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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
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.
Member since:2005-12-31
in response to b:
I truly don't believe, opensource companies will make their products harder to use: because of several reasons:
-: A lot of companies want support, so they can poke someone when something goes terribly wrong etc, not because their own experts can't work with the software
-: competition can use usability to create their products more appealing, (unless they suddenly all agree to generate equally bad products)
-: tech support already get's loads of phone calls about truly basic questions for the so-called user friendly software (ex: "Where's the 'anykey'?").
-: creating a steep learning curve, scares away a lot of users and potential developers etc
(currently I'm learning Cg and if nVidia made it difficult, I would never started learning it on my own)
Of course those are just couple reasons for a sane company, I've seen enough companies that do wacky stuff
Member since:2005-07-17
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.
A. means that you are not really important if you don't MAKE hardware. Think of the record industry and who makes money.. those who make songs are a dime a dozen and easily replaced, those who have connections to who owns the CD presses make a mint...for now.
B. Support is about fixing things... correctly. Again, I can buy all the parts to fix my car or plumbing at the discount store for cheap.. it doesn't make me a car mechanic or plumber though... those jobs are very much still needed and people still pay even though they could replace the parts on their own.
Think of how much harder Red Hat or IBM works for their money on support contracts making software something useful versus Microsoft that sells shiny discs to OEMs with almost no support or performance guaranteed. one is going away soon, guess which one.
Look at IBM or Asus for hardware. EeePC is cheap.. but somebody has to MAKE it. That several million dollars of sunk cost in machinery to make 1 unit. IBM big iron servers are even more expensive to make.. billions to make CPUs. Software like windows or linux is cheap (lots of labor but little capital cost), and OS has almost no value, unless you are Apple and use it as a marketing tool for your Hardware. In the old days, software was part of what made the computer "go". It was necessary, but hardware sales was the point. Stuff like eeePC is pushing the cost of hardware down so far only freely available tools are cheap enough.
Member since:
2006-01-28
Linus is stating the obvious. In fact, when read in context, his statements seem fairly sound.
Proprietary software makers are forced to put upgrades in the market place because they otherwise go out of business. While FLOSS benefits from commercial success, it goes on irrespectively, particularly because its revenue stream is primarily tied to support services instead of licenses.
And HSF and HSF+ are indeed pretty old and junky. Let's hope that Apple eventually replaces them with ZFS.