Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sat 16th Aug 2008 01:04 UTC, submitted by sharkscott
"In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework."
Permalink for comment 327198
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-07-05
I disagree with two points here...
Red Hat was and is a part of the community and just happened to become a corporate player as well. IBM and Novell didn't take a risk on this pet project called Linux and make it a success. No, they jumped on board after Linux was already a success. Yes, IBM (and Novell to a lesser degree) have helped improve corporate acceptance of Linux amongst the techo-neophyte manager types who unfortunately make corporate technology decisions, but they are not the reason behind Linux's success.
First, BSD has had a huge impact on the market. Not only is it the base upon which OS X was built, but look at the battle it won against AT&T. That was a huge win for the market.
Second, FreeBSD is an incredible project. I wouldn't regard it less simply because it doesn't have as strong a corporate following as Linux seems to have.