Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC.
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Member since:2006-07-01
... and you wouldn't need to either because they don't take 10 years to make it 1.0 and don't stay in perpetual beta/alpha states like open source software.
Member since:2008-07-15
No, most closed source software slaps a 1.0 version number on it whether it's ready or not, because their marketing department determines it must be released on a certain date. Even when that's not the case, there's generally not enough testing done at most x.0 releases no matter if you're talking open or closed source. Want a good example of a closed source, piece of crap software? iTunes version 8.1, have a look at that. Oh, it looks slick, sure, but they made some serious regressions in the QA department between 8.0.2 and 8.1, and that's not even a .0 release.
Open or closed source isn't what determines a good product, it's design and testing that distinguishes a piece of crap from a work of good engineering. I've seen some closed source software that absolutely sucked, and I've seen some that was excellent, likewise with open source software.
Member since:2007-01-18
Member since:2005-08-12
The difficulty is that when talking about Linux for the desktop, we're talking about people who CAN'T write a few lines of code to fix some "problem" for themselves.
It always seems to be the nerds who run about talking about Linux for the desktop, forgetting that 99.9% of the computer using population couldn't care less about what nerds think.
Member since:
2006-02-10
Heh... Yesterday I wrote a 3 line patch for an open source program, to make it behave according to my needs. I couldn't possibly have done it with Windows or MacOSX...
Unlike 99.9% of people on earth right now, I am simply not interested in owning hardware I can't tweak. I guess I am just weird, but I like computers
Edited 2009-03-26 04:12 UTC