LWN article on Limux / WiMue and PMPC

Adonay Felipe Nogueira adfeno at hyperbola.info
Sun Jan 7 02:45:16 UTC 2018


You took my words and left me speechless. That is: I would say exactly
the same thing. ;)

2017-11-30T16:22:19+0100 Paul Boddie wrote:
> Well, I guess there is some additional history that isn't readily apparent 
> from reading my remarks and others. Personally, I don't think it is too much 
> to ask that the different Free Software solution providers consider things 
> like interoperability between their own solutions and others, and that they 
> also try and grow the Free Software share of the market instead of trying to 
> be the biggest fish in an ever-shrinking small pond, but I suppose I'm in the 
> minority and my opinion doesn't matter, anyway.
>
> Indeed, there are fundamental issues with sustaining Free Software that people 
> refuse to acknowledge or address. As long as those people retain the mentality 
> that they may "dethrone" the proprietary software incumbent and show everyone 
> else how it is done, while trying to do what the incumbent does on a 
> vanishingly small fraction of the resources that this incumbent has, while 
> also leaning on "the community" as a source of free stuff when the resource 
> problem starts to bite, then we should just expect more disappointment when 
> Free Software is discarded or not chosen. Because those fundamental issues 
> will still be there.
>
> It is possible that I am completely wrong and that Free Software is incredibly 
> successful in the area being discussed, but if so then such success is 
> happening behind closed doors, nobody ever speaks of it, and what we read 
> about in terms of the Free Software development process is largely just for 
> show, perhaps to attract support for specific products. And then I must wonder 
> why "the community" should pay the topic any attention at all. I am sure my 
> life would be easier if I didn't spend time on these things.
>
>
> These are indeed the standards we have to live with. I have less to say about 
> whether vCard can be customised to successfully provide "social profiles" (why 
> not use URLs just as one of the commenters asks?) than I might have about the 
> way these files are encoded and structured (data should be represented in a 
> consistent way with as few edge cases as possible) and the way these standards 
> are developed (iCalendar seems to be developed within some "pay to play" 
> organisation called CalConnect).
>
> Personally, I don't think people take enough advantage of what these standards 
> can already do, anyway. Participants in a scheduling activity merely need a 
> means of exchanging calendar information, not some central server, but many 
> people seem to have the misapprehension that a server is mandatory when it is 
> at most helpful. It would be nice to enhance mail/calendar clients to exchange 
> free/busy information between themselves, precisely as described by the 
> standards, but I've never seen it done. Again, someone insists on a server to 
> orchestrate the job. For example:
>
> https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/calendar-free-busy.html.en
>
> Such things matter more to the likes of you and me than to someone selling 
> solutions to businesses, however. But then again, we should care more about 
> these things than what "businesses demand" if we don't get to see any of their 
> money.
>
> Paul
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