Posts by Martyn Welch

Sorry, but this seems like quite a bad take. There's aspects of this I can 100% agree with and others that smack of opinion with a lack of research or knowledge.

You make the assertion that "some freeloaders just use this stuff and don't contribute anything back. Many might not even realize that they're doing it. Apple's macOS is built on a basis of open source. Android is too, and ChromeOS". When it comes to Linux and hardware support, we are primarily talking about kernel level development. This is an area that I'm fairly familiar with. Let's just take a look at the development statistics for a few of the last kernel development cycles (data from LWN):

6.0: Google, 85886 lines changed, 5.4% of total, 4th overall in this metric.

5.19: Google, 30767 lines changed, 2.5% of total, 8th overall in this metric.

5.18: Google, 103801 lines changed, 8.8% of total, 3rd overall in this metric.

5.17: Google, 24971 lines changed, 4.1% of total, 6th overall in this metric.

Broadly the same looking at changesets.

That also probably misses a tonne of work that they finance in the kernel space alone through outside consultancies (which I know that they do).

I know that their contributions also extend to at least some other FOSS components they use, though I have far less knowledge there as it's not my area of focus. There is probably broad swathes of the Linux ecosystem that they don't contribute to, however there's large portions of the ecosystem that aren't used in the products they create. There certainly are vendors in the FOSS ecosystem that use and contribute nothing back, but (for all their sins) I don't feel it's remotely appropriate to try and paint Google in that light.

(For transparencies sake, I don't work for Google, however I do work at a consultancy that does work for Google so have some awareness of some of the work done for them although I'm not currently involved in it.)

Hang on...

They're still going to do the stupid walking through the door ways, just a tablet is going to be used to record who walks through which door rather than, I assume, a pen and paper.

This is such a small step forward it's hardly news worthy. If they were staying seated and each individually voting from a device *that* would be news worthy, but that's not what the article send to be saying they are going to do.

@John Robson

From what I can remember of the design as shown in TV shows, when this was competing against another design (I believe) from Boeing, the JSF can provide some thrust out of vents at the wing tips (or something like that) to control roll.

Windows Update

I guess this means that windows update process has been detached from Internet Explorer? Or has this already happened in Vista?

@Christopher Michaelis

Um, Openoffice already supports ODF, in fact it's the default file format.

I think you mean microsoft's OpenXML. Though it would be reasonable for Openoffice to provide support for OpenXML, I personally I feel it would be far nicer to see microsoft supporting existing standards and provide filters in their products (Office and the others like Works, which I believe still exists) for the ISO certified Open Document Format. That is rather than relying on third parties to try and write add-on filters.

@ P.Pod

"Does anybody here know one single person not employed in the IT industry who runs Linux as an everyday machine?"

Yes, infact, I do, a few and they aren't all computer geeks either. I do provide a small amount of support to some of them, but I have had to provide less support than to those I know still using windows.

"There are some round here who won't want to admit it, but XP and Vista work perfectly well on any Dell pre-installation."

XP and Vista may work well on any new Dell machine, but just about any new machine is over-kill for the 50% (conservative guess) of computer users that use their computer to browse the web, send and receive email and do some light wordprocessing. Unless of course you happen to run microsoft's latest OS which, without wanting to go too hippie, means that running this OS to do just these tasks is a gratuitous waste of resources.

"As for those that complain about the price - well if you buy a few million copies like Dell then Microsoft will offer you a good price too!"

Which fails to make any comparison with the licencing cost of providing Linux on those machines. Given that the basic option provides "No Ubuntu support [Included in Price]" (other than the free community support of helpful users and developers, that are in most cases far more responsive to the needs of a single home user than microsoft) means that that actual licensing cost is near zero. Dell are free to download the distribution from the Ubuntu site, like anyone else, create and install image and blat it onto as many drives as they so desire. I say near zero cost since to comply with the licencing, as a distributor of the code, they must provide the source on request, which is usually achieved buy placing it on a ftp/web server, thus allowing interested parties to download it. This incurs some bandwidth costs.

Now, if I buy a enough copies of microsoft's latest attempt at an OS to be able to provide every human on the planet with 3 licenses (one for work, a laptop and home computer) and enough to coat the entire land surface area off the planet in licence key stickers, I might, just, possibly, get the licencing costs down to an approximation of that of Linux. Though interestingly this won't include the cost of those pesky microsoft office licenses and other sundry applications to provide the equivalent functionality installed in the standard Ubuntu install. Ok, you could just use open office on windows, but if your going to do that and are one of the above mentioned 50%, why not just run Linux and save yourself the cost of those OS licenses?

Really?

"the one that controls your search queries, e-mails, instant messages, photos, documents and soon phone calls without ever discussing an open standard that will let you manipulate all that data or let you move it to a new service provider"

Search Queries: OK, no open standard, but the interface is well documented - http://code.google.com/enterprise/documentation/xml_reference.html

Emails: Mail accessible and downloadable via POP3 - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10350&query=Export+Mail&topic=&type=f

Contacts: Contacts can be exported to CSV (including a layout suitable for importing into outlook) - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=24911&topic=1530

Instant Messaging: Talk uses the Jabber/XMPP protocol, which is based on open standards - http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html

Photos: Not exactly sure what you are getting at here, Picasa is a desktop app as far as I know, so the files are saved locally.

Documents: Again, not exactly sure what you are getting at here, but Google Docs and Spreadsheats allows you to "save your files to your own computer in DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODT, PDF, RTF and HTML formats" - http://www.google.com/google-d-s/intl/en-GB/tour3.html

Beyond that - Videos can be downloaded from Google Video, even if it iss just in a format suitable for use on iPods and PSPs.

They also provide a fair amount of information about there APIs - http://code.google.com/

How is that not allowing you to manipulate your data or move to a new service provider? Would you prefer them to talk about open standards more rather than actually using them where possible?