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DefCon 16: Hackers and Gag Order in Sin City

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."

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RE: Comment by tomcat

by Clinton on Sun 17th Aug 2008 23:10 UTC in reply to "Comment by tomcat"

Member since:
2005-07-05

I disagree with two points here...

This is partially fiction. The primary reason that Linux even had a chance at all of becoming competitive was not because of the overall community but, rather, because of large contributions from commercial organizations such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others.

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.

Otherwise, it would have ended up as yet another BSD-ish project which, while laudable and very useful, has never really had much of an impact on the market.

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.

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