Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: eldakingOf course, what I really want is for Office to stop shitting all over standards and making their files incompatible with every other software.

Same, I’m a lot more interested in Microsoft opening up their standards or switching to open standards than in installing their software on Linux. I like LibreOffice just fine but it still shits the bed when I receive MS Office files with frames and absolute-positioned content.

They do use open standards. Office Open XML (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) are an international standard, due to much lobbying by Microsoft.

But Microsoft doesn't properly follow the standards, saving the documents in a wrong version of the format, and thus ruining compatibility.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CFWhitmanTrademark does not fail spectacularly. It mostly succeeds (though not completely; consumers can be a bit gullible).

Of course consumers don't sue over trademark. They don't have standing to do so. The fact that trademark protects the company with the trademark from being legally impersonated doesn't mean consumers are not protected from being fooled as well. Most of the good that trademark does is accomplished without lawsuits because people already know they would be the target of a lawsuit if they violated it.

It is not trademark's purpose to inform people that two different brands are owned by the same company. You would need another regulation for that. Also, it is possible for two different brands to actually have substantial differences while still being owned by the same company.

The fact that trademark is sometimes overextended and abused does not make it ineffective for legitimate purposes.

The idea that the phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure" now seems too generic to be a trademark is an allowed defense for a trademark lawsuit if the defendant can show enough use of the phrase for some period of time that was not stopped by the plaintiff or use of the phrase by someone other than the plaintiff within the scope of the trademark suit that predated the registration of the trademark. Of course not every case goes as it should. If you want the law to be perfect and perfectly applied, then you'll have to look elsewhere than laws created and/or applied by imperfect people.

Trademark fails because it puts the interests of the company over those of the customers. Companies are allowed to misuse their own trademarks in ways that are arguably deceptive (implying different products are related), and choose to enforce them against others not due to a public interest in avoiding harm to customers but due to their personal interest in getting an advantage over a competitor. It can be sold, transferred or licensed, at the convenience of its owners (and not when necessary/beneficial for the public utility of the trademark). It is a privilege granted to businesses, not a regulation they have to follow. I find it disingenuous to argue that trademark law isn't, first and foremost, intended to protect trademark holders and their particular interests.

It is not a case of the law being abused. It is the case of wording the law in a way that goes counter its own (supposed) purpose.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any laws to prevent misuse of identifying symbology... I'm just saying that laws protecting customers/the public interest shouldn't be granting third parties property rights over phrases. There are many other ways to regulate products to avoid fraud.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

QuoteThe Microsoft Teams client is the first Office app that is coming to Linux desktops, and will support all of Teams’ core capabilities.

This is the part that interested me. I didn't even know about this "Teams" software. But Microsoft Office is still a big limiting factor for Linux. Word, Power Point and Excel on Linux would be huge.

Of course, what I really want is for Office to stop shitting all over standards and making their files incompatible with every other software.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SalvatosThe CYOA company is probably just angry because unlike Kleenex and others, a lot of people don’t even realize that it’s a brand and not a generic term, so they don’t get as much promotional value from other companies keeping the term alive.

The fact that people don't even realize it refers to your brand is probably the best possible argument for something not being a trademark.

Quoting: CFWhitmanI wanted to point out that trademark law is probably the most supportable form of so-called "intellectual property." Trademark law is a consumer protection law. The purpose of trademark is to prevent dishonesty in the marketplace. Trademark is a way of making sure that you are dealing with the company that you think you are. Without it, anyone could pretend to be representing a company that they have nothing to do with. With trademark you know that the mayonnaise that you bought is Hellman's or Cain's, the car you bought is a Toyota or a Chevrolet, etc. Without it you can't be sure of any of these things.

Does this mean that trademark is never abused? Of course not. I pointed out things that I thought were abuses in a previous post. That doesn't mean that trademark is a bad thing overall.

The best argument against this trademark is that protection for it wasn't pursued diligently enough in the years between when the books were popular and just recently. The phrase may seem generic now, but it was quite original back when the books were first introduced.

Except it fails spectacularly at any of this. It is never a case of consumers suing, it is the company. It works to stop what should be legitimate uses of descriptive phrases, fair use of character names, and the use of symbols and terms that are useful to the public. It is like a soft copyright more than anything.

And it doesn't even get close to preventing consumer confusion. That one would take much more burdensome regulation on what forms of marketing, brands, slogans and packaging are acceptable. If you want people to know what they are buying, having several brands with the same owner is a no-go. Full disclosure of production chains and affiliations should be strictly required. Changes to products and packaging should be even more heavily regulated.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PangaeaSome nice rebates, but with GOG not bothering to release the Stardew Valley update for days on end, I refuse to spend a single cent there.

Stardew Valley was one game I bought on GOG and that I regret not getting on Steam instead.

I quite like a lot about GOG, but Linux support has fallen behind a lot, which makes the comparison to Steam even more one-sided. Steam got us Proton, GOG doesn't bother to get incremental updates, betas, or even their multiplayer system into Linux. For now, I'm taking the stance that GOG is good only for the really old games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I would say this story is a good example of the benefits we could have from games being FOSS. The game has a longstanding bug that should be fixed on the game code (rather than worked around in drivers), but the developer has no Linux developers left to fix it and not really any interest in the Linux copy. However, technical savvy users have found the bug and identified what fix would be needed, and are even willing to do onerous stuff like recompiling the entire graphics driver to solve it. But they have no access to the game source code and no way to distribute the fix if they had (yes, it would be necessary; we couldn't rely on the developers maintaining the game, after all).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeEveryone's their own of course, but I'm surprised how many people state no interest at all in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The big AAA games (which are all action games, shooters, or action RPGs) get disproportionate media attention. Sure, they are big, but if we add together all the small niches that are ignored it also becomes huge. Or in other words, a lot of people are interested in that but not the actual majority.

Also, we have a biased sample here. People that are super interested in running such games are, on average, less likely to play games on Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Absolutely nothing I might be remotely interested in. As expected.

More interesting: what games on that list do not have working Linux ports yet? This could help answer the first of the two big questions - are games getting ports because of Stadia. The second question will have to wait a little more - whether those games release for Linux desktops or not.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If it doesn't interfere with the traditional model - and I can't imagine Valve would risk that - I'm not against it. Might even perhaps use it one day, for the rare exceptional game, if my internet ever becomes good enough.

The ideal would be for them to just provide a server and you install your game there and everything is the same as if you were running the game itself - even install folders, mods, etc.

But even in that best of cases, I'm a bit afraid of games coming to rely on that kind of thing. Games should be made with PC specs in mind. Preferrably cheap PC specs. I already find it outrageous the kind of system requirements new games require.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I personally wouldn't use either a chromium derivative or a Microsoft browser instead of Firefox, but still... better than the alternative.

If they were rebuilding Edge based on chromium, and they removed the Linux compatibility that was already there, it would be bad. And it is what Apple would do, or what Microsoft did several times in the past. So, yay, they didn't ruin things even more this time. (Ironically, Google is the one that is adopting the traditional Microsoft strategy of incorrectly implementing standards because as market leader this punishes small competitors that do things right).

Now, if they ported Microsoft Office to Linux, that I would be interested in. Not that I want to use it (for my limited use, Libre Office is more than good enough), but it might be necessary for collaboration, and it would make transitioning to Linux a lot smoother.

View this comment - View article - View full comments