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Linux as a decent and usable desktop has been around for...What? Maybe 2 years? Not more than that. But now more and more people try it out and become converts.

not entirely...

It depends or your perspective. I first got into Linux with RedHat 5.2 It was far prettier (enlightenment etc), more powerful and faster than Windows 98. It pretty much equaled if not bettered Windows 2000 at the time. BeOS was nice too back then but didnt seem so well supported.

Then Windows XP came out and suddenly to joe user Linux looked old graphically speaking and since then aesthetically has been going downhill. That at least was the case until Kwin, Beryl, Compiz and 'enter your current flavour here' came out and suddenly its up there on par with Vista and MacOS X.

I think the pretty eye candy is bringing people back to Linux (that and the poor adoption of Vista) and I hate to piss off you hardcore command line users but until the system is aesthetically pleasing then that will always be the case. In 'Joe users' eyes if it look powerful then it is powerful

Yes, the eye-candy is what made me adopt Linux (who wants an ugly desktop anyway, like the early days of Gnome, remember?). Not many years ago, default desktops weren't eye-candy. I would say the first eye-candy distro has been Ubuntu. And it's been a success.

"Yes, the eye-candy is what made me adopt Linux (who wants an ugly desktop anyway, like the early days of Gnome, remember?). Not many years ago, default desktops weren't eye-candy. I would say the first eye-candy distro has been Ubuntu. And it's been a success."

No fanboi, Ubuntu wasn't the first eye-candy distro. Novel's SLED Desktop 10.0 was the first distribution to provide (and have enabled by default) Compiz and XGL. SLED 10 was also the first distribution to sport the innovative SLAB menu and Gnome control center. Even Mandriva was first with Metisse, an innovative alternative to 3D desktops. Ubuntu didn't adopt these innovations until much later. And, while we're on the topic of Ubuntu's so called eye candy, need I remind you that Ubuntu still sports craptacular brown wallpapers and garish orange icons by default. If one wants to see what Ubuntu could look like if done right, then look no further than Linux Mint.

Edited 2007-11-24 00:33

"Ubuntu still sports craptacular brown wallpapers and garish orange icons by default".

I love the dark brown and dark orange look and feel. It's warn and feels good.

"look no further than Linux Mint"

This is how it looks like: http://linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/celena/1024/mintassistant.png

I'm not thrilled by the colors.

"No fanboi"

Ah! A Mint fanboy!

As the GP said, it's all about perspective. The breaking point of the migration for me was discovering the Blackbox+bbkeys combo on Linux, under X. It did what Gnome and KDE couldn't, it made me switch and stay switched. Granted, it wasn't their merit alone, a lot of things and apps in the Linux ecosystem contributed, but it was a sort of catalyst. So for some people it's performance, not eye candy, that matters.

My first linux was slack 7 in 2000. coming from a mac background, I was seriously fed up with windows, and so was really open to alternative operating systems. I remember printing out the slack book and binding it in a local copy shop. That, and the linux newbie administrator guide were my bibles. IMHO, slack is the best distro to learn on, because it has very little distro specific stuff to get dependant on.

Anyways, all that to say, eye candy is the last thing that attracted me to linux. It was the alpha-geekness.

When I went to upgrade from RH 4.2 to 5.0 on my then-dual-boot home machine, I realized I had not booted Windows 95 for over a year. I wiped out the Windows partition, installed RH5.0, and haven't looked back. (I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for the last 5 or 6 years)...

I think you are strongly oversimplifying. With Beryl/Compiz Linux already looks much better than Vista and has eye candy that Vista can only dream about. But i wouldn't care if it looked like CDE. What is missing for me are special interest Apps or at least some basic compatibility with Windows Apps (which wine still does not offer and - i get the feeling - probably never will).

Now i hear you saying: "But special interest apps are only important to a minority!" The problem is, most of the minorities aren't served now and many minorities do add up. Right now, Linux is uninteresting to the gamers, video editors, musicians, cg artist, etc.
That is imho the reason Linux hasn't taken over an significant desktop share on the home desktop. We will see whether or not that is ever going to change.

I agree with you Alleister. I love Compiz and find it to be far more than "eyecandy." It's task switching ability is far better than Vista's "flip3d" which requires one to take their hands off the keyboard and click an icon in order to flip through them - one may as well just click which app they want while they're down there instead.

However another kill-app I have is media center ability and MythTV has a long long way to go before it comes close to media center, even after one gets beyond the titanic sized un-user friendlyness.

Unfortunately people have been pushing Linux on the desktop for more than 2 years.

Before the flame war begins, I would like to just point something out. If this is the same study commissioned by Kace, yes you definitely need to take this with a grain of salt...a very large grain the size of a watermelon. Nobody, at least with any credibility does online surveys. The reason being is obvious, first and foremost is you have to insure that respondent A is who they say they are. You must also insure that respondent A does not answer for respondents A, B, and C. I unfortunately see these online polls and surveys used way too much these days. People seem to have a blind
faith in the internet. I can go on and on listing all the faults done on this. For years I have been associated with such research. In college I worked for a market research firm some 18 years ago. Now, through association a good share of my clients are research firms. The most any have ever used for online tools is to recruit people to take part in focus groups where a controlled environment can be maintained.

Before certain people start ranting on and on, I would strongly advise them to look in the archives circa 2001 at what was said about XP, and before that Win2k. I happened to have been around when NT 3.5/4.0 was pushed to replace 3.11. I also happen to remember quite a few people saying that nobody is going to switch to NT.

This has nothing to do with the merits or lack there of for Vista, simply that any time a new OS such as this is released there is always going to be this backlash and hesitation towards adoption. What does need to be said is more how people are currently viewing XP. 99.9% of our clients have no interest in Vista simply for one reason; they have absolutely no reason to upgrade. XP is perfect for them. But the thought that businesses are going to simply move to either OSX or Linux is laughable at best. The only way this will EVER happen is twofold. Windows has to truly come out with something unusable, and the competition has to come out with something that is beyond exceptional so that there is simply no choice in the matter. This is how the real world works, as it does with just about any marketplace. While fanboys may already see Linux as being the closest thing to GOD, and Windows as the devil, mind you the majority of people in this world do not share these beliefs.

Best example here is to take a look at AMD vs. Intel. For some time AMD produced a better quality, lower cost, higher performing CPU, yet consider the struggle to gain marketshare. Yet CPUs are interchangeable. I can take any desktop and replace the Intel with an AMD and it will still run the same applications. The same can not be said for an OS. It is not to say that alternative from Windows can not be introduced into the workplace, we do this all the time replacing certain services with Linux over Windows where Linux is a better option. But merely replacing Apache for IIS for a website that is not done in ASP is one thing, to replace Exchange and the corresponding desktop OS and applications is another. While there certainly will be some companies over the years that may transition, the actual percentage point will remain quite low for some time to come for good reason.

People here will in the end just see what they want to see out of this. While I personally and professionally have seen no reason for Vista adoption, the reasons being are based on the judgment that there simply is no need at this time, anymore than there is a need for new hardware to replace SCA with SAS. Others are certainly going to use this as ammunition, they are welcome to it, but this does not mean they are any wiser for it.

"Unfortunately people have been pushing Linux on the desktop for more than 2 years".

There's a difference between pushing a shiny and mature Linux distro to the public and pushing a distro that is not ready for the masses. Remember how long it used to take to customize your Linux distro after a fresh install to have samba, codecs, plugins, fonts, Java, Flash, to mount your USB flash drive, to mount your floppy drive, etc... Now all this is done so much easier.

"The only way this will EVER happen is twofold. Windows has to truly come out with something unusable, and the competition has to come out with something that is beyond exceptional so that there is simply no choice in the matter. This is how the real world works, as it does with just about any marketplace."

That's not how a marketplace works, but a place where the market doesn't work.

If one product has to be a total failure and the competing product has to be exceptional for it to get more market share, this is simply a perfect case of market failure.

I certainly agree with you though that the hurdles to a more widespread adoption of Linux are much higher than most people seem to think. But then again, there are some developments mentioned in the article, that might help linux adoption. Very low cost computers like the eee, Android, etc.
But maybe that's just the fanboy in me talking here.

Bingo!

A market cannot function if switching between the available products is prohibitively expensive or if they cannot be seen as direct replacements for one another.

No matter how much money and talent any competitor pours into it, Microsoft will always be the dominant platform vendor in the desktop market. The only event that can defeat Microsoft is the emergence a new class of client devices that challenges the prevailing notion of the "desktop".

In a sense, Microsoft defined the desktop to mean Windows. Any PC that doesn't run Windows isn't really a desktop, it's a Mac or a Linux box (or whatever). It's not the same thing, and anybody expecting it to be so is bound to be disappointed.

When consumers and businesses decide that they don't want to use desktops (or laptops), but rather handsets, palmtops, thin clients, set-top boxes, and closet servers, then Microsoft's choke-hold will begin to disappear.

"Before the flame war begins, I would like to just point something out. If this is the same study commissioned by Kace, yes you definitely need to take this with a grain of salt...a very large grain the size of a watermelon."

LOL
Yep, its that same Kace "study" all right.

Before certain people start ranting on and on, I would strongly advise them to look in the archives circa 2001 at what was said about XP, and before that Win2k.

I know the dogma. Sources at that time complained about the new OS being resource hungry. People complained about windows XP, about XP consuming a considerable amount of memory.

With every successor in the MS line-up the hardware requirements increased.

The question is, is it inevitable? Is it an (un)written law that any new OS release requires a hardware upgrade?

Maybe not. Windows 7 seems to be aiming for a leaner Kernel than previous versions of Windows.

Normally I'd agree with you, but I think you're wrong in this case. Check the article here:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5118924882.html

From the article:

"The survey group was not self-selected. Instead, an independently selected group of IT professionals from small, midsize and large organizations were e-mailed and invited to participate in the Web survey in November 2007."

The KACE survey should therefore not be considered invalid simply on the basis that it was done online. I see a lot of skepticism here from the usual bunch of Microsoft apologists, but really the KACE survey doesn't surprise me. I have yet to meet a single person around me (IT people and/or non-techies) who is enthusiastic about Vista, or looking forward to installing it.

It is a well-known rhetorical tactic to never acknowledge mistakes and always present failure as successes. I think this is what the MS apologists are doing now, however it's plain to everyone that doesn't have a strong opinion on the matter that Vista has failed to "wow" the masses, and that this is a good opportunity for alternative operating systems.

Depends on whom you ask.

MY year of the Linux desktop was somewhen 2000/2001.
It was the time I started doing everything but gaming on Linux, and I started having an "install and play" experience with my hardware and Linux.

Prior to that it was mostly out of interest and curiosity that I fiddeled around with linux.

Since then, more and more stumbling blocks have been removed from the installation and configuration path. Today I would expect that probably 30 - 50% of the home systems work with Linux either out of the box, or with minimum configuring work in a graphical configuring dialog. So it is definitely worth a try, life CDs are a fine thing there.

My aunt bought a brand new computer this summer with Windows Vista Home edition on it. She called because it was running extremely slow. Whenever I ran the Vista compatibility test, it scored a 2. Why on earth would anyone sell a system, that the OS that comes with it, would only register a 2? If they system is a low end system, then it should at least come with XP instead.

I know what you mean.. I was searching for a $300-$400 budget PC for my parents, and a lot of these machines had 512MB and came with Vista.

It is unfortunate that many of these PCs are coming with Linux (which virtually nobody wants) or Vista. If you're gonna sell a budget PC, at least offer it with XP. Selling PCs that are pre-loaded with Vista with only 512MB of RAM ought to be illegal.

I didn't mod you down. I agree with your statements about the OEMs.

I have to agree almost completely with you; piracy has always been the one thing that pushes forward new things. But, I've seen a pirated version of Vista available too, and someone here in OSnews comments section (some other story though) admitted using a pirated copy of Vista. So, Vista is available illegally and apparently works just fine. Yet it still hasn't kicked off.

PS. I don't support piracy, I have a license for XP on my laptop and desktop and I use Linux on every PC as my main OS.

Is it coincidence that you no longer need to validate WGA to get IE7?

I did pirate windows for many years... and even installed OEM BIOSes to fake vista into staying activated. These methods I believe dont work with Vista SP1 but I know there are others that do work.

The truth is, I don't even find Vista worth the effort to pirate anymore. Not because its harder (for me) but because I really think OSX / Linux is superior. I had actually thought of buying Vista, I'm so glad I backed out on that one. On this machine Vista uses 70% memory 30-40% cpu on idle. The same machine using linux uses 30% memory 5-15% cpu.

My gf would like to move away from her licensed copy of Windows XP. Sadly because of her line of work she needs Adobe products to work so Linux is pretty much out the question and its such a waste to replace a perfectly good PC (Alienware) with a Mac. I'd be more willing to buy Leopard (yes buy) and hackintosh it but sadly I cant be sure we wouldn't have to re-install everytime a patch came out.


THIS is where my take on Vista piracy comes in. I live quite far away from my gf, I cant just go round there everytime Apple decides to patch something and confuse her hackintosh. I'm an OS guru for my family/friends, I dont have the time whenever Vista barfs to go round and re-inject a new OEM bios even though I'd be quite happy to keep my own machines running. So I simply dont suggest/encourage that they install Vista. Actually I now actively encourage them to install Linux but that's not always possible.

So why did I not pay for windows before? Because everytime I didn't pay for windows, I get back at Microsoft for all the far better companies they have shafted out of existence. Then when I thought about it I realized I (and many other geeks like me) were actually promoting the windows platform and encouraging the monopoly I actually despised.

Morals aside, I do think businesses should pay for the software they use, if you make money using them why shouldn't people make money making them -- but thats another kettle of fish.

Personally, the one thing I think that will change the masses over is games... and sadly the majority of the games are made for windows. (Wine, cedega and cider are now helping that)

As a side note, I have proper licenses to Dos 6.22 Win 3.11 and Win 95. I have an OSX tiger license and a leopard one. I've provided £600+ to Mandrake in 'sponsorships' before they became Mandriva.

At home for personal use, I've ran 95sr1, 98, 98se, 2k, ME (gah!) XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, 2k3EE and ME II (err Vista) without valid licenses.

I do pay for what I believe in, I just lost my faith in MS to the extent they weren't even worth stealing anymore.

I don't get it. How does vista discourage piracy?

Activation, WGA and numerous other annoyances. They don't stop piracy but they make piracy a lot more annoying - hoping that that the annoying will get to a stage where people just give in and purchase the genuine copy.

Also, if you actually spent a bit of time reading what he said (and took an English class or two), he stated:

"I think much of the reason (among others) that Vista has not caught on is because of Microsoft's (fairly successful) attempts at discouraging piracy"

It is the anti-piracy measures which he stated inhibit the adoption of Windows Vista.

Edited 2007-11-24 13:02

Well, well, gather brethren, see the wonders. I don't think slower adoption means it's hard to circumvent the protection. Additionally, it's always really hard to come up with reasonable numbers of "adopted" pirated versions, and I don't think they include pirated versions' numbers (questionable if they even could) in those adoption numbers. What the slower adoption numbers show has much more to do with upgrade troubles, performance issues, and unplanned extra hardware costs than the WGA and protection features of Vista. Just as one hands-on example, we have the hardware that could laughingly run vista ultimate, we still don't upgrade [yet, at least], it just doesn't worth the trouble, we have work to do.

Who said that I agreed?

The point I was making was correcting what Luminair said - the fact that he couldn't even interpret something properly. Dear god.

People, learn English - it's not a difficult language to grasp.

Piracy is one of those issues where developers think they need to do everything they can to stop it, because it is "stealing" profit from them, and though that might be true, you need to look at it from another angle.

Moving a billion people from one OS to another is hard. Most people just don't care. It takes the early adopters saying, "Oh, yeah, I use Vista. It's pretty cool" to start the momentum.

Pirates are the best possible early champions of your OS that you can have. They generally are the most competent users of your software. They will do things like hack the registry in order to make it support a device, or fix a piece of software that doesn't work. They'll crawl through forum after forum trying to find a solution. Best of all, they won't bitch at you about how your software doesn't work, because they didn't pay anything for it.

I'm very of the mindset that if you are using someone's software for commercial reasons, and you don't pay them, then you are a douchebag. For home use though, people just don't have the incentive that they do at work to pay for something. Just charge a fair price for home use (not $500 for Vista "The Version Everyone Wants" edition), discourage passive copying (serial keys are fine), and then just let the pirates, who are your first adopters, the most likely to champion your product, and also the trailblazers through most issues, just pirate the software. It's too hard for most people to even install a full version of your software anyway, let alone learn about what a torrent is, find a site that has it, install the torrent application, download it using the torrent client, possibly extract it using compression software, know what an ISO or bin/cue file is, burn that to a disc, and THEN install the OS. 99% of people won't go through that, they will just wait to hear reviews, and if favorable, will go out and buy it for a FAIR price.

Microsoft discouraged pirates, who never early adopted the OS, and then charged $300+ for any version that people actually wanted, who had already heard all the negative press...and like I said, all of this added up to Vista having an extremely slow movement in the market. I honestly doubt it is going to end up hitting the critical mass needed to supplant XP, short of Microsoft really making some changes (Dvorak outlined some possible ideas, especially regarding price).

I'm not 100% sure, because I didn't follow it that much, but I think it took longer than other Windows versions for the crackers to really get working, and by then most interest in Vista had sort of waned. If I remember correctly, XP was cracked fairly quickly. Additionally, things like WGA make it very annoying to update Windows and the various components.

Vista is definitely cracked at this point, and if you want to pirate it, you can. The point is, Microsoft made it harder this time around, and by the time the crackers worked through all of that, all the negative press had already gone around about Vista, everyone had generally been underwhelmed, and most people that would have pirated it (and thus, increased adoption of Vista en mass), either stuck with XP, moved to Ubuntu (or other Linux), or moved to a Mac (or built their own Hackintosh).

Every person that I know has a pirated Vista. The only reason you would have a license for the OS here would be if you snagged a laptop from the US with the OS already installed.

I have to disagree almost completely with you.

That's a laugh. They did not achieve anything by it. Vista is duplicated far and wide in spite of their "protection systems". If they really wanted to stop illegal duplication cold they would have done so. They didn't. They don't want to. Illegal copies is a big part of what made Windows a de facto standard.



Let's get one thing clear. "Pirates" means rings that duplicate CD's and other goods illegaly, for sale. People at home duplicating Vista are not "pirates". They may well be in their right to do so. At worst, they are breaking copyright law. In some parts of the world, it's still a civil offense. It should be a slap on the wrist.



There's absolutely no relation there. (Sheesh, "underground cult". Why not "underground mole people"?) MP3 became succesfull with users everywhere because it has no DRM, it does a decent job of holding all kinds of quality of music, and at the time it spread it was the only format that did this. Circumstances and its features made it what it is, not mole people.



If by "standard for graphics editing" you mean "I'll just grab a copy off the net and monkey around with it because I can't even use it at 10% of it potential" then yes, you're right.

The large masses that grab a copy of Photoshop and install it are irrelevant. They would never pay the full price for it, and they can't really use it. They'd be perfectly happy with much lesser graphics editors. The true professionals are far and few in between and they will pay for Photoshop because it's a matter of real professional need and pride.



Nobody's stealing anything. You can't "steal" information. Breaking copyright is not stealing, because software and music is not potatoes. You are infringing upon certain rights that have been granted to the author. It's more like using someone else's parking spot than stealing. But even that's not a good analogy, because that person only has one parking spot, whereas you can create infinite copies of software or music with almost zero effort.

Man, you're Mr.Semantics, aren't you? I think you misinterpreted and misconstrued almost every point of mine that you responded to. My apologies if English is not your first language and there was some sort of breakdown there, but short of that...you might want to cool down a bit.

Ok, I'll give you one response (unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time lately to spend on the OSNews Forums).

I have to disagree almost completely with you.

Fair enough.

That's a laugh. They did not achieve anything by it. Vista is duplicated far and wide in spite of their "protection systems". If they really wanted to stop illegal duplication cold they would have done so. They didn't. They don't want to. Illegal copies is a big part of what made Windows a de facto standard.

First of all, no, they can't stop piracy. Not without inadvertently locking out legitimate purchasers of their software (this was already seen with the activation issue they had a few months ago).

Second, I'm aware you can find a pirated copy of Vista now; I'm simply saying, it took a lot longer than it did with XP, and it is still more of a pain than it was before.

Let's get one thing clear. "Pirates" means rings that duplicate CD's and other goods illegaly, for sale. People at home duplicating Vista are not "pirates". They may well be in their right to do so. At worst, they are breaking copyright law. In some parts of the world, it's still a civil offense. It should be a slap on the wrist.

No, a (software) pirate is someone who illegally obtains, distributes, and/or uses a piece of software, without the permission of the original author. Whether or not you receive monetary (or other) compensation for that action is irrelevant.

Additionally, the penalty received for the action (from no penalty, all the way up to fine/jail time) is also irrelevant. If the above applies to you, then you are a software pirate.

There's absolutely no relation there. (Sheesh, "underground cult". Why not "underground mole people"?) MP3 became succesfull with users everywhere because it has no DRM, it does a decent job of holding all kinds of quality of music, and at the time it spread it was the only format that did this. Circumstances and its features made it what it is, not mole people.

Right, and for the reasons you listed above, it gained popularity UNDERGROUND (in the piracy community), before finally being accepted by the masses. So my point still stands...

If by "standard for graphics editing" you mean "I'll just grab a copy off the net and monkey around with it because I can't even use it at 10% of it potential" then yes, you're right.

The large masses that grab a copy of Photoshop and install it are irrelevant. They would never pay the full price for it, and they can't really use it. They'd be perfectly happy with much lesser graphics editors. The true professionals are far and few in between and they will pay for Photoshop because it's a matter of real professional need and pride.

Again, I think you really missed the point I was making. Why do those professionals choose Photoshop? Is it simply because they go to work and it is there? Sure, partly, but how many of them likely downloaded a pirated version of the software when they were 14, started playing around with it, figured it out, continued to use it in school, and then ultimately in their career? Probably around 95% of them? The reason Photoshop obtained absolute dominance (aside from being a very capable application) is because so many people pirated it for casual home use or learning, and then demanded it from their employer later on.

Nobody's stealing anything. You can't "steal" information. Breaking copyright is not stealing, because software and music is not potatoes. You are infringing upon certain rights that have been granted to the author. It's more like using someone else's parking spot than stealing. But even that's not a good analogy, because that person only has one parking spot, whereas you can create infinite copies of software or music with almost zero effort.

Fair enough. This is sort of a gray area. It depends on the ultimate intent of the person. If they would have purchased it, then it is stealing; otherwise, it is copyright infringement. So I suppose you need to handle it on a case-by-case basis.

Again, I think you've terribly misunderstood the point I was attempting to make. I was simply saying how those who pirate software, especially things like Windows operating systems, generally are the most powerful early adopters those companies can have, because they increase the size of the user base early on, which makes hardware and software vendors move faster in supporting the platform. Additionally, they provide the most work of any user base in finding solutions to problems. Also, many of them have positions (either professionally or unofficially) where they influence the technology buying decisions of others, and if they have experience using the new OS, they won't have a problem pushing others to use it.

Hope that helps clear things up a a bit...

Edited 2007-11-25 04:25

You know, it's ironic that you'd call me Mr. Semantics and then come out with such a textbook definition.

Except... around my little part of the world (where we sadly don't speak English as our native language) piracy is very well defined, both in the dictionary and in the text of the law. Individuals who download from the Internet are not even breaking copyright law, let alone being "pirates". Individuals who upload to the Internet are breaking copyright law, but they are most often not pursued, and if they're caught they're let off with a fine or a warning.

Compare with the US, where the copyright law is getting ridiculous:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/26/1612223&from=rs...

I can turn you into a "pirate" by offering you a link which would make your computer download an image you don't own the copy rights for. I hope you'll still consider it irrelevant if you're asked to pay huge gobs of money or go to prison over it.



How does that "dominance" help Adobe? It doesn't. Millions of people using Photoshop to a very small amount of its potential and not paying for it are completely irrelevant to Adobe. They don't make Photoshop a standard in graphics editing. They don't exist as far as this issue is concerned. The professionals who choose Photoshop do. And they do not "pirate" it.

Photoshop is a specialized application. It is not a good example for your point. Choose another, look, pick a Windows version and I'll agree. Illegal duplication has definitely helped Microsoft achieve de facto standard status. Still, see below:



I got that, but I think you're overestimating the amounts quite a bit. The largest adoption vector out there is the thing called "default install". People who will get Vista due to this thing outnumber early adopters, geeks, gamers and enthusiasts by orders of magnitude. All those are just niche players. The vast masses of regular users out there care as much about Vista as they care about the software in the ROM of their microwave oven.

I think we're twisting very fine hairs here, by the way. We may agree on larger points, but if we get down to very small details we'll never see the end of it.

I think the piracy discussion has gone off topic, but you said something that is a pet peeve of mine:

"Nobody's stealing anything. You can't "steal" information. Breaking copyright is not stealing, because software and music is not potatoes. You are infringing upon certain rights that have been granted to the author. It's more like using someone else's parking spot than stealing. But even that's not a good analogy, because that person only has one parking spot, whereas you can create infinite copies of software or music with almost zero effort."

If I'm running a company and I hack into my competitor's computer system to obtain internal business information, but leave the information intact so my competitor still has access to it, have I "stolen" trade secrets, or not? Or what if I obtain copies of your personal info (medical records, credit card number, social security number, etc), have I now "stolen" that info? It's certainly not 'merely' "copyright infringement". Sorry, I think the idea that one can't "steal" information is bull.

Actually, you used another pet-peeve of mind, which is the notion that anything that consists of bytes qualifies as "information" and nothing more. I dont' think that an OS, computer program, video game, or any kind of software qualifies as "information". If I pirate a video game, what "information" have I obtained? The bytes making up the video game don't inform me of anything. They inform the computer on instructions to perform, but that's not "information" in the human sense of the word. I think certain people like to classify all pieces of digital media as "information" to devalue them and dismiss the hard work it took to create them. As in, "Information wants to be free, and all software is nothing more than information, therefore all software should be free. QED". On the contrary, a video game, or any software program, or music, or movie, etc, is a creation of humans, not merely information discovered and/or gathered by humans. But this is off-topic too.

Strange, when I saw the title of your post and your nick I was pretty sure I'd have to mod it down.
Eventually, I did the opposite :-)

Not because I share your view - as a matter of fact I couldn't disagree more! No, I like your comment because it leaves the door open to a rational discussion.

Most comments on this matter sound like
"You are EVIL! PERIOD!"
without any 'because' or 'I think'.

Speaking of 'I think':
I think we should probably take the discussion about the moral status of 'pirating' software to OSNews' 'conversations'.
If you use OSNews v4, that is.

This way, the discussion would be ON TOPIC and we wouldn't have to restate or re-restate our respective opinions in every second thread but could simply link to the conversation ;-)

Do you mean legally, or in common conversation? In the first case, no. Nothing was "stolen" per se. However, you would be guilty of industrial espionage. I don't know what the correct term is in this case, but I'm pretty sure it's not "theft", "burglary", "larceny" or any of the sort.

In the perspective of common conversation, the use of the term is acceptable, but that doesn't make it more accurate.



It *is* information. It doesn't have any distinct physical existence, and it is more than just raw energy - it is energy arranged in a coherent, logical manner. You may not agree with the term, but it is the correct one. What do you think the acronym IT stand for?



So, if electricity powers machines but not humans, it shouldn't be considered "energy" in the human sense of the word? That doesn't make any sense. Digital data is information; again, that is the correct term, whether you agree with it or not.

I don't pirate music, films or games. I work in the video games industry. Still, that doesn't change the fact that piracy *isn't* theft, and a video game *is* information. You don't need to change the meaning of words in order to decry something that is already illegal. Just stick to the facts.

It's how you use the information and what you do to get it that should (maybe) pe punished, not the simple fact of owning it.

In your examples, there are several negative actions. Breaking into another's computer or personal space is severely frowned upon by any society or community. If you obtain my personal info it depends on what you do with it, but generally you'd have to break some law to get to them. And the right to privacy is a fundamental right (or ought to be), which you'd be breaking.

And so is copyright. I'm not saying "information wants to be free" (which is silly, ofc). Creators deserve to be compensated for their hard work.

But you cannot force people to do so. This is where the fundamental differences between information and physical goods come into play. We cannot go on on treating intellectual goods and information as tangible and try to use the same rules. It simply won't work. It just gets us into more and more of a mess if people insist on saying things like "stealing information" and "intellectual