When hardware advances make a new application for software possible, copyright law provides the funds to quickly throw together a team and ship a first version (whereas free software projects tend to be relatively slow to gather momentum). Without this compatibility, it’s less likely to be as helpful to others, which means there’s less chance of widespread adoption, and less chance of fame, and writing something similar to something else that already exists may simply be less interesting.Ĭopyright law is good at producing good-enough new software fast. Further, if sharing data is important (as it often is), then it will no longer be enough to just write the software, it also has to be made compatible with whatever else already exists (which is likely to be a moving target).
If someone can license software that does what they need, then they no longer need to write free software to do it. These motivators are all reduced if something comparable already exists. The desire to help others and/or for the fame that may come from doing so, or simply doing something new out of interest, are others. Necessity is the mother of (at least some) invention(s). That said, you’re right that much restricted software doesn’t have free equivalents, but I rather suspect it’s often because the restricted software exists that equivalent free software doesn’t. I’m given to understand that there are non-techie types that are able to use Ubuntu, and find it to do what they need. I think that’s a bit of an over-generalisation.
This is why you have a billion text editors but no decent medical transcription software, half a dozen shells but no drop in replacement for Quickbooks/Quicken, its because FOSS is written BY programmers and FOR programmers, not a programmer? move on please. If the FOSS argument were valid then there would be a FOSS alternative to almost any commercial software of note….hint, not even close.įOSS has shown time and time again if you are not a PROGRAMMER and your primary job is not PROGRAMMING then FOSS frankly isn’t for you. It’s one thing to see Dutch embrace a new method of displaying direct quotes under the influences of computers, but to see an entire form of script threatened is another. It’d be fantastic if Microsoft, Google, and Apple could include proper support for nastaliq into their products. And those that don’t like it can go write in Western letters.
But when rendered on the web and on smartphones and the entire gamut of digital devices at our disposal, Urdu is getting depicted in naskh, an angular and rather stodgy script that comes from Arabic. Urdu is traditionally written in a Perso-Arabic script called nastaliq, a flowy and ornate and hanging script.
This article is a bit too politicised for my taste, but if you set that aside and focus on its linguistic and technological aspects, it’s quite, quite fascinating. While the changes highlighted in that article were subtle and not particularly substantial, there are cases around the world where computing threatens much more than a few subtle, barely noticeable features of a language. Way back in 2009, I wrote about a few specific cases in which computers led to (subtle) changes in the Dutch language.