Yes boys and girls, it's Net Applications time. Sure, their figures are flawed, and sure, they're misused all over the non-scientifically educated media, but that doesn't mean they do not indicate trends. One of those trends was a slowly rising popularity of Linux, which hit 0.93% market share in August 2008, only to sink back again during the following months. Well, it's 
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Member since:2008-09-11
Man have you've got the blinders on. Read my post over and over again until it sinks in. As a quick reminder to focus on, it's about the user/client not you. You "work" for them and it's definitely not about getting them to work for you. People will come to code for Linux anyway but what they want and the rest of the world wants can be very different things.
Now if you just want an OS that some other developers use then stay the course. But for the rest of the world, any comparisons between Windows or Mac desktops and Linux desktops will fall on deaf ears.
Member since:2005-12-02
"Hahaha! Oh man you really outdid yourself there. We write the code for you, we invite you to join us and we give the code to you free. Last time I checked that was not a good example to describe the word selfish. Stupid perhaps ;-) , but certainly not selfish."
Selfish in the respect that not anyone can submit patches to projects. Bug reports get marked down as "Won't fix" commonly if developers do not feel a want for that item. In order to submit a patch or assist in any way, you must be approved by the project at hand before they will even listen to what you have to say. Basically things fall on generally deaf ears. No, I will not post the emails back refusing assistance since I am not "Known" to the "community".
Linux is good, however this is one attitude that needs to change. At least when I call MS, they fix the bug that is reported, and usually pretty quick if you are a paying customer.
Member since:2005-09-10
I've seen this too but this is certainly not only happening in FOSS projects and could be due to a variety of reasons. It might occasionaly be due to developer "egos" (and I know first hand that they tend to inflate when you work on a project for free) but my guess is that it more often due to limited developer time or limitations in the current code base.
Yeah I guess reputation or credibility helps a lot to break in to bubbles where they exist and some projects are surely easier to grasp than others but there are plenty of communities where your contributions are highly appreciated. The first one that comes to mind is Archlinux. In any case, put the patch out in the open and perhaps others will either help maintaining it or have better success in getting it merged.
Good to hear, I have never called Microsoft myself to file a bug and I do not know of the success rate of people filing patches to them.
Member since:2006-03-12
Selfish in the respect that not anyone can submit patches to projects. Bug reports get marked down as "Won't fix" commonly if developers do not feel a want for that item. In order to submit a patch or assist in any way, you must be approved by the project at hand before they will even listen to what you have to say. Basically things fall on generally deaf ears. No, I will not post the emails back refusing assistance since I am not "Known" to the "community".
Linux is good, however this is one attitude that needs to change. At least when I call MS, they fix the bug that is reported, and usually pretty quick if you are a paying customer.
LOL. this is more than a little silly. Only in the Linux world of transparent development has it allowed me direct access to the developers. In fact if you really want I can point you to a vast array of bugzillas and checkpoint of bugs I have had fixed for me. Thats not to say that demanding developers give priory to your bugs, or features.
That said MS Support when I last used it, was very helpful...but did not fix any bugs, but if you have any idea how programming works, or bugfixing in a corporate environment works, fixes can take week, and I suspect your bugs will join the queue like everyone else.
Interesting in Linux there is lots of levels of paid support as well check out Ubuntu.
Member since:
2005-09-10
Lol! And what attitude is that mszl which you managed to read into those statements? What exactly are my and the community members' problem? I am not smart enough to follow you on this one and your points below do not really connect to this statement so please educate me.
We are probably not going to get anywhere in this particular thread and maybe I should not bother but for the sake of the others here who might actually be interested in what I have to say on the subject I will still comment on what you wrote.
So we have different perspectives on the topic and perhaps we are not even talking about the same thing. If you are only talking about commercial success in the traditional enterprise market then well perhaps you have a point somewhere. I do not have any first hand experience about that except from what is going on in universities. I do not care if my desktop system is a commercial hit and unless you are owning stock in or working for the company making it, neither should you. What matters is that the technology empowers you to do what you need or want and that you enjoy doing it.
A typical Desktop Linux project pieces together many parts: the Linux kernel itself + GNU toolchain + a desktop environment + distribution packaging + third party apps and user forums or similar means of communication. This leaves plenty of room for people to help out, and being developed in the open, it is easy to do so. I listed five ways off the top of my head in which people that do not write code are still able to contribute back to the community and that we see more and more of this.
It does not take that much brain power to see that it makes a big difference if only 0.01% of users report their experiences back compared to 10%, especially to small projects. More people contributing back to the project increases the chance of a more diverse use cases being represented in the project pool or "mind share" as you call it. As your userbase reach a certain threshold, be it 10.000 or 10.000.000 or whatever depending on the project, then perhaps you do not need as high proportion of users filing bugs because most of the cases will be represented anyway.
In a FOSS project, all your users are potential contributors. The code is out there for those that like to dig in to that, it is often easy to find other users and ask for help or help others or to contact the distro or upstream developers. In other words, there are most often plenty of channels for you to be useful to others or get help from others before having to degrade yourself to a "complainer".
The point is that as many as possible of those users should be encouraged to take part of or at least report back to the project as they stumble across problems. Not everyone will do this of course but those that do fill a very important role to projects which success metric is generally not measured by profit since there often no actual product being sold. These users are really valuable and, as I said above, especially so early on.
C'mon is this really how you feel companies like Microsoft and Apple treat you? Shouldn't FOSS development with its tendency to release early and often be just the right kind of development method to cater to a range of complaints, no matter how small, and have solutions to them in incremental upgrades? Even if the core developers themselves are busy, someone else might be able to chip in and implement a solution to send upstream.
Sure you need people that understand the market if you feel like plunging into it, finding clients and your costs for doing so are high, but for the vast majority of projects it is mainly about delivering technology and exchange ideas with people interested in it. My guess is that FOSS projects actually much more often shrink the commercial market instead of generating profit and that this is the main problem for proprietary vendors. But I could not care less.
Hahaha! Oh man you really outdid yourself there. We write the code for you, we invite you to join us and we give the code to you free. Last time I checked that was not a good example to describe the word selfish. Stupid perhaps ;-) , but certainly not selfish.