'Commercial Partners'

[Eric S. Raymond]

Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com>:
> The existing one seems to have better metrics for assessing 
> compliance, less danger and greater longer-term stability.

Well, maybe.  Unless the consequence is that we never reach the mass
market at all, in which case Very Bad Things are likely to happen down
the road.  Like, no video cards we can actually use at above VESA
resolution.

> They will want their encrypted Blu-ray and HD-DVD. 

We don't know that yet.  A ruinous format war that turns consumers 
off both still looks like a fairly likely outcome.

>                                    They already want 
> their DVD now and that has to come by a dangerous contraband.

True.  I don't know how to solve that problem.
 
> MP3 decode and Flash look like they are safely (ie, no patent attack 
> invited) possible with an end-user download.

Yes.

> so lacking WMA is a dealbreaker for such folks.

How many of them do you think there are, as percentage
of the population?
 
> >QuickTime is somewhere in the middle.
> 
> For people who got to trailers.apple.com Quicktime is a dealbreaker, not 
> in the middle.

There can't be a lot of those, as Windows doesn't do QuickTime (at 
least it didn't last I checked).  That holds the damage down to 5% or so.

> This just illustrates how fuzzy it is to define the distro on a "wanker 
> perception" scale rather than objective criteria.

Still, the consequences of failure to do so would be a serious problem
in the middle- to long term.  If we can at least hold the number of
nontechie users who find Linux useless down to 1 in 10 or so we can
avoid this.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>