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Linux Sales Down, But...
An anonymous reader writes " News.com has a story about combined Linux revenues reaching $80 million for 2001. "The Linux operating system market, from a revenue perspective, accounts for one half of 1 percent of the total operating system revenue each year, or roughly two days' worth of Microsoft's operating system revenue," [IDC Analyst] Gillen said. "On the second day of January, Microsoft had generated more operating system revenue than the Linux community (will for the entire year).""
Users of Windows suddenly realized that what they have actually paid for is a pile of bug riddled dog crap.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
At first I was a little disappointed that Linux sales were falling. After all, the greatest thing I could imagine would be the triumph of Linux companies over Micro$tuff. And dwindling sales hardly seemed like it could be a good sign.
But then I thought things out to their logical conclusion. You see, the more Micro$ucks' sales grow, the more they think they can get away with ripping off customers by selling worse products for inflated prices (XP, anyone?). It's only a matter of time before people won't take it anymore and switch to Linux. Every sale of Windows just accelerates them toward the inevitable. With this news, it looks like we will all be using Linux before too long.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
No, 'cause that'd be false. A more accurate statement would be "On the second day of January, the Linux community had patched the bugs that Microsoft won't have patched until NEXT January."
In a single day of illegal price fixing, MicroSoft overcharged consumers by more than Linux has since its introduction.
IDC based its projection of $280 million in sales within four years on efforts by Red Hat, SuSE and others to wring more money from Linux, in part by making it more difficult for users to obtain the software for free, Gillen said.
Here's what I think will happen:
1. RedHat stops distributing binaries and enforces its copyright on the binaries it builds.
2. Someone founds a company called OrangeFedora whose sole purpose is to take the RedHat distribution, s/RedHat/OrangeFedora/ and give away/sell the binaries at a reduced cost.
3. RedHat embeds some secret instances of the string "RedHat" inside their distro.
4a. OrangeFedora developers don't notice the secret strings.
5a. RedHat sues OrangeFedora for trademark violation and wins.
4b. OrangeFedora developers notice the secret strings and remove them.
5b. RedHat sues OrangeFedora under the DMCA and wins.
6. The courts decide that commercial entities have the right to keep ownership of their improvements to GPL'ed code, thus defeating the spirit of the license.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Ummm... right. What you mean is a copy, and a very poor one at that, of someone else's GUI. It is highly debatable how good MS GUI's are, and most people are simply comfortable with it because they have used it before. This in no way means it's good. On the contrary, I'd personally argue that it's horrendous because even though people have been using it for years many still have trouble with it!
"the ability to copy and paste between applications"
WTF? Why the hell do people always come back to this? I have not one single application that has trouble copying/pasting to/from other apps! Drop this FUD already!
"and the best support the industry has to offer"
<flaimbait> Yep, because with the shit MS calls software, you're gonna need it </flaimbait>
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden