:35 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
The BBC Microcomputer and the Acorn Electron (and various derivatives) had their circuit diagrams published in their respective Advanced User Guide and in various datasheets. You didn't get the internal details of the ULA chips (although people are aiming to deconstruct them, just as has been done for the Spectrum fairly recently), but you got all the details of programming those chips via the memory locations corresponding to the externally exposed registers. You also got a fair amount of information about things like the system bus, interfaces, along with workarounds for various interfacing issues. I've seen circuit diagrams for various peripherals, including ones which may not have been sold to the public, and the only thing in doubt when considering the more formalised notion of sharing that we have today is whether these works were intended to be widely distributed and used. Certainly, some of these designs were adopted by third parties, products made from them were sold openly and widely, although I don't know what the licensing arrangements would have been, if there were any agreements in place at all.
It's true that the software was proprietary and Acorn did prevent someone publishing a book which contained a disassembly listing of their system software, and perhaps the largest regret is that the UK government didn't seek to mandate an open standard, even though that would have been very forward-looking at the time. These days, open source software and open standards are widely accepted and embraced, but it is the closed nature of hardware that often creates the biggest obstacles to having a completely open system.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 16, 2011 19:53 UTC (Fri) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]
Clarifying/adding to my comment about hackable low-price computers. We have an expanding market of very cheap devices whose point is to be hacked, modified and reused in innovative ways. In this game, properly open systems will be at a huge advantage and I would expect them to win out (e.g. Arduino, Linux in embedded systems).
However, other posts are possibly correct that the Rasp. Pi itself will not be entirely open.
more Linux phone whining... Posted Dec 14, 2011 21:50 UTC (Wed) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
> You can buy N9's instead -- they will last you longer!
I could, but I don't want to. I typed my comment above on my N900 on the bus, do you think I would have done that on an N9? Unfortunately some hardware properties can still not be done in software...
> Although my N950 is even more wonderful, for me.
I would buy one if I could. I thought about it when it was announced, but I decided to prefer a family life before hacking every night & weekend to qualify for one.
more Linux phone whining... Posted Dec 14, 2011 22:05 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yes, the n950 keyboard is in important reason for me to use that phone instead of the N9. But Harmattan MeeGo's virtual keyboard is really extremely good -- and I tend not to bother with the physical keyboard of the N950 even when using the terminal app a lot of the time!
more Linux phone whining... Posted Dec 15, 2011 17:38 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
The n9 keyboard is a fine soft keyboard, if any can be said to be, but it's no n900 hardware keyboard!
A lot of things in the n9 feel very "first release" and don't seem likely to get fixed. A related example: You normally don't have arrow keys on your keyboard and so there's no way to move the cursor without tapping, which means you're often left trying to stick your fat fingers in *just the right place* to delete a mis-typed character. At least the n900 had a stylus.
The n9 is a far more practical *phone* than the n900, but not nearly as nice a computer. From its "one big list of unsorted icons" launcher system, compared to four desktops of custom icons and a categorized menu, to the rather clunky way window management is handled, the n9 has a lot to disappoint an n900 fan.
At least it never takes me 20+ seconds to answer the ringing phone due to UI lag. That's something.
more Linux phone whining... Posted Dec 16, 2011 19:09 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
4x the amount of RAM does that.
(Typed on my N9 with its wonderful software keyboard. The N950 with its hardware keyboard is lying in a drawer, forgotten. I know I'll get hate for this.)
more Linux phone whining... Posted Dec 16, 2011 20:05 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Not hate... But you might be able to sell your N950 for a considerable sum. When push comes to shove, these two devices really did deliver on their promise.
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 16:45 UTC (Thu) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link] Bruce Willis?
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 15, 2011 18:51 UTC (Thu) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]
Nathan Byfield ?
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 16, 2011 13:30 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] Slartibartfast?
2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments (Datamation) Posted Dec 17, 2011 22:43 UTC (Sat) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]
"And finally, all the ear-splitting whining by hidebound fossils with chalk instead of red blood in their veins about all the wonderful new stuff free software's flagship projects like KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu have released this year"
I am a KDE user and I have complained a bit, so I do share some guilt here. But I don't think I'm a hidebound fossil and I could be convinced to keep an open mind on the innovations. However, as a user, the whole kde4 introduction has been disruptive. Not because my favourite non-standard way of doing things was changed but because quite basic work-essential components were genuinely degraded (examples: kaddressbook, printing). Things are a lot better now, but still not there yet.
I think a lot of the criticism that things like the semantic desktop are receiving reflect the associated regression in the usability of the rest of the suite (although the regression is not always caused by the innovation). If there were no disruption of their work, I don't think many people would be complaining.
|
|||||||||||||