[Ilugc] Check out my Facebook profile- Security issues
- From: kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx (Kapil Hari Paranjape)
- Date: Tue Jun 10 11:03:37 2008
On Mon, 09 Jun 2008, Sarad AV wrote:
B. Avoid monopolies. If your friend uses Gmail then insist on using
Yahoo! and complain loudly if the two services do not co-operate.
More choice is mostly better!
Its designed not to work. All the 'free extra services' can be
exercised only if you stick to one of them. Using two different
services for the same thing now becomes grossly inconvenient.
A lot of things appear to be inconvenient until one tries them out!
Look at what someone else said.
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Akarsh Simha wrote:
It's more a matter of choice. I prefer free software by choice,
convenient or not.
The cost of freedom is that you need to exercise your choices.
Occasionally, this means giving up temporary conveniences.
To come to the example at hand. Suppose everyone decides to go with
gmail and googlegroups. Suppose that this causes Yahoo! to fold up
its e-mail services and so on. Suddenly, it becomes practical _and_
profitable for Google to start exercising its monopoly![1][2]
Accepting the temporary incovenience of connecting to the 'net
with slirp and a reduced capability network stack, allowed us to
setup mail services in 1992-93 at School of Maths, TIFR using
GNU/Linux. Thanks to Pablo Ares Gastesi that is now a full-fledged
LAN running GNU/Linux. (See
http://www.math.tifr.res.in).
Luckily for us all, his effort to circumvent the inconvenience was
not the only one but was replicated a thousand times over across the
world. As a result, circa 2000 it became more *convenient* to set up
basic services (DNS,mail,web,...) using GNU/Linux or *BSD than
with any of the proprietary systems.
So if one believes that Web 2.0 or network-based shared-resource
computing is the way of the future then the time is ripe to:
(a) ensure interoperability of the proprietary providers
and
(b) setup (or provide software resources to setup) community
supported service providers
This may be a bit inconvenient in the short term but will benefit
everyone in the long term. Example: Open Street Maps!
Regards,
Kapil.
[1] This is not specific to Google. If the roles of Google and Yahoo!
were interchanged, this would not really change the story.
[2] In fact, Linux users should be happy that there is
FreeBSD/OpenBSD which can throw up different (and sometimes better!)
ways of doing the same thing. Thus Linux is not allowed to be a monopoly
either. :-)
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