28 Apr
2016
28 Apr
'16
7:35 a.m.
But the
marketing men got to it and ruined its security and
elegance, to produce the lipstick-and-high-heels Windows XP. That
version, insecure and flakey with its terrible bodged-in browser,
that, of course, was the one that sold.
???Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a
large scale, is much
more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how
efficient it might be.??? > Linux got nowhere until it copied the XP model.
Only for corporate values of "nowhere". Considering it to be a failure
because it wasn't grabbing "market" share, or because there weren't
large companies involved, is to buy into the problem, defining success
in monetary (or near-monetary) terms.
I don't know what Linus's original vision for Linux was, so I don't
know when (if ever) it was his idea of a success. But I would have
called it a success much earlier, and, indeed, I would be tempted to
say it failed _when_ it "copied the XP model" and "got somewhere",
because that's when it lost the benefits early versions brought.
I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source"
but have never once even tried to build anything from source.
Personally, it doesn't run on my machines unless I personally built it
from source; my only use for a binary distribution is
the first install
on a new architecture, and even that not always - sometimes I can
cross-build or some such.
Yours in curmudgeonicity,
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