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Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours k

Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant.

jiggy2011 13y ago
I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin.
- maxharris 13y ago
  I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin. As an aggregate measure, spread across several million people? Perhaps. Resolving that is just a matter of looking up the data. But that's not the question that matters for an actual developer. What actually matters is: How much money are you making on one platform, and how much could you make on the other? That question has a lot more to do with whether or not a developer makes his or her rent next month than the aggregate measure above. I'm not saying it's useless to look at the long-term picture. I'm just trying to show that it's a big mistake to focus on that to the exclusion of more pressing things first.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    I'm not sure I completely follow you. I would calculate on the basis of developers building software that runs on top of Linux, so that would include a large proportion of all web applications as well as various embedded applications. You could probably include android in there also. Now it's true that this isn't quite apples to apples since Linux is more fungible than iOS in most regards, mostly thanks to it's open source nature. For example moving your web application from Linux to FreeBSD is likely to make less of a revenue difference than say moving from iOS to Windows Phone 8. The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS.
    - maxharris 13y ago
      The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS. Maybe. On the one hand, I know exactly how great it is to have development tools that are a free download away (I remember shelling out hundreds on a C++ compiler in the mid-90s). Open source definitely rocks in this respect. On the other hand, I know that without the iPhone, iOS, and all of the associated things that came with it (including the industry's massive pivot to compete in its wake), things might look very different for an app developer today. (Or at the very least they'd be slower in getting to this point.) I think it's important to realize that there were no independent app developers in 2007 - writing, buying and using software for the Palm handhelds or Windows CE was radically different on nearly every level.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        It's quite difficult to retroactively unpick cause and effect though it could certainly be argued that the existence of Linux (and free UNIX in general) contributed greatly to the rise of the web. I would still wager that more paid developer hours go towards stuff that ends up being executed on top of Linux than iOS though.
      - ninetenel 13y ago
        He's just trolling ...
    - mynameisvlad 13y ago
      Why would you include Web Applications as part of that? Web applications are almost completely OS-agnostic. I can run my PHP application on Linux, on OSX, or on Windows. It shouldn't count for any of the three operating systems because it wasn't built for any of them. It was built to run on a software stack which runs on all three.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        But people do in fact choose to run them on Linux which is unlikely to be a purely arbitrary choice though by nature open source stacks will be more portable, but it seems perverse to use that as a negative argument.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  > I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin. Without a doubt. IBM, Google, Amazon, and many, many others are deep in the Linux eco-system. Pretty much all supercomputing is done on Linux, and all the boring cloud/infrastructure/scientific stuff is done on Linux.
_pmf_ 13y ago
> Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant. Yeah, one has to admit that Mac users are a more receptive audience for the high-brow humor of sophisticated fart apps.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  Now now, don't be mad because what he says is true. It's unbecoming. If you really care, put your effort into making it false.
  - amznthrowaway 13y ago
    It is false. I and my coworkers make plenty of money developing for Linux. Also, we're hiring: http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/ http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/
    - nsxwolf 13y ago
      Do you all make money developing Linux software for consumers? Anything my mom may have used, perhaps?
      - reinhardt 13y ago
        And consumer software is the only one that matters because..? In any case if your mom uses the interwebz, she has probably used Linux software, both free and money-making.
        nsxwolf 13y ago
        Are you saying it doesn't matter? Or that it matters so little you can justify just staying out of that market entirely? Yes, the whole world "uses Linux" in one way or another. But Linux is not a viable consumer platform (No, Android doesn't count).
      - 13y ago
pavanky 13y ago
There is money to be made making software for Linux. Mostly in engineering / Scientific software. Making money of utility software ? Not so much. If you are a company like PGI you are probably making a ton of money selling fortran compilers to people running Linux on their clusters.
- ngoldbaum 13y ago
  Sadly the PGI compilers are (at least in my experience with codes I use) buggy, slow, and difficult to use. Why pay when I can get comparable performance using GNU compilers?
  - pavanky 13y ago
    People using FORTRAN have this weird tendency of not changing much with the times. Their code bases go back decades, and PGI compilers are something they continue using.
    - caw 13y ago
      My experience with PGI is that the engineers liked them because they had a FORTRAN to CUDA compiler, so they didn't have to rewrite their code. They were pretty good about answering bug reports, with the number of times I had to install new compilers on the compute systems.
ninguem2 13y ago
Android (Linux) has surpassed iOS in number of users worldwide.
- rimantas 13y ago
  And?
- maxharris 13y ago
  True. But the reality is far more complicated than that. In order to compare the two objectively (this is from the perspective of a developer, but many of the same factors also apply for end users), you also have to take into account things like the number of users that buy apps, app store fragmentation, how your software will fare in each store, and a whole host of other technical and market factors that are frequently discussed here. I realize this might not be what you're saying, so I'll slay a misinterpretation for those that might hold it: going only by the sheer number of users on a platform alone does not mean that it is going to be a good idea for you to develop for it.
  - thrush 13y ago
    http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/ http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/ Most notable point is that iOS users spend more than 3x on apps than android users. Also, the same exact app on the iTunes Store tends to make more then 3x in sales than the same app on Google Play.
- millerm 13y ago
  More people drive Toyota than BMW. More people eat at McDonalds than Five Guys. More people stay at a Holiday Inn than The Ritz Carlton. The statement is worthless as it conveys no meaning, other than a factoid, as do my statements.
  - dirkgently 13y ago
    pukes
  - deleted 13y ago
brooksbp 13y ago
Yeah, nobody makes money off of linux in embedded systems..

Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant.

jiggy2011 13y ago

I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin.

maxharris 13y ago
I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin. As an aggregate measure, spread across several million people? Perhaps. Resolving that is just a matter of looking up the data. But that's not the question that matters for an actual developer. What actually matters is: How much money are you making on one platform, and how much could you make on the other? That question has a lot more to do with whether or not a developer makes his or her rent next month than the aggregate measure above. I'm not saying it's useless to look at the long-term picture. I'm just trying to show that it's a big mistake to focus on that to the exclusion of more pressing things first.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I'm not sure I completely follow you. I would calculate on the basis of developers building software that runs on top of Linux, so that would include a large proportion of all web applications as well as various embedded applications. You could probably include android in there also. Now it's true that this isn't quite apples to apples since Linux is more fungible than iOS in most regards, mostly thanks to it's open source nature. For example moving your web application from Linux to FreeBSD is likely to make less of a revenue difference than say moving from iOS to Windows Phone 8. The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS.
  - maxharris 13y ago
    The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS. Maybe. On the one hand, I know exactly how great it is to have development tools that are a free download away (I remember shelling out hundreds on a C++ compiler in the mid-90s). Open source definitely rocks in this respect. On the other hand, I know that without the iPhone, iOS, and all of the associated things that came with it (including the industry's massive pivot to compete in its wake), things might look very different for an app developer today. (Or at the very least they'd be slower in getting to this point.) I think it's important to realize that there were no independent app developers in 2007 - writing, buying and using software for the Palm handhelds or Windows CE was radically different on nearly every level.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      It's quite difficult to retroactively unpick cause and effect though it could certainly be argued that the existence of Linux (and free UNIX in general) contributed greatly to the rise of the web. I would still wager that more paid developer hours go towards stuff that ends up being executed on top of Linux than iOS though.
    - ninetenel 13y ago
      He's just trolling ...
  - mynameisvlad 13y ago
    Why would you include Web Applications as part of that? Web applications are almost completely OS-agnostic. I can run my PHP application on Linux, on OSX, or on Windows. It shouldn't count for any of the three operating systems because it wasn't built for any of them. It was built to run on a software stack which runs on all three.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      But people do in fact choose to run them on Linux which is unlikely to be a purely arbitrary choice though by nature open source stacks will be more portable, but it seems perverse to use that as a negative argument.
Mikeb85 13y ago
> I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin. Without a doubt. IBM, Google, Amazon, and many, many others are deep in the Linux eco-system. Pretty much all supercomputing is done on Linux, and all the boring cloud/infrastructure/scientific stuff is done on Linux.

_pmf_ 13y ago

> Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant. Yeah, one has to admit that Mac users are a more receptive audience for the high-brow humor of sophisticated fart apps.

DannyBee 13y ago
Now now, don't be mad because what he says is true. It's unbecoming. If you really care, put your effort into making it false.
- amznthrowaway 13y ago
  It is false. I and my coworkers make plenty of money developing for Linux. Also, we're hiring: http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/ http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    Do you all make money developing Linux software for consumers? Anything my mom may have used, perhaps?
    - reinhardt 13y ago
      And consumer software is the only one that matters because..? In any case if your mom uses the interwebz, she has probably used Linux software, both free and money-making.
      - nsxwolf 13y ago
        Are you saying it doesn't matter? Or that it matters so little you can justify just staying out of that market entirely? Yes, the whole world "uses Linux" in one way or another. But Linux is not a viable consumer platform (No, Android doesn't count).
    - 13y ago

pavanky 13y ago

There is money to be made making software for Linux. Mostly in engineering / Scientific software. Making money of utility software ? Not so much. If you are a company like PGI you are probably making a ton of money selling fortran compilers to people running Linux on their clusters.

ngoldbaum 13y ago
Sadly the PGI compilers are (at least in my experience with codes I use) buggy, slow, and difficult to use. Why pay when I can get comparable performance using GNU compilers?
- pavanky 13y ago
  People using FORTRAN have this weird tendency of not changing much with the times. Their code bases go back decades, and PGI compilers are something they continue using.
  - caw 13y ago
    My experience with PGI is that the engineers liked them because they had a FORTRAN to CUDA compiler, so they didn't have to rewrite their code. They were pretty good about answering bug reports, with the number of times I had to install new compilers on the compute systems.

ninguem2 13y ago

Android (Linux) has surpassed iOS in number of users worldwide.

rimantas 13y ago
And?
maxharris 13y ago
True. But the reality is far more complicated than that. In order to compare the two objectively (this is from the perspective of a developer, but many of the same factors also apply for end users), you also have to take into account things like the number of users that buy apps, app store fragmentation, how your software will fare in each store, and a whole host of other technical and market factors that are frequently discussed here. I realize this might not be what you're saying, so I'll slay a misinterpretation for those that might hold it: going only by the sheer number of users on a platform alone does not mean that it is going to be a good idea for you to develop for it.
- thrush 13y ago
  http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/ http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/ Most notable point is that iOS users spend more than 3x on apps than android users. Also, the same exact app on the iTunes Store tends to make more then 3x in sales than the same app on Google Play.
millerm 13y ago
More people drive Toyota than BMW. More people eat at McDonalds than Five Guys. More people stay at a Holiday Inn than The Ritz Carlton. The statement is worthless as it conveys no meaning, other than a factoid, as do my statements.
- dirkgently 13y ago
  pukes
- deleted 13y ago

brooksbp 13y ago

Yeah, nobody makes money off of linux in embedded systems..