4 ms·

"A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there." Linux did take over Wind

"A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there." Linux did take over Windows. You realize Android is Linux, right? That's 80% of the mobile market right here https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840/photo/1 https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840... And now Microsoft is building Android apps. So that tiny, passionate minority was right ;-)

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Linux didn't take over Windows: it took over much of the server space and a specific form of it dominated mobile. Windows still dominates the desktop space as the commenter clearly meant. Further, a single company and product line has been holding its own against Android with profits that made Microsoft and IBM look poor. In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace Windows as king. And all kinds of companies working together got Android to 80% of the market with Apple getting 50% of market's profit. I wouldn't be bragging in either of those two niches. Cloud, on the other hand? Slam dunk.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  I could write several books on that subject (yawn) but my larger point is that this technology affects billions of people now. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but Slashdot was a big deal and so is Hacker News. These people have a lot of influence. It's a small world, after all ;-)
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Proprietary technology effects billions of people. Proprietary media has more influence than ever and across the globe. Again, proves nothing while distorting the truth of FOSS. The truth is that it was mostly subverted as a free labor tool for proprietary companies with a tiny percentage contributing something back. Totally opposite of the vision Stallman was preaching long ago when I still read his stuff. They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise. It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.
- tim333 11y ago
  >Apple getting 50% of market's profit 92% has been reported recently http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-industrys-profits-soars-to-92-1436727458 http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Wow. That's amazing. Their ability to get people to want over-priced stuff is and often was amazing. I'll give them that.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jaakl 11y ago
Linux vs Windows result was that the whole question become pointless, desktop computing was replaced by cloud and mobiles. This will be eventually also fate of FaceBook - we might see no direct FB killer, but something completely different which makes whole class of social networks pointless. Maybe telepathic technology - we could barely guess. Btw, same thing will happen with Google as search engine - generic web search is already less and less relevant, as we do not have "homepages" anymore, relevant stuff is consolidated to few portals which have better direct search. This does not mean that the corporates disappear - if they are well run then they just adopt to new areas.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  Along the lines of what I was thinking, a new class. I wonder about Google shrinking too. It has been suggested that autocomplete was a way for Google to hide that the number of searches was flat (not growing) and they changed the definition of a unique search with autocomplete. Of course, people are doing voice searches and YouTube searches now. The game changed.
  - cben 11y ago
    I've worked on the autocomplete team. It was always primarily a way to shave off some measurable time for users, making searches easier and faster — obviously a direct interest of Google. (There is also a serendipity aspiration — occasionally helping users formulate better searches — but we never knew how to define or measure success in this.) It did change search statistics but not in way anybody welcomed: all statistical analyses (including the building of the completion corpus itself) became more complicated as you now want to separate the signal of "how many people wanted to search this" from the semi-noise of "how many people chose this from the 5 suggestions at the moment they glanced at the screen". Google "Instant" triggering automatic searches for some completions muddled stuff even more... Nobody would go through that just "to hide" something.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Linux didn't take over Windows: it took over much of the server space and a specific form of it dominated mobile. Windows still dominates the desktop space as the commenter clearly meant. Further, a single company and product line has been holding its own against Android with profits that made Microsoft and IBM look poor. In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace Windows as king. And all kinds of companies working together got Android to 80% of the market with Apple getting 50% of market's profit. I wouldn't be bragging in either of those two niches. Cloud, on the other hand? Slam dunk.

pjbrunet 11y ago
I could write several books on that subject (yawn) but my larger point is that this technology affects billions of people now. Maybe it wasn't obvious at the time, but Slashdot was a big deal and so is Hacker News. These people have a lot of influence. It's a small world, after all ;-)
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Proprietary technology effects billions of people. Proprietary media has more influence than ever and across the globe. Again, proves nothing while distorting the truth of FOSS. The truth is that it was mostly subverted as a free labor tool for proprietary companies with a tiny percentage contributing something back. Totally opposite of the vision Stallman was preaching long ago when I still read his stuff. They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise. It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.
tim333 11y ago
>Apple getting 50% of market's profit 92% has been reported recently http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-industrys-profits-soars-to-92-1436727458 http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Wow. That's amazing. Their ability to get people to want over-priced stuff is and often was amazing. I'll give them that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

jaakl 11y ago

Linux vs Windows result was that the whole question become pointless, desktop computing was replaced by cloud and mobiles. This will be eventually also fate of FaceBook - we might see no direct FB killer, but something completely different which makes whole class of social networks pointless. Maybe telepathic technology - we could barely guess. Btw, same thing will happen with Google as search engine - generic web search is already less and less relevant, as we do not have "homepages" anymore, relevant stuff is consolidated to few portals which have better direct search. This does not mean that the corporates disappear - if they are well run then they just adopt to new areas.

pjbrunet 11y ago
Along the lines of what I was thinking, a new class. I wonder about Google shrinking too. It has been suggested that autocomplete was a way for Google to hide that the number of searches was flat (not growing) and they changed the definition of a unique search with autocomplete. Of course, people are doing voice searches and YouTube searches now. The game changed.
- cben 11y ago
  I've worked on the autocomplete team. It was always primarily a way to shave off some measurable time for users, making searches easier and faster — obviously a direct interest of Google. (There is also a serendipity aspiration — occasionally helping users formulate better searches — but we never knew how to define or measure success in this.) It did change search statistics but not in way anybody welcomed: all statistical analyses (including the building of the completion corpus itself) became more complicated as you now want to separate the signal of "how many people wanted to search this" from the semi-noise of "how many people chose this from the 5 suggestions at the moment they glanced at the screen". Google "Instant" triggering automatic searches for some completions muddled stuff even more... Nobody would go through that just "to hide" something.