Yet Another Car Analogy - Why Linux will win

[DoctorMO]

While reading this thread about anoying linux advocates: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=703972

I had a thought, during the latter 20th century car manufacturing went from a Ford and Rolls Royce style assembly line, where every part was made by the company and the whole product was designed, put together and even sold to the customer by people in the business to the Japanese part distribution streams.

When you want to make a car, you design a nice car, then you send off to about 20 to 40 other factories for each of the major parts that make up the car internals. each one of those factories will send off to another 5 or 10 factories for each major part for that component until your the factory at the end making 3cm washers for the battery clips.

The point of the process was that each small business in the chain would be able to sell to multiple car or part manufacturers, could focus on making their part as wonderfully robust and well made or as cheap as it could be and it meant the money got spread around a bit more and you could have a sense of ownership over your little factory making seemingly little unimportant widgets.

This compares nicely to the behemoth microsoft/adobe/coral approach where all applications are built in house from the ground to the sky. All support, sales and everything is handled by the same company and everything is owned by one master business.

Where as on the linux side we have many, many people, businesses and projects working on lots of little bits and little programs and libraries. then we have lots of people putting all these things together in interesting and creative ways. then we have people packaging all these apps into distro's that people can install easy and take advantage of all these great apps.

So in conclusion, the flexibility as much as the freedom and the openness of the process gives linux a major advantage to development that it's rivals can't compete against.

p.s. I did not mention apple because they are special, they have learned to take from the community; lots and lots of bsd code, or just to buy out the author of a tool such as cups to get what they need.

[Quillz]

Yeah, sure, whatever. People say this same thing every single year, and it will be brought up next year, too.

[DoctorMO]

Really? what would that be then? because your reply sounds mean, spiteful and completely irrelevant to what I was saying. vacuous.

[Quillz]

Really? what would that be then? because your reply sounds mean, spiteful and completely irrelevant to what I was saying. vacuous.
I'll be frank, I didn't read your entire post. But basically, you're getting at Linux "winning" because it's free, open source, etc. This argument gets brought up every single year. "This year is the Year of Linux!!" "This year, Linux gains market share!!" It's never happened, and probably never will. Your argument is one that I actually do support, but it doesn't live in reality. Corporations will always win out because they have more money, and that's the bottom line. Money makes the world go round, for better or for worse.

[kooolrock]

I'll be frank, I didn't read your entire post. But basically, you're getting at Linux "winning" because it's free, open source, etc. This argument gets brought up every single year. "This year is the Year of Linux!!" "This year, Linux gains market share!!" It's never happened, and probably never will. Your argument is one that I actually do support, but it doesn't live in reality. Corporations will always win out because they have more money, and that's the bottom line. Money makes the world go round, for better or for worse.
+5

[intense.ego]

I'll be frank, I didn't read your entire post. But basically, you're getting at Linux "winning" because it's free, open source, etc. This argument gets brought up every single year. "This year is the Year of Linux!!" "This year, Linux gains market share!!" It's never happened, and probably never will. Your argument is one that I actually do support, but it doesn't live in reality. Corporations will always win out because they have more money, and that's the bottom line. Money makes the world go round, for better or for worse.

The fact that you didn't read the post really shows. This was not your typical "Linux is the best" type of posts, but made a valid comparison between how linux is created as opposed to windows, adobe, etc.

[kooolrock]

Yeah, sure, whatever. People say this same thing every single year, and it will be brought up next year, too.
linux won't win, just b'coz it takes "effort" to get used to linux for a windows user.( and not everyone is ready to spend that much effort).

linux has this image of being for geeks. that image exists for the majority even to this day.

we value what is more difficult to get ( Windows is v.costly) than what doesn't take any effort( Linux is free).( There is a post about this in the forum. I don't remember. Plz post the linux if u remember)

All these are from my own experience. I'm using Ubuntu/Linux since this Sunday.

[kooolrock]

The fact that you didn't read the post really shows. This was not your typical "Linux is the best" type of posts, but made a valid comparison between how linux is created as opposed to windows, adobe, etc.
read my post

[Quillz]

The fact that you didn't read the post really shows. This was not your typical "Linux is the best" type of posts, but made a valid comparison between how linux is created as opposed to windows, adobe, etc.
But it doesn't change reality. This is what Linux has been from the start and has yet to win. It won't win. The corporations with the biggest wallets win.

[aysiu]

But basically, you're getting at Linux "winning" because it's free, open source, etc. This argument gets brought up every single year. "This year is the Year of Linux!!" "This year, Linux gains market share!!" It's never happened, and probably never will. Just because the first times the boy cried "Wolf" the wolf didn't come doesn't mean the wolf never came. Logically speaking, the wolf coming has nothing to do with whether or not people announce its arrival.

[Quillz]

Just because the first times the boy cried "Wolf" the wolf didn't come doesn't mean the wolf never came. Logically speaking, the wolf coming has nothing to do with whether or not people announce its arrival.
Sorry, you've lost me here.

[aysiu]

Sorry, you've lost me here.
The "wolf" in this case is Linux reaching "the desktop" (whatever that means). Whether it does or not has nothing to do with how often people announce it reaching that point.

Let's say, hypothetically, that "the year of the Linux desktop" (again, a phrase with no agreed-upon meaning, so this is definitely hypothetical) arrives in 2025. If that's the case, it'd arrive in 2025 if people announce in 2008, 2009, 2010, etc. that "this is the year of the Linux desktop." It would also arrive in 2025 if no one announced before 2025 that "this is the year of the Linux desktop."

People proclaiming each year to be the year of the Linux desktop has no bearing on whether there ever will be such a year in the future.

[Quillz]

The "wolf" in this case is Linux reaching "the desktop" (whatever that means). Whether it does or not has nothing to do with how often people announce it reaching that point.

Let's say, hypothetically, that "the year of the Linux desktop" (again, a phrase with no agreed-upon meaning, so this is definitely hypothetical) arrives in 2025. If that's the case, it'd arrive in 2025 if people announce in 2008, 2009, 2010, etc. that "this is the year of the Linux desktop." It would also arrive in 2025 if no one announced before 2025 that "this is the year of the Linux desktop."

People proclaiming each year to be the year of the Linux desktop has no bearing on whether there ever will be such a year in the future.
Yes, I absolutely agree with this. But I still think, that at least with our current social structure, this will simply not happen. Until we get past our obsession with money and it being equal to power and prominence, then Linux and other open source, free projects will never take over.

[aysiu]

Yes, I absolutely agree with this. But I still think, that at least with our current social structure, this will simply not happen. Until we get past our obsession with money and it being equal to power and prominence, then Linux and other open source, free projects will never take over.
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "take over." I remember when I first started using Firefox in 2004, its market share was abysmal (definitely single digits, but I can't remember the exact number). Back then, it wasn't surprising to find websites that didn't work with Firefox.

Now its market share is anywhere between 15% and 50%, depending on the country, and web designers (for businesses, anyway) would be stupid not to design their websites to work with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are a huge chunk of the web server arena and I believe have "taken over" by most definitions of the phrase "take over."

I'm old enough to remember a time before Windows and even before MS-DOS (maybe not before it was invented, but certainly before it was popular), so I don't believe it when people say "such-and-such in technology will never change." Google came out of nowhere. Dell came out of nowhere. Even Apple was hunkered down for a bit in the 90s before resurrecting itself with the iPod at the turn of the millenium.

Technology trends change a couple of times every decade. In the 80s, everyday users were fine with the command-line. In the 90s, people were fine with only a dial-up internet connection. In the 2000s, more and more computing is web-based (Google Docs, email, Facebook, Flickr, etc.). People are even doing their taxes online now!

Is it inevitable that Linux will "take over" the desktop? Certainly not. Nor is it impossible. It is very difficult to predict such things, and that's why the phrase "this is the year of the Linux desktop" means nothing. You just can't know. By the time a "Linux desktop year" happens, everyone will know about it, so there's no point in writing an article about it.

Where I see Linux for home users making strides is the Eee PC and its derivatives. More and more of everyday computing is web-based and not desktop-application-based, so a mobile internet appliance could be a great way for home users to get comfortable with Linux. Since Ultra Mobile PCs are relatively unchartered territory (unlike larger laptops, more powerful desktops, cell phones, or PDAs), Linux can stake a claim on it early on, and it seems to have done so already.

[23meg]

But it doesn't change reality. This is what Linux has been from the start and has yet to win. It won't win. The corporations with the biggest wallets win.

Many corporations with the biggest wallets actually use, support and invest in Linux, entirely out of coincidence, nothing to do with the fact that it was Linux that let them inflate their wallets.

If you think Linux is some naive anti-corporate crusade, your vision is outdated by at least a decade and has no basis in today's reality.