Who is the enemy of FOSS today?
michuk.posterous.com
michuk.posterous.com
Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in 1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.
Oh, and I would have to jailbreak iPhone to use it.
It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.
BTW, maybe I'm missing something here but shouldn't it be possible to keep an index on the device and just update it when files are added/deleted?
Yeah, it's enabled by default but I'm pretty sure it's the correct behavior for most people.
Directories are, in a sense, high-maintenance indexes, but some of us find the existing tag system utterly inadequate and need to fall back to this solution.
Given an outside-generated MP3 (as opposed to one I ripped from CD), I had scripts that would look at the tags to figure out where to put the file in my directory hierarchy.
Said directory hierarchy would then be synced to the Archos, where it would be accessed via the file browser.
To this day, I still miss this approach when I want to listen to classical music. I felt like listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony a couple days ago at work, and it took me about 5 minutes to find it on my iPhone. It would have taken me 5 seconds on my old Archos. The iPhone/iPod pretty much falls apart when faced with music that doesn't fit into the genre/artist/album classification.
I'm starting to see those free software ideals I've held so dear turn into tradeoffs. I'll trade in some 'freedoms' for more capable, abundant, and better supported software that allows me to get work done easier and more effectively.
If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users. To most people software freedom is too intangible to be counted as a benefit. Hell, 99.9% of people couldn't even explain it in very basic terms if you asked them. He's just created software for enthusiasts and hobbyists. Not a bad thing, but not his goal either.
Anyways, I've grown out of it.
I'm just talking about consumer-facing software, by the way. I know free software will always have value in education, commodity software that is not your primary business, etc. It is always going to be an abysmal failure on the desktop unless a free software Steve Jobs appears out of thin air, though.
Indeed, consider this alternate timeline whose RMS is more pragmatic and willing to give up a few short term small victories in order to win big in the end:
It's the late '70s. The microprocessor revolution is just getting started. RMS and his band of wily hackers jump onboard, realizing there is going to be a lot of money to be made, and that a person with a lot of money can do a lot more good than a person without a lot of money.
They make a decision: they will go commercial, amass a fortune, and then retire to promote their ideal free software world.
It's GNU BASIC that Altair picks up in this timeline, not MS BASIC. It's RMS that gets the IBM deal. It's RMS that becomes the world's richest man.
25 years later, RMS retires, and then sets up the FSF, endowed with about $50 billion dollars. With just the investment income, not touching the principle at all, the FSF is generating enough money to be able to give out 50000 grants a year that each pay a developer for one year's full time work on free software.
In 10 years, the FSF has produced GPL replacements for every important piece of non-free generally available software on the planet. The only non-GPL software left is internal things on corporate intranets.
Microsoft would do a far better job at discrediting FOSS if they simply flooded the internet with astroturfers that mimic the FOSS nutjobs.
I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.
If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.
He quotes from research derived from watching a group of neurotics that consistently defended itself against his [the researcher] attempts to make them do what they had ostensible gathered themselves together for. The second pattern of defensive behavior was identifying a common enemy. Clay writes:
"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies."
So let's forget about Apple or Microsoft or any other so-called-enemy for awhile and get back to coding and "defeat" them the old-fashioned way.
If Apple is the enemy of FOSS, we've got a rosy future.
Apple's lawsuit against HTC effectively asserts that Android is illegal. That's a rather big deal; there are three mobile computing platforms that matter, and Android is the only one that's open.
Apple is a greater enemy to FOSS than Microsoft because where the latter's attacks center around FUD and legal threats, Apple's is a competent attempt to undermine open computing platforms. The walled garden begins at the hardware level.
There'll always be a non-Apple 100% free platform. The two models can coexist together just fine. I use Apple products where appropriate, and others where it's not.