[Coco] OT: Vista and MS patent application, Linux

[Joel Ewy]

Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> ...
> Innovation is typically not a feature of free programs; instead it's all
> incremental development, just getting better and "stealing" features from
> other programs over time. Reactive development, with the developers often
> making money through employment as a developer, instead of going through the
> boom-bust cycle of selling it...where your job is coding, not selling. :)
>
> [snip]
>   
If by "typically" you mean something like "the percentage of free
program code that is innovative is small compared to the percentage that
is imitative" then I'd probably agree.  OHOH, I suspect that more real
innovation comes from the free / Open Source world than from the
commercial software companies, for the following reasons:
1.  More eyes, more hands, more brains.  The wider diversity of people
you have writing software, the more potential there is for really unique
ideas to surface.
2.  People who are writing software as a hobby, or in addition to their
paid programming work, have no economic incentive to be conservative
with it.  If it's "just for fun" (to quote Linus T.) then you can do
whatever you want, and conventional wisdom can go hang.  You have no
customers to please, no shareholders to displease, and nothing to lose
if it doesn't prove a complete success.  Maybe the fact that these
projects have no marketing department means that many people know
nothing about them.

All these cool new features Vista has?  I haven't heard of any yet that
sound truly innovative.  The reason it sounds cliche to say they've been
around in various X window managers for years is because they have. 
People feel the need to point this out with every new version of
MS-Windows.  Transparent Windows?  WOW!  I have that every time I boot
Damn Small Linux on some beat-up old cast-off Schmentium system.  3D
window manager?  It's been done.

I'm not saying M'Soft shouldn't be doing these things.  It's fine. 
Bring these ideas into the Windows world.  But don't go calling it
innovative.  Most of it falls firmly in the category of "Gee-whiz"
anyway.  Give me real innovations in functionality over eye-candy any
day.  With Linux Terminal Server Project (or just Linux and X) I can
turn a junk PC into a diskless X terminal for $0, which will allow me to
run OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, or whatever else I want
remotely.  That's innovative.  With Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall I
can turn a junk PC into a router/firewall/NAT gateway for next to
nothing.  That's innovative.  With OpenMOSIX I can turn a pile of junk
PCs into a load-balanced cluster.  That's innovative.  ROX Filer and
Zero-install are innovative.  UnionFS is innovative.  At least as
innovative as anything I've seen from M'Soft in the last two decades.  I
have to use and support MS-Windows.  I'm not saying Microsoft can do
nothing right.  It's only recently that Linux distributions like Ubuntu
have really achieved the seamless GUI user-configurability Windows has
had since 95.  But the Mac had it in '84, and they just stole it from
Xerox...

Now ROM BASIC was innovative.  If M'Soft would come up with an operating
system for the PC with basic functionality, but support for modern
hardware and software, and extra goo-gah features only as options
(there's your "modular" for ya), that boots in less than 10 seconds and
costs $20 - $40 a shot, even I might buy a copy.  Until then, I'll
continue to claim that ROM BASIC for the 8-bit micros of the '70s and
early '80s was Bill Gates' one and only truly great and innovative
contribution to the computing world.

JCE