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Hmm, do we ever had any Open Source "answer" to anything succeed, not in the meaning of usefulness, but in the meaning of BEING ACTUALLY USED BY A HUGE NUMBER O
by foljs 16y ago
Hmm, do we ever had any Open Source "answer" to anything succeed, not in the meaning of usefulness, but in the meaning of BEING ACTUALLY USED BY A HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, something that is necessary for, say, Facebook?
Compare:
@ Linux, BSD -> Windows, OS X
@ ogg -> mp3
@ Theora -> H264,
@ Gimp -> Photoshop,
@ Open Office -> MS Office,
@ Mono -> Windows .NET CLR,
@ GNUStep -> Cocoa,
The only exceptions I can think of are Firefox/Webkit (still lagging behind IE, though).
In the server side, of course, it's different: Apache, Bind, MySQL, PHP, etc...
- wladimir 16y agoHow do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the largest market share? Anyway, Linux has certainly succeeded. In the server and embedded realm it is used a lot. If you can't find more exceptions you're simply not looking well enough. There are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source. And don't forget OSX is based on an open source kernel. In databases many open source products are used. BerkelyDB is used a lot in applications, so is MySQL in web applications. Many tools used regularly by developers are open source.
- foljs 16y ago"How do you define "succeed"? Does something only succeed if it has the largest market share?" -- no: mainly if it's better suited to the task at hand. "There are many other exceptions: Wikipedia is open source." Which doesn't matter at all, the success of Wikipedia is in the content and the participation of the content creators, not in the open source-ness of the underlying wiki engine. "And don't forget OSX is based on an open source kernel." I don't. But that has nothing to do with the success of OS X. Darwin itself never got anywhere. "Many tools used regularly by developers are open source." Yes --but those are not replications of existing closed source ones...