The issue really starts with the American culture (of litigation), not American law, per se.
And of course the encouragement of litigation, the acceptance of it as a way of life and a way of doing business, and the high amount of ensuing court activity breeds a rather large body of case law, a complex legal landscape, which gives way to a sort of feedback loop leading to more litigation.
"Can we sue our way to prosperity?"
This was a title of a Congressional study a year or two ago.
I think it captures the essence of the problem. Wealth is increasingly being created _only_ through litigation. (Reminder: IP rights are often nothing more than rights to sue alleged infringers.) Is that toxic? Is it sustainable? I don't know. I don't think Congress knows either.
It makes me wonder what some US politicians wouldn't do for a vote. I'm not in the US at the moment, so I don't know the full extent of what his appearances. But I can only imagine. I know he was recently on Entertainment Tonight. That seemed a little peculiar. Now he's on Reddit. What next?
I'd like to see him do Fear Factor.
If you want my vote Barack, you have to go on Fear Factor. Those are my terms. Non-negotiable.
"Every engineer I know... They also have a distorted view..."
cletus you are one of the few people with enough karma to always grab and hold a top post spot who _actually says things worth saying_.
Right on.
As for "someone with the gravitas", never say never. But they might not use the Linux kernel and GNU as their "clay" or "base material".
I've thought about such a person and one thing I believe is that they would be foolish to try to "sell" such a simple to use system to Linux users (and many of those users would, alas, include engineers like the ones you describe: set in their ways) nor to those engineers who worship Apple, with their belief in some mythical "user experience" [translation: _their_ experience]).
In my opinion, a person with the gravitas would also need to the vision to see that the target user base who is open to change lies elsewhere. The users need to come with an open mind.
I don't know what will happen to Linux. But the binary blob problem keeps getting worse. Too many Linux users are happy to accept the blobs. They don't want to read source code. They just want working devices. That's understandable. But in my opinion it's not a small problem in the long run.
Apple, on the other hand, is flat out abusing its power. Not only over end users but over developers (who are of course just a particular class of end users). They are standing in the way of people's general education about computers. Keeping everyone dumb may give some developers a warm, fuzzy feeling as they watch their bank accounts grow to new levels, or dream of it, but I do think Apple's conduct, seen for what it is, will trickle down past just us fanatics on HN and elsewhere on the web. People are going to figure it out.
If I was a monopoly-lover, if I loved to see "winner-take-all" in IT, as if that improved the lot for any of us (I am not and it doesn't), then my money would go on Amazon. They seem to be making the fewest mistakes. Great things will come from AWS. It is the democratisation of hosting - a sharing of power, risks be damned (unfortunately, it may also mean the monopolisation of hosting as we've never before seen). In "Dropbox", we are only seeing the very beginning of what's possible.
In my view, Apple is a "disabler" (everything they introduce is restricted) while Amazon is an "enabler" (generally: they open many more doors than they close).
There never was a "Linux desktop". Linux is a kernel. GNU is a set of utilities. And X11 is a mess.
Did you know that X11 is why we have shared libs (the UNIX version of "dll hell")? If not for having to run X11, shared libs really would not have been needed.
There are many window managers. Maybe too many. Too much choice for a noob. That selection or the pre-selections Linux distribution people make does not equate to "the" Linux Desktop. It equates someone else's configurations and choice of applications. It equates to having to fiddle with X11, whether you are just configuring it or developing programs to run in it. And that has always been extremely frustrating for too many people- constant tweaking; it never ends. This is like a brick wall to people who might want to try Linux, coming from Windows. You are inheriting a system that's been configured to someone else's preferences. (Same is true with Apple, but they have a knack for making things easy.)
I skipped Linux altogther and went from using Windows to using BSD. I've also been a Mac user. And BSD is way better than OSX, or any of the previous MacOS's for doing most everyday things: email, internet and secure web (ramdisk). Moreover it's flexible - you can shape into what you want - without this being an overwhelming task of undoing someone else's settings.
If you want a citation for the shared libs thing I will track it down, but honestly anyone can do it on their own. The historical research will do you good. Educate yourself.
The issue really starts with the American culture (of litigation), not American law, per se.
And of course the encouragement of litigation, the acceptance of it as a way of life and a way of doing business, and the high amount of ensuing court activity breeds a rather large body of case law, a complex legal landscape, which gives way to a sort of feedback loop leading to more litigation.
"Can we sue our way to prosperity?"
This was a title of a Congressional study a year or two ago.
I think it captures the essence of the problem. Wealth is increasingly being created _only_ through litigation. (Reminder: IP rights are often nothing more than rights to sue alleged infringers.) Is that toxic? Is it sustainable? I don't know. I don't think Congress knows either.