>> But the marketing men got to it and ruined its security and >> elegance, to produce the lipstick-and-high-heels Windows XP. That >> version, insecure and flakey with its terrible bodged-in browser, >> that, of course, was the one that sold. > â??Consistent mediocrity, delivered on a large scale, is much > more profitable than anything on a small scale, no matter how > efficient it might be.â??
Indeed. Ask any junk-food chain. The depressing (to me) part is that there seems to be a place for decent-quality restaurants in the same restaurant-food ecosystem that contains junk-food chains...but there doesn't seem to be the analog in the computer operating system ecosystem. >> Linux got nowhere until it copied the XP model. Only for corporate values of "nowhere". Considering it to be a failure because it wasn't grabbing "market" share, or because there weren't large companies involved, is to buy into the problem, defining success in monetary (or near-monetary) terms. I don't know what Linus's original vision for Linux was, so I don't know when (if ever) it was his idea of a success. But I would have called it a success much earlier, and, indeed, I would be tempted to say it failed _when_ it "copied the XP model" and "got somewhere", because that's when it lost the benefits early versions brought. I can't help wondering how many people use Linux because "Open Source" but have never once even tried to build anything from source. Personally, it doesn't run on my machines unless I personally built it from source; my only use for a binary distribution is the first install on a new architecture, and even that not always - sometimes I can cross-build or some such. Yours in curmudgeonicity, /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B