LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 13:51:18 +0930

Re: Aunt Nelly (was Re: Re: Re: bsd- easier than you think)

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 01:40:44PM +1000, Christopher Yeoh wrote:
> At 2003/7/27 20:50+0930  Alan Kennington writes:
> > 
> > Linux can only take over the world by becoming _not_ linux.
> > I just wish that linux advocates would stop to think about _why_ they
> > want to take over from MS. If it's to guarantee the survival of linux,
> 
> I want more apps on Linux. For a lot of them we're below the market
> share required for ISV's to invest the resources to port.
> 


Chris,

In fact, I think there's every reason to believe that linux _will_ take
over the IT world. It's difficult to believe that linux will not take
over the world when you read aricles like this:
http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html
This article, ``The Wonderful World of Linux 2.6'' by Joseph Pranevich,
is well worth reading all the way through, particularly by programmers,
and especially by kernel programmers.

The main point to come out of that article is that linux has essentially
spread to every kind of hardware on the planet that can have an operating
system. I think that the question applications developers should ask is not
``what proportion of the desktop IBM compatible market does linux have?'',
but ``what proportion of all _types_ of commercial hardware can linux run on?''.

Since hardware is becoming almost cheap enough to give away in boxes
of breakfast krispies, no one's going to want to pay $500 or $1000 any more
for the basic software per CPU. I'm sure that the downfall of MS will be
the cheapness of hardware, just as the downfall of IBM was the cheapness 
of microprocessor-based systems. The hardware manufacturers will kill
off MS, not linux. Linux just has to wait patiently to fill the gap.

So far, I haven't seen any really worthwhile linux PDAs though, but
I'm sure it will happen some day. I bought a Agenda PDA with linux, but
that was a waste of space. The Yopy was promising, but seems to be sort of
on again, off again all the time. The Sharp Zaurus looked very promising,
but it's been discontinued. The Ipaq seemed very promising, but I never
could get one when I wanted it, and you have to flash it with linux yourself.
I would love to be able to develop the same code on the desktop as on the PDA.
I just wish that PalmOS would go away and let linux take over on the PDA.

Nevertheless, it seems like the main linux selling point to applications
developers should be ubiquity of _types_ of hardware in the longer term.

Cheers,
Alan.

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