This is why I only use & support Free & Open Source Software in my personal life. This man is going to prison. Prison.
"A California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected his claim that the “restore disks” he made to extend the lives of computers had no financial value, instead ruling that he had infringed Microsoft’s products to the tune of $700,000."
“I don’t think anybody in that courtroom understood what a restore disk was,” Lundgren said.
This is key. Most folks don't understand tech. The whole "You wouldn't steal a car!" ad campaign is an example.
If that car was open sourced, and I could download it and print, yes... I'd "steal" a car. But that isn't stealing.
A jury of your peers means your average lay person. They think in a corporate mindset. Arbitrary "losses" equal prison time.
@tinker I think the description as a corporate mindset fits way too well:
The other day I was talking with someone about linux stuff and their opinion was that there should be only one distribution, one desktop, one solution. What they didn't get was that the #FLOSS / #FOSS movement is not a corporation trying to sell you a product but a movement trying to give you the tools to overcome the digital immaturity. (I also welcome discussion on that view.)
@uniporn @tinker Afterall there are great free desktops. From my experience I think the issue is that we're not good as a community at onboarding people. I've seen too many get stuck at which distro to use.
Personally in terms of desktops I'm very partial to elementary OS's Pantheon, and I'm sure they've outshone both Microsoft and Apple in the design department.
@tinker
if you want to be left out the discussion speak up, I will keep you in otherwise.
@alcinnz
Yeah, I see this as an interesting problem especially since the choice made with the distro has rather small impact on the userXP compared to the DE which only limits first choice when getting "exotic" like something very new or something very few people use.
So using the wording of UI patterns the decision of building "your" linux setup basically lacks consistency to be intuitiv to newbies.
@uniporn @tinker Also as a developer, you’re right. I can’t target my UI design to whatever Linux system the user has cobbled together. But I can target systems like elementary with a strongly defined experience.
And I can read standardised configuration files so my apps can work elsewhere. Maybe a standard like Flatpack will make this even easier for them.
@alcinnz @tinker
yeah! I've read in some blog somewhere from an apple-user once about firefox that its UX was very "linuxy" (not the exact word but good enough) which collides with his designed OSX xp.
Where I think FOSS did some astonishing job with branding the UX of vi(m) which you find in really a ton of programms.
And damn is it user-friendly once you overcome the entrance-barrier :)
But I see that this is an issue for people used to windows, whichs UX I don't understand well at all.
@uniporn @tinker Yeah, except for me I find Chrome clashes worse than Firefox on elementary. They both seem to have decided they don’t care what constitutes as a “native” UX, though Firefox has gotten better after Quantum.
And I certainly acknowledge the importance of branding to UX, we need great icons and everything. But a UX issue I find (particularly on iOS and the Web) is that the level branding within apps leaves me needing to learn each one from scratch.
@alcinnz @tinker
Which explains the usecase for standards :)
for FF I find funny how you say quantum improved it: before quantum I think you could just override shurtcuts, now you only can add them which I find very limiting as you shouldn't accidently close your entire FF instead of just a tab... (which lead me to the workaround of disabling C-q on a WM level) and it made me switch to qutebrowser (which is mainly nice when you like vim (defaults :)))
@uniporn @tinker At the same time it’s worth looking at our strengths.
For starters we have standards for our desktops, which allows our apps to work pretty well everywhere. Even if they look best on particular desktops.
And second developers for proprietary desktops tend to be more keen on furthering their own brand rather then embracing the desktop’s experience. We don’t have as much (though still see some on elementary).