Sad, but true. The days of Ubuntu, and likely the open source movement, are in their final throes. According to this fellow:
Having failed to turn a profit year, after year, Canonical/Ubuntu has put all of it’s remaining energy into this deal: from the website re-design with the focus on Dell, to the recent video/talk marketing efforts made by Mr. Shuttleworth.
And it gets worse; according to Web legend Robert X Cringely, Google is also going down:
This is key: Google is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. It can't help doing so.
Dire-sounding indeed. As we learned just the other day, We're all Linux users by virtue of using Google and that 80% of servers running the internet use Apache.
Time to buy drop all pretenses and save up to buy Vista as that seems the only sane alternative. Or should I say safe alternative? Because as everyone knows, Linux is infringing on 235 of Microsoft's patents, and will soon be sued out of existence.
Well, it's been fun; I've enjoyed these few months of imagining that anything could be free and open source and challenge the rightful digital overlords. I say rightful because, well, their operating system is installed by default when you buy a real computer (notice I say real computer, doesn't include Macs).
There are, of course, those few Mac hobbyists that have like .0000001 market share (and shrinking) who refuse to get on board, but never mind about them. Plus they just don't have the software. In fact, rumors abound that Apple may be soon closing up shop as well. They just dropped the computer part of their name (used to be Apple computer); they may well sense the writing on the wall that has predicted their downfall since the early 90's. About time.
Never mind that a number of schools, governments, communities and even the US Department of Defense have adopted open source software in some way or that Dell computer is now going to sell computers with Linux pre-installed; they're also going to sell their computers at Wal-Mart, for crying out loud! Add another corpse to the pile. Bring out yer dead!
Never mind that open source is seen as a key to anti-terrorism efforts in the 21st century:
Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s chairman, CEO and president, was a conference keynote speaker along with McNealy. "The [Department of Defense] has been quick to recognize the importance of open source software," Szulik said in his speech. He called current systems "broken and dysfunctional" and referred to open source as "a national destiny."
....
"Most of the code that was written for SELinux was written by the National Security Agency," Byrd said, pointing to another professed advantage of open-source systems: the ability of programmers within government agencies to easily code to their agency's unique specifications.
......
Even so, according to those gathered at the conference, open sourcing is the direction of the future, both in software and intelligence, the one helping to enable the other. And according to Meyerrose, they both boil down to one thing: "making sure folks in the trenches have the tactical intelligence that they need."
Mmyeah, like those guys ever get any funding (hahahaha). So, while it's been fun to write about all this open source stuff for the past month and a half or so, I should have seen what was coming. The end of Ubuntu, and ultimately the ends of Google, Dell, Wal-Mart, plus all those people who adopt open source (Luzers!).
I've come to realize that we all need to embrace Digital Rights Management, which is:
an umbrella term referring to technologies used by publishers or copyright owners to control access to or usage of digital data or hardware, and to restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work or device. The term is often confused with copy protection and technical protection measures, which refer to technologies that control or restrict the use and access of digital content on electronic devices with such technologies installed, acting as components of a DRM design.
the Trusted Platform Module:
A Trusted Platform Module offers facilities for secure generation of cryptographic keys, the ability to limit the use of keys (to either signing / verification or encryption / decryption), as well as a Hardware Random Number Generator. It also includes capabilities such as remote attestation, binding, and sealed storage. Remote attestation creates an unforgeable summary of the hardware, boot, and host O/S configuration of a computer, allowing a third party (such as a digital music store) to verify that the software has not been changed. Sealing encrypts data in such a way that it may be decrypted only in the exact same state (that is, it may be decrypted only on the computer it was encrypted running the same software). Binding encrypts data using the TPM's endorsement key (a unique RSA key put in the chip during its production) or another 'trusted' key.
which is used by Microsoft Vista in its Bit Locker Drive Encryption which, at its highest level of operation requires key escrow:
(also known as a fair cryptosystem) is an arrangement in which the keys needed to decrypt encrypted data are held in escrow by a third party, so that someone else (typically government agencies) can obtain them to decrypt messages which they suspect to be relevant to national security.
and that makes us all that much safer; but even that is not going far enough--we also need to embrace the Broadcast Flag:
a set of status bits (or "flags") sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates whether or not it can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. Possible restrictions include inability to save an unencrypted digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials.
which is already included in the Xbox Media Center so they're already helping us out of those nasty dilemmas so that we don't to make those difficult choices. Anyway, who wants to watch HBO, Showtime, Cinemax or any of those rotten cable channels; I get the big three (ABC, NBC, FOX), and that's enough for me.
I've been sadly deluded, but now that I've seen what the real deal is, I've decided to take these diaries in a different direction, in helping spread information on the dangers of open source and the safety in having fewer choices. I'll have saved up enough for Vista Basic in a month or so, and I hope to extol its virtues when I have the time.