As you have probably noticed, new versions have arrived of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and other derivatives. One of the most exciting new features has received far less publicity than it deserves - the ability to 'install' it onto your USB flash drive with just a few clicks. The advantages are obvious: just plug your flash drive into a computer and run your favourite operating system. What's more, everything you do - installing applications, saving documents, editing preferences - will be saved to your flash drive and will be available to you every time you run it! The best news is that it's astoundingly easy: all it takes is a few clicks.
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Member since:2005-10-10
Member since:2005-11-12
There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate
There certainly is competition in open source. A lot of the forks we see compete with the original maintainers' vision. This can be a good thing since a group of people might decide they don't like the direction of development of say, X Window, and they come up with something that suits their needs better. Maybe their isn't monetary competition but when your module gets dropped in favor of a newer or better one it certainly drives progress. It is a more friendly kind of competition but it can also get hot and heated. It hurts a little when your own design gets dropped. We like our own stuff to succeed. It makes a developer feel good.
Member since:2005-11-05
You're being childish if you really think that there is no competition in the open source world.
No open source devs or other folks are interested in climbing the greasy pole, or using their skills in open source to leverage a job elsewhere? No distro is interested in what the other distros are up to? No distro is interested in bumping up its usage figures, which in almost all cases can only come by taking users from other distros? No distro is interested in using the latest and greatest software, because without it the distro will lost some of its appeal compared to others? No developer is interested in producing the best program of its kind, which by definition means better than the others and which also invariably means taking users from the others?
The open source world is rife with competition, and open source on the server is a ruthlessly competitive commercial business. It's time we laid to rest the myth of devs in back bedrooms only "scratching an itch" in a land of milk and honey. Life doesn't work this way, and Linux's main players are all hard-fightin' multi-billion corporations - Red Hat, Novell and IBM. Yes, there are plenty who scratch their itch. But the ones whose software really makes an impact and goes on to be used by thousands or millions of people tend to take things an awful lot more seriously than that.
In fact, I welcome competition. It is a powerful incentive to improve and behave. Without it, arguably, Linux at least would still be stuck in the 1970s, with new users (if it had any) being patronized by greybeards telling them that graphical x-servers = bad, bad, bad. Thank god all those days are over.
Member since:2008-11-09
Agree, we all share between distributions.
I think the issue is that Ubuntu users and even Canonical to an extend tend to take credit for open source innovation as a whole.
Last year at Linux world I saw a Canonical session on desktop linux and it was shocking to see all the projects they took credit for :
- Plug and play in Linux with HAL & Dbus
- Graphical network management with NetworkManager
- Improved X server
- Improvements in Linux device driver support for more platforms.
Sadly none of them were developed or funded by canonical.
But they certainly do a good job of packaging.
Member since:2005-07-08
Not sure about some Ubuntu users, there are many kinds of them, some maybe also less informed than others, of course. That shouldn't cause serious headache to you or anyone else.
But as to Canonical, I haven't seen them being guilty of taking credit for open source innovation as whole any more than others. Claims that they would have been doing that a lot seem mostly FUD to me, maybe caused by envy and Ubuntu popularity. Canonical knows, like everyone else, that most of their software is open source (in Ubuntu's case most of it comes from Debian too), so developed by many others too than just themselves.
Open source is - by the very definition - almost always developed in the open, not behind the closed doors of some commercial company only. Often the developer community is worldwide even in small open source projects. Also innovation tends to happen in that worldwide non-proprietary community, not behind the closed doors of some company. So how could some open source company even try to take sole credit for open source?
Member since:
2005-11-10
Except that this isn't plagiarizing. It's one distro packaging something that's been developed - FOR THE PURPOSE OF EVERYBODY ELSE USING IT TOO.
There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate.
It's called sharing, and it shouldn't cause you to drop your monocle. Ahem.