[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

Blink of an eye, my good man, blink of an eye.

I blinked. We're still here.

According to this, it appears the most popular solution is that of giving the Saudis their own server, and that solution is being tested now.

If it's going to be done at all, that's probably the way to go.

According to this, it appears they already tried to gain access on their own and failed. So much for due process.

Sorry, that wasn't what I meant.

In the US, for example, due process means that if a law enforcement agency wanted access to my email, my ISP's likely response would be "Show us your court order." They would be unlikely to cough up simply because a cop asked for it, if nothing else to avoid lawsuits out the wazoo. The necessity of getting a judge in the loop and convincing him there is adequate reason to conduct the investigation and sign off on an order directing the ISP to comply constitutes the sort of "due process" I was talking about.

I don't know anything about the Saudi legal system, but I suspect they have channels that should be gone through and sign offs that have to happen before an arm of the Saudi government could get access to a Saudi Blackberry subscriber's mail. There may be rather less due process than we have, and a much broader notion of what constitutes something they would see fit to take action over, but there will be a process.

There's still a battle raging about v3 vs v2. Linus Torvalds hisownself had issues with it from the beginning:

"[This] means that now, suddenly, you maybe can't share code simply because of license issues. But that's not something new; we've always had that with other licenses...One of the few reasons GPL v3 might be useful was if there were lots of external code that were important and worthwhile and licensed under GPL v3. To avoid the licensing incompatibility, some kernel people could re-license to version 3 - not because it's the better license, but because it opens up code to us."

--Linus Torvalds, in Voicu, D. (2008, January 9). Linus Torvalds Says "No" to GPLv3. (link)

Phones/mobile devices are probably one of those situations; for instance, the bootloader on the Droid X is encrypted in order to keep people like myself from updating the OS outside of normal channels; that's code written my Moto and not (to my knowledge) open-source. Torvalds and Stallman will disagree over this until their last breaths.

I've no doubt they will. Linus is far more pragmatic in his approach than RMS. Stallman doesn't seem to understand that everyone isn't just like him. He's a Utopian with a vision of what open source is supposed to be. But that vision founders on some practical realities, like how you write open source software and make a living.

Richard isn't married, doesn't have kids, a house, a car, or most of the other trappings of middle class existence. He doesn't have mortgage and car payments to make or tuition to spring for, and I believe he actually lives out of the FSF offices. I don't know what his annual income is, but I suspect it would be considered poverty level. RMS doesn't care. He makes enough to cover basic needs and continue to write and evangelize for free software, and doesn't understand why everyone else can't follow his example. "Well, Richard, an awful lot of folks are trying to make their living as programmers and need to get paid for writing code..."

Actually, I'm not sure I want Linux to take over the world inasmuch as it's already running the most secure and mission-critical servers on the planet; I personally don't care if Linux takes over the desktop either (I tried the evangelism route for the first 6 months I used Linux...complete waste of time). For such a thing to happen, users will have to learn to take responsibility for their actions, and Microsoft has conditioned the casual user for 15 years to believe that such responsibility shouldn't be necessary. As a matter of fact, Mark Shuttleworth and the group at Canonical are doing a bang-up job of it themselves.

You can actually make a case that such responsibility shouldn't be necessary. Unfortunately, it is.

I'm active on occasion on a site devoted to a flavor of Linux where most of the folks who hang out see Ubuntu as the antithesis of what they think a distro ought to be. They rail about the annoyance of not having root by default and needing to use sudo, and how hard (they think) Ubuntu makes it to pop the hood and learn about the system.

My analogy is to the automobile. You can own a drive a car without being a mechanic or knowing the principles of the four stroke internal combustion engine. For things beyond fixing a flat, you pay a specialist to work on it.

We aren't quite there yet with computers. You need to have some understanding of how the system works to get the most out of it. But development has been focused on increasingly higher levels of abstraction, reducing what the user had to know to be able to use the machine at all.

I can't be bothered to evangelize for Linux on the desktop. Most folks learn only as much as they have to to be able to use the system and accomplish what they want to do. They aren't likely to switch to Linux from Windows because it's different, and will require a learning curve they won't wish to come up.

If someone indicates they are interested in trying Linux, I'll probably point them at Ubuntu, simply because it does the best job of installing with minimal involvement from the user and Just Working that I've seen from a Linux distro. If they want to pop the hood and learn more, they can, but they don't have to be a mechanic (or want to be one) simply to use the system at all.

I'm not perturbed at all by things like the difficulty of getting root on an Android phone. Linux is in all sorts of things. My wireless router uses a Linux kernel. To get a command line and root access I need to install third party firmware, as the default interface is web based. The ordinary user may not be aware there's a Linux kernel underneath, and should not have to be to use the box. The same goes for Linux based smartphones. If you want to get root just because, fine. If you have to get root because it's the only way to do something you want to do, there's a good case you bought the wrong phone.
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Dennis