One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Fair warning: Everything referenced in this article is very long. Sorry. It’s all worth reading and I would highly suggest you do so. On top of that, I’d say that every OS nerd of any kind should read both of the referenced articles.

Several times.

Now, about that hell frezing over thing:

I discovered ESR & Rob Landley’s World Domination 201 yesterday, 6 months or so after ESR and Rob Landley posted it. Frankly, I disagree with a hugely large amount of things that ESR says, and most of how he suggests we accomplish his goals - he’s the one “open source” guy that really bugs me. However, this article in question sticks out as a very sane, very logical analysis of where we’re going.

I was going to post about Peter Gutmann’s article about the Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection but at this point I believe it serves as a decent (if far from NPOV) sidebar to the ESR/Landley article, as a justification as to why ESR/Landley’s view of World Domination is so horribly important.

ESR/Landley’s article in a nutshell relies on the following points, which I consider valid:

• The transition to 64-bit operating systems begins for serious with Vista.
• Per Moore’s Law the transition will usually be in full swing by the end of 2008.
• The rise of high-definition codecs and memory-intensive media applications is going to play a key role in deciding which platform becomes dominant.
• Closed-source OS vendors and media companies are making software that is incompatible with open-source operating systems like Linux.
• This incompatibility will continue to increase as closed-source software becomes less friendly to reverse engineering and more friendly to DRM.
• If Linux is ever to be adopted as a desktop OS, it must be friendly and easy to use.
• If Linux is ever to be adopted as a desktop OS, it must be legally compatible with these media formats.

For once in my life, I am completely and unequivically in agreement with ESR: without major unification and changes in the next 2 years, Linux is going to be relegated to a position as a second-tier server OS only. It will be completely excluded from the playback - or creation - of high-definition formats. Linux on the desktop will be far less useful now than it already is.

This is very disheartening.