strangest systems I've sent email from

[Mouse]

>> 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.
> 	â??Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much
> 	more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how
> 	efficient it might be.â??

Indeed.  Ask any junk-food chain.

The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for
decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that
contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in
the computer operating system ecosystem.

>> 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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