A change in how the Linux community does things...
Posted: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 06:18
Hi all...
I found this article today and from this statement, I'm wondering if this the beginning of a trend...
As far as flash is concerned, at some point down the road, 11.2 will no longer be compatible and will no longer run any content. I don't think it's realistic to explain to potential users that they can only see flash content if they install Google Chrome. While I have not tried them, I don't think the community's home grown solutions, Lightspark and Gnash, compare well with Flash Player, either. Neither of these options are going to be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
This is just one example. Are we going to see further divestment from companies who currently support Linux?
While I freely admit that I don't have all the answers, I think the entire Linux community is going to have to do some "soul searching" and have a discussion about it's future in terms of market growth and adoption rates and how to achieve that. We need to give these (and other) companies an incentive for supporting Linux as well as to start walking away from reverse engineering as an accepted way to solving most of the driver/software issues. While I certainly support open source principles, I don't think that means there isn't any room for a capitalistic approach to improving Linux and making it more appealing and usable.
For that to happen, I think it's going to involve some serious financial investment from the community, most likely in the form of an extremely modest charge to download your favorite distribution, say $10.00 or $20.00 per release (and no more.) This way, everyone can afford to pay, rich or poor.
There's more I could discuss on this topic but I think I will stop for now.
Regards...
I found this article today and from this statement, I'm wondering if this the beginning of a trend...
This comes after Adobe's decision to quit releasing new versions of Flash Player after 11.2 roughly a year ago. Decisions like this can't help but to adversely affect Linux's "adoptibilty," at least among end users, who expect things to just work with a minimum of hassles."Though in the announcement of dropping 32-bit CUDA Linux support, it sounds like they might also remove the CUDA driver from the 64-bit NVIDIA Linux driver. 'The CUDA driver might not be included in future releases of the NVIDIA Linux-x86 and Linux-x86_64 GPU driver packages."
As far as flash is concerned, at some point down the road, 11.2 will no longer be compatible and will no longer run any content. I don't think it's realistic to explain to potential users that they can only see flash content if they install Google Chrome. While I have not tried them, I don't think the community's home grown solutions, Lightspark and Gnash, compare well with Flash Player, either. Neither of these options are going to be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
This is just one example. Are we going to see further divestment from companies who currently support Linux?
While I freely admit that I don't have all the answers, I think the entire Linux community is going to have to do some "soul searching" and have a discussion about it's future in terms of market growth and adoption rates and how to achieve that. We need to give these (and other) companies an incentive for supporting Linux as well as to start walking away from reverse engineering as an accepted way to solving most of the driver/software issues. While I certainly support open source principles, I don't think that means there isn't any room for a capitalistic approach to improving Linux and making it more appealing and usable.
For that to happen, I think it's going to involve some serious financial investment from the community, most likely in the form of an extremely modest charge to download your favorite distribution, say $10.00 or $20.00 per release (and no more.) This way, everyone can afford to pay, rich or poor.
There's more I could discuss on this topic but I think I will stop for now.
Regards...