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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 t

by 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.

by cwyers 12y ago

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.