On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:12 AM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > I wrote the following essay about the point made in the preceding > paragraph: > > http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200104/200104.htm#_editors_desk >
Time changes many things. For the most part, switching to Linux is far easier now than it was in 2000/2001; I've migrated the members of my family with only a few issues of "How do I do XYZ?", and the biggest piece of XYZ wasn't technically a Linux issue (at the same time as that, I also cut out all Windows Networking, opting instead to have a git repository of household documents; if I'd wanted to, I could have just deployed Samba on all systems and let them use file sharing, but (a) that risks file locking issues and consequent corruption, and (b) I wanted a full-history repository anyway, so git was the way to go). And I could have done a near-transparent changeover of our video hosting from Windows to Linux, except that I didn't understand that the S-Video spec wasn't going to do 1024x768. At the same time, Windows has had a decade to demonstrate that it needs at least some measure of interoperability (at least with itself) in order to maintain its monopoly. I don't think we'll see a new version of MS Word that's unable to import documents from previous versions of Word, for instance. So the theory of "Who owns your data?" may still be valid, but ten years of letting Microsoft own your data haven't shown up any solid business reasons for denying it them; in fact, if you ask that question around the traps today, most people will think you're talking about Google or Facebook, not the manufacturer of your desktop system's software. (And that's also a legit concern, of course. But a separate one.) But there's one topic that probably would never have come up ten years ago, and it's a huge point in favour of free software: Virtual machines. If I have a valid, licensed copy of some OS, am I allowed to install it on a VM inside one of my other computers? * Linux? Well, duh. :) * Windows? There are some special cases that allow something like four VMs on a single license, but I haven't dug into the details. You have to license based on the number of processor cores you're using, etc, etc, etc. Read the full details before getting too confident. * Mac OS? You're allowed to virtualize but ONLY under Apple hardware. I'm pretty sure you can legally take a standard desktop Windows license and use that on a single VM. Most of the complexity of Windows VM licensing is aimed at servers, where you might not even have them all running all the time; but the fact remains that there *is* a lot of complexity. And Apple put restrictions in that mean it's illegal to build a box from generic components, install Linux on it, install VMWare or VirtualBox, and then put a Mac inside it. And that's just for putting a single VM in. I was talking to someone a while ago about solving a problem by using virtual machines - lots and lots of them. Having previously solved similar problems in a similar way, I thought nothing of the idea of using the VirtualBox "Linked Clone" feature to create myriad very similar VMs, run as many of them concurrently as RAM will allow, and progressively solve the problem; but that's with Linux, where I know that's within the license terms. With Windows? That's another few hundred licenses required, right there. (Although it could be argued that a Linked Clone, being fundamentally a snapshot that you can restore to, isn't creating a new machine at all; so you might need only as many licenses as you run concurrently. But that's one for the lawyers to dig into.) The trouble with advocating an overall free environment is that most people will never use any particular freedom. (How many of you here have dug into the source code of, say, Open SSL, to see if you can find a bug? I certainly haven't - and I probably wouldn't have spotted Heartbleed's cause if I had.) Boasting that you can do X, Y, and Z isn't going to sway someone who does't want to do any of those three things. What difference will it make to the typical home user that s/he has, or does not have, the rights to edit the source code for the desktop web browser? It's not going to happen anyway. How do you encourage someone to take a walk in the big wide world, when he's much happier staying inside all day? (Hey, that's me...) Freedom *on its own* is actually quite useless to most people. ChrisA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/captjjmow5uopbs-p4a4agcfp6o23cbrpe+xorshytffpycd...@mail.gmail.com
