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Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensing
An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")
Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these. hell if these numbers were from a company after TWENTY years of trying they'd be Chap 11 by now. No what Linux need extremely badly is a LEADER, someone with real vision and drive that will say "Ya know what? this is unacceptable. i'm not gonna accept 2%, hell I'm not gonna accept 5%. I'm not gonna quit until Ballmer and Cook are sitting at their desks looking at the numbers and thinking to themselves "WTF is this shit? How did THAT happen?" and Linux machines are in every damned store on the planet making both nervous as hell".
Like it or not there was a reason why guys like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison ended up on the top of the heap, and that was because they simply wouldn't settle. They would have never accepted numbers that low and then had articles written about their "success' they would have considered it a personal insult, found out what the competitors were doing to beat them, and then came out with something better and stomped the shit out of them.
As a retailer i'd love to see that day happen, i remember when there was a half a dozen different OSes and nearly as many CPUs to run them on, but that day will never get here if you continue on this path. Take that link and put in ANY date you want, you'll see the numbers are damned near flatline. Expecting the world to change and suddenly want to become geeker heavy and learn all about how the guts work just ain't gonna happen, see the iShiny or win 7 which your average 6 year old would probably have no problem running.
The way I see it there is really only two choices here, change or don't change. if you change and embrace consumers and give them what they want? You might seriously have a shot. you run faster on lower powered hardware, you don't force the user to get a new machine just to run the latest version and nobody else will be able to go lower even if you charged $5 for the OS it would still undercut anything MSFT has.
If you don't want to change that is your choice, then you'll just have to settle for a maximum of low single digits and the fact the vast majority of the planet is gonna ignore you. the OEMs, the retailers, and the users will all pretty much not care that you exist at all. but you can't eat your cake and have it too, because after 20 years the numbers clearly show you will never get the world to do things "your way" or act like you want them to. Business 101 give the customer something they want to buy and the numbers clearly show Linux hasn't done that, so I don't see how anybody can call less than 2% success. That is including the BSDs and other OSes BTW.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Calling Mac OS X "BSD based" is a stretch.