
Linus Torvalds, leader of the cult of Linux,
took a swipe at Apple's OS X and Microsoft Vista in the same breath at a conference in Australia last week. Speaking at the linux.conf.au conference in Melbourne, Australia, a few weeks ago, Torvalds called Leopard 'utter crap' and bashed the proprietary OS makers for being greedy, according to Australian reporter Nick Miller in the The Age.
"I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said.
"(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." He also scoffed at his rivals' practice of revenue-through-renewal by launching upgrades that require new purchases.
"An operating system should be completely invisible," Torvalds said.
"To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment - to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."
Member since:
2005-11-13
While FLOSS benefits from commercial success, it goes on irrespectively, particularly because its revenue stream is primarily tied to support services instead of licenses.
Which means that:
a) Those who don't have support or hardware to sell probably can't make money with FLOSS, unless they're gonna sell t-shirts or something. This would hurt most (if not all) COTS vendors and micro ISVs.
b) Do you think that those FLOSS companies who depend on support services as their revenue stream are going to make their apps easy to use so that you didn't need support to begin with? Probably not.