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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:06 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by davide.del.vento Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
If I may, you highlight the problem by ignoring my point. My point is that the lack of a stable, consistent, easily targetable platform for third parties is what keeps that software out of user's hands. Sure, if we had a billion desktop Linux users, I'm sure no amount of headache would come between revenue sources, but we don't. Therefore, don't you think that actually making it very easy for third parties to write and distribute their own (not necessarily open) software would yield a higher chance of getting them to throw a few resources at it? That's a rhetorical question btw :)
Take this example. A long long while back, I installed the Amazon MP3 downloader. Now, I don't even know if it works any more because I've long since switched to using a Mac to download music. But at the time, they had to independently package the same application for a number of different moving target "platforms". Only a small number of vendors (like Amazon) are going to bother with that effort, and perhaps because their own engineers want this to work :) And 6-12 months later, when the distros have revved, those packages no longer work because system libraries and other pieces have changed underneath. Sure, I can and did fix this for a while for myself on my own system by using compat libraries or building stuff from source...but users aren't going to do this, and vendors writing these apps aren't going to go rev them every 6 months just to stand still. No, they (rightly) expect that if you install a software application today, it's going to work in 6 months, or 3 years from now. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 10 minutes from now it had better still work.
We can go back to thinking the answer is that we ignore proprietary software, or non-distro stuff. That's fine. But that is why it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. It won't be the year of the Linux desktop until a user can download a piece of software built more than 10 minutes ago, and not by the distro in question, and expect it to just work. And sure, we can all go out and buy Macs, etc. etc. but that's not the answer either. Let me summarize it this way: the Economist article has a number of very valid and useful points that should not be ignored.
Jon.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:50 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Exactly - if the Linux community doesn't carefully analyse the arguments made by the Economist article, and think out how to prevent these problems, there is no chance for desktop Linux.
Even using the term desktop Linux is misleading - since there is no stable core API across distros and versions, there is really a huge proliferation of desktop Linux variants. That's great for adapting to unique user requirements, but only a fraction of this (perhaps Ubuntu) can support a third party application market.
The Humble Indie Bundle has been at the forefront of encouraging indie game developers to support Linux, and they have made some significant revenue out of Linux, but this is going to be limited by the installation hassles - I can't even get some Humble games installed on Linux, so I just reboot into Windows. The point is to play the games not to be a Linux administrator...
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:16 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] No, they (rightly) expect that if you install a software application today, it's going to work in 6 months, or 3 years from now. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 10 minutes from now it had better still work.It is not like this is not possible it just not promoted good enough ... something like glick2 Let me quote from the site:
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:30 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Seems to address most of your issues ... just no one uses it (yet?). This immediately raises the question of: why. Who's behind this project? Why haven't they offered some new goodies in glick2 format (a lot of people would like to run latest versions of GIMP or LibreOffice on three-year old distribution using something like glick2) ? The whole story looks promising, but it's in “too early to tell” stage. But thanks for the hint: the promises are intriguing.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:03 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
There were several similar systems (autopackage, various bundle implementations) but they've failed because they all need a critical mass of users to succeed.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 19:46 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
They _failed_ because their continued use went and hosed a bunch of systems of poor newbies who bought all the "you just have to double click" schtick and perhaps thought autopackage & friends were anything more than a fancy "do anything you like to my system" shell script.
And then their distributions support communities were unable to really help them because they'd been running "installers" that ran slipshod over the whole system.
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