This poor fellow's misery got me thinking today about why us Linux users are no more than 2% of the population of PC users, and about the largest obstacles to a higher level of Linux adoption:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...cseen#msg79039
It seems to boil down to this: The designers and builders of computer hardware consist of "for profit" organizations and their "for profit" employees. Put plainly, they are market-driven capitalists. To sell their goods into the market, they have to provide drivers to the mass that runs Windows. But those Windows-using folks have no expectation of "free", either as beer or speech, so there's no inherent conflict (I'm conveniently ignoring software piracy...).
Our little 2% market, however, contains a considerable proportion of ideologues who believe (rightly or wrongly -- I don't pass judgment on it) that software should be "free", as in beer or speech or both.
It seems there is an inherent conflict between the capitalist hardware organizations, who write Windows drivers for money (through sale of the package), and the Linux market, which seeks software for free. The desirable transaction between the supplier and consumer is doomed, due to a failure to agree on price.
It's interesting to contemplate what could happen to the Linux consumer market if there were a Canonical-like organization, with funding, that would pay hardware designers a reasonable fee for the technical data needed to write Linux drivers, and then prioritize and staff driver development for popular hardware items.
Today's two cents' worth, I guess.
EDIT: Thank you, Nvidia.
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...cseen#msg79039
It seems to boil down to this: The designers and builders of computer hardware consist of "for profit" organizations and their "for profit" employees. Put plainly, they are market-driven capitalists. To sell their goods into the market, they have to provide drivers to the mass that runs Windows. But those Windows-using folks have no expectation of "free", either as beer or speech, so there's no inherent conflict (I'm conveniently ignoring software piracy...).
Our little 2% market, however, contains a considerable proportion of ideologues who believe (rightly or wrongly -- I don't pass judgment on it) that software should be "free", as in beer or speech or both.
It seems there is an inherent conflict between the capitalist hardware organizations, who write Windows drivers for money (through sale of the package), and the Linux market, which seeks software for free. The desirable transaction between the supplier and consumer is doomed, due to a failure to agree on price.
It's interesting to contemplate what could happen to the Linux consumer market if there were a Canonical-like organization, with funding, that would pay hardware designers a reasonable fee for the technical data needed to write Linux drivers, and then prioritize and staff driver development for popular hardware items.
Today's two cents' worth, I guess.
EDIT: Thank you, Nvidia.
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