4 ms·

Aren't these all "killer apps" for Linux? cp mv rm cat grep find ln head tail

vinkelhake 12y ago
They are all readily available on a number of other operating systems.
cwyers 12y ago
A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform. Those are all pretty standard *IX command line utilities, not killer apps. (They're also the sort of thing that I bet someone has coded in Rust or Go over a few weekends as an exercise, and as such they're probably the EASIEST bit of GNU code to rip out of Linux at this point if you wanted a Linux without GNU.)
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform. True, and I don't think the listed command-line utilities do that. OTOH, I do think that that presentation hints at the truth -- the "killer apps" that are driving Linux adoption aren't a big flashy end-user-facing 1-2-3 style apps, or even apps in the traditional sense, but lower-level more-technical features/tools that make developing on and for Linux attractive, or make Linux attractive for use in cloud deployments, etc.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    In my opinion, the "killer apps" for Linux (aside from the Apache httpd that amyjess mentioned) are: * A mostly Unix-like OS that runs on available commodity hardware, rather than requiring you to buy a SPARC, Alpha or POWER machine, you can buy a commodity x86 machine and use that instead. Because of economies of scale, commodity hardware is always going to be cheaper. * Low (really no) licensing cost. The traditional model of scaling was that when your computer wasn't fast enough, you bought a faster computer. Linux's licensing model makes it affordable to scale horizontally -- to have lots of "slow" computers provide the same computing capacity as one big computer. In a "buy a computer and you have to buy my UNIX" world, any savings you can achieve by scaling out instead of up are offset by software licensing costs. Not in a Linux world, though.

They are all readily available on a number of other operating systems.

A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform. Those are all pretty standard *IX command line utilities, not killer apps. (They're also the sort of thing that I bet someone has coded in Rust or Go over a few weekends as an exercise, and as such they're probably the EASIEST bit of GNU code to rip out of Linux at this point if you wanted a Linux without GNU.)

dragonwriter 12y ago
> A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform. True, and I don't think the listed command-line utilities do that. OTOH, I do think that that presentation hints at the truth -- the "killer apps" that are driving Linux adoption aren't a big flashy end-user-facing 1-2-3 style apps, or even apps in the traditional sense, but lower-level more-technical features/tools that make developing on and for Linux attractive, or make Linux attractive for use in cloud deployments, etc.
- cwyers 12y ago
  In my opinion, the "killer apps" for Linux (aside from the Apache httpd that amyjess mentioned) are: * A mostly Unix-like OS that runs on available commodity hardware, rather than requiring you to buy a SPARC, Alpha or POWER machine, you can buy a commodity x86 machine and use that instead. Because of economies of scale, commodity hardware is always going to be cheaper. * Low (really no) licensing cost. The traditional model of scaling was that when your computer wasn't fast enough, you bought a faster computer. Linux's licensing model makes it affordable to scale horizontally -- to have lots of "slow" computers provide the same computing capacity as one big computer. In a "buy a computer and you have to buy my UNIX" world, any savings you can achieve by scaling out instead of up are offset by software licensing costs. Not in a Linux world, though.