i really can't figure out the point of this DED article.
yes, there are still some - very few by now - "open" evangelists who preach its supreme value as a general rule. but there were 100x more of them 15 years ago. their great consumer-facing crusades - desktop Linux OS, Mozilla, etc - just didn't pan out in the real world. the verdict of history is in. if that is who DED is aiming this post at, he is still fighting the last war that ended years ago.
and it turned out instead, as many here have noted, it was "under the hood" open software that often worked great and is now ubiquitous. like Apache, and Apple's Webkit.
given the current state of "Android" (there isn't a single OS there anymore) and Google's blatant manipulation of its version, hardly anyone still claims it is "open" with a straight face. more accurate to say, it's technical underpinnings are being "openly used" to create many closed outcomes.
as to the connection between all this and profits, well, i think that's talking apples and oranges and DED is stretching too far with that theme. the profits will always be focused on the popular consumer/business-facing products. and those will typically be "closed" implementations of some kind necessarily providing a whole package of services to users - aka, an ecosystem. MS still has the leading generic business ecosystem. Apple has the leading consumer ecosystem. Google has the leading web ecosystem. Samsung is the outlier, being instead the leading commodity product OEM, vs. HTC, Nokia, et al. ... Samsung makes great refrigerators too.
Well they've forked it right? Which is practically the definition of co-opting something, which itself is as close to "stealing" as makes no difference. If the fork works, they could be considered to have taken something, bent it to their own uses and simultaneously (at least attempted) to torpedo the original.
So the answer to his question is essentially "no" then, I take it?
What question? How was that even a question? My stars. Is it or is it not easier to take open software than closed. THAT is a question. Already answered, by the way.
The difference between Windows and Unix = Unix works, its scalable and have zero viruses/"server grade security".
If closed was better, then Windows Phone should do much better, also Windows on ARM.
Windows simply could not fit the GUI/Power requirement in a post PC world.
From a technical point of view, the windows of today is just as secure as unix. It's had modern security elements, such as privilege separation, fine-grained file access control, DEP, ASLR, etc., since Vista. While Unix has always had privilege separation by design, its various implementations didn't adopt some of the other features until recently. For example, it took OS X until Lion in 2011 to fully implement ASLR. And it's unclear whether FreeBSD has ASLR yet (perhaps someone in the know can clarify).
With respect to scalability, you may have a point about scaling up to the level of supercomputers, but Windows has had a major presence in servers and embedded systems for years, so clearly its scalability can't be that shabby. Windows Phone runs great and the lack of adoption of the platform has little to do with any technical defects.
Your premise of the "premise of the article" is simply wrong. Either your reading comprehension is pretty terrible or you're trying to cloud issues by making a straw man argument about how great open source is.
The article clearly mentions WebKit, and if you Google the web for LLVM, AI's DED article from 08 on the subject is in the top 5 hits. So don't trot out your education about how Apple is also using open source. The article also makes no connection between security and closed software, another strawman you erect to show your superior boxing skills. I'm sure there are some actual flaws in the article you could argue against; you don't need to invent your own.
The article makes it pretty clear that, if you're taking about "superiority," "market performance," "efficacious impact on the world/technology/culture" or anything along those lines, it's just silly to compare Google's copy of software being handed out to a bunch of visionless cloners who were making boring PCs a decade ago to a series of real products Apple is making, products that have defined the culture and changed how people act and think, from the iPad to iPhone to iPad.
Where is all the supposed innovation across all of the Android landscape? The most unique thing running Android is perhaps a SLR with a smartphone camera back, and that just doesn't seem like a great idea. Why not just attach a smartphone? What else has Android come up with apart from copies of the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV? The community should be able to devise a few really cool things that at least catch on, but instead they are churning out nothing but me-too copies.
Apple has leveraged open source software to do great things. It gave the world a third browser (rescuing some KHTML code that would never have gone anywhere otherwise), it has built a next-generation coding toolchain with LLVM, LLDB and Clang, it made *BSD relevant again and took advantage of really cool things the various *BSDs have created.
But Apple doesn't brag about having given away the most web browser engines the way Google brags about having deployed the most (yet most defective!) smartphone OS licenses. And having given away so much Android has not resulted in some sort of superior platform for development or deployment. Smells a lot like Linux on the desktop to me.
Apple's kernel is open source, and they might use some open standards code like Open CL, etc. but they have closed it to run on their own hardware. Same goes with all of these different flavors of Unix by Sun, IBM, HP, etc. I don't know of too many people with an HP server running Sun Solaris on it. I think HP might have a difficult time servicing them.
Apple did have the Darwin project but they pulled the proprietary stuff off for obvious reasons.. The problem with Open Source OS where you can freely modify it is the mechanism for support for the consumer and businesses. For a college student learning? Sure, have at it, but once you go out in the real world, it doesn't make sense. There's been so many Free OS's out there they all are more for college students to hack around with so they can go to a real company and help develop an OS for a specific device (regardless of what it is)
The Freedom to customize is childish. I think if someone wants to make their own device, sure, but close the thing up once you're done so you can give great support to your customer if you take your product seriously, so will the user.
I see a HUGE potential in a DIY smartphone. Pick from cases, screens, motherboards, etc. so you can put your own OS and name on it. Maybe there's an opportunity.LOL.
Probably most or all modern OSs are based on a KERNEL that came from Open Source, with the exception of Microsoft, but that's the just the kernel, but Apple closed the OS just to run on Apple hardware. So I think the more appropriate way is Open Source kernel Closed Source architecture.
Microsoft is a proprietary OS, but they write it run on a variety of different processors, license it to the typical PC mfg, and then sell an off the shelf version to DIY crowd, but you still can't modify it. They've been trying to get Microsoft to release the Source Code for the Educational and Government Crowd to mess with, but not the general public. SO, it's a closed kernel, open architecture with a commercial license because you can buy the license to put on whatever hardware it's meant to run on to use but not modify.
Programmers that can't get a job with these smartphone mfg to assist in the development of an OS is where these people belong, or using some Open Source OS for college studies but please, not in the real world.
I see a HUGE potential in a DIY smartphone. Pick from cases, screens, motherboards, etc. so you can put your own OS and name on it. Maybe there's an opportunity.LOL.
Google's already one step ahead of you. I guess we'll see if you're right and if there is a huge market for that. They're also boasting that it'll be assembled in the US.
Google's already one step ahead of you. I guess we'll see if you're right and if there is a huge market for that. They're also boasting that it'll be assembled in the US.
Google is more of an Open Loop architecture.
Google already one step ahead? Actually, not really. You can't take a Samsung chip, with a LG display, stick components from HTC, Samsung that are specific to certain models and stick it in a Oppo case. come on. Get real. It's not that DIY. All it is is a cheaply designed business model to save them money from having to have the overhead costs that a REAL computing company like Apple that actually designs more of their own product than anyone else, that actually supports it, updates and deals with not allowing malware whenever they can. Android on a Samsung S3 is a different flavor than the S4 version, than the Admire, than the HTC One, etc. etc. So they are not only fragmented by the version of Android, but by the various modified versions running on all of the different mfg/model phones.
So, far, Android (if you add all of the different flavors) has more market share, but not profits. Profits keep the doors open. No Profit closes doors.
It's almost like comparing HP/UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, etc. and adding them together into one market share number and calling it UNIX market share vs Linux Market share.
Programmers that can't get a job with these smartphone mfg to assist in the development of an OS is where these people belong, or using some Open Source OS for college studies but please, not in the real world.
Ugh, I hope new and up coming programmers never share your views on this subject.
You do realize the majority of the servers in the world are running Linux by a huge margin. So it seems you stand alone on this.
Linux 93.8%
AIX 3.6%
Hybrid Unix/Linux 1.4%
Other Unix 0.6%
Windows HPC 0.6%
Here's some numbers to look at.
GO look at the market share of desktop computer OSs, Linux is down in the Less than 2.1%, while even Macs are at around 7%. Linux is not mainstream even as much as OS X is. While Windows (all flavors combined are around 90%).
Linux is used in a lot of specialty equipment that are designed for you NOT to hack into. There are medical equipment systems, gaming systems, kiosks, car systems, etc that run on Linux, that's because they it's FREEEE for them to develop their own OS that gets locked down afterwards, if they're smart.
Open has been successful though. Android took the feature phone and buried it. Everyone has been better off with Android on the cheaper phones.
I don't know if Google has been all about profit. Maybe they just want to elevate the level of technology out in the world. In other words - be good. Google Glass is a good example of that.
For a business, "success" has to translate into making money. That's how you pay your employees. That's how you pay for components to make the next great product.
And your statement that Google may be just trying to "elevate the level of technology out in the world" is one of the most asinine statements I have heard in a while. The fact that Google spouts such patently false nonsense makes it even worse. Google wants to make money as much as the next corporation. The reason they give Android away for free is because your eyeballs looking at ads have far more value to Google than your cash ever could. And since they have a profitable product in search, they're not afraid of losing money on Android if that ever happens.
Hi I am an Android guy who saw the link in Google News and decided to read this, if I am a troll, I don't meant to be.
I think you're analysis is mostly correct, however I think your concept of success as "making money" and failure as "not making money" is wrong. Google wants to make it easy for people to click on ads, and while people might be able to block ads on their phone, they did remove ad blocking apps on the play store which means 90% of users now have no idea how to download them. Google's profit from mobile web ads has skyrocketed in the past year.
You also ignore that there are high end Android smartphones that have some advantages to iPhone. Also if success is making money, why do you consider Apple to be successful despite their stock price being so low?
They should have a product line called the Android Freedom phone. NO SUPPORT, NO WARRANTY, and there's NO guarantee that you actually use it on a cellular network.
Then they can use the marketing tag line. YOU ARE FREEEEEEEEEEEEE. and then just give them away and all they are are the oldest crap that's been returned that no one else wants.
GO look at the market share of desktop computer OSs, Linux is down in the Less than 2.1%, while even Macs are at around 7%. Linux is not mainstream even as much as OS X is. While Windows (all flavors combined are around 90%).
Linux is used in a lot of specialty equipment that are designed for you NOT to hack into. There are medical equipment systems, gaming systems, kiosks, car systems, etc that run on Linux, that's because they it's FREEEE for them to develop their own OS that gets locked down afterwards, if they're smart.
Those numbers are for the top 500 supercomputers, I failed to realize and Linux servers is over 25% in 2013.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
iOS sure is open, huh¡
iOS is built on BSD.
Most of the time I come to this site to be entertained by the comments.
This is one thread of comments that stands out for me due to the fact that it is an actual "discussion" between intelligent people.
I'd really love to see more of that.
The long thread about the new Mac Pro fits that bill, I should think.
i really can't figure out the point of this DED article.
yes, there are still some - very few by now - "open" evangelists who preach its supreme value as a general rule. but there were 100x more of them 15 years ago. their great consumer-facing crusades - desktop Linux OS, Mozilla, etc - just didn't pan out in the real world. the verdict of history is in. if that is who DED is aiming this post at, he is still fighting the last war that ended years ago.
and it turned out instead, as many here have noted, it was "under the hood" open software that often worked great and is now ubiquitous. like Apache, and Apple's Webkit.
given the current state of "Android" (there isn't a single OS there anymore) and Google's blatant manipulation of its version, hardly anyone still claims it is "open" with a straight face. more accurate to say, it's technical underpinnings are being "openly used" to create many closed outcomes.
as to the connection between all this and profits, well, i think that's talking apples and oranges and DED is stretching too far with that theme. the profits will always be focused on the popular consumer/business-facing products. and those will typically be "closed" implementations of some kind necessarily providing a whole package of services to users - aka, an ecosystem. MS still has the leading generic business ecosystem. Apple has the leading consumer ecosystem. Google has the leading web ecosystem. Samsung is the outlier, being instead the leading commodity product OEM, vs. HTC, Nokia, et al. ... Samsung makes great refrigerators too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Darwin
(another forked project)
So the answer to his question is essentially "no" then, I take it?
What question? How was that even a question? My stars. Is it or is it not easier to take open software than closed. THAT is a question. Already answered, by the way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shompa
WIndows Vs Open is more Windows Vs Unix.
The difference between Windows and Unix = Unix works, its scalable and have zero viruses/"server grade security".
If closed was better, then Windows Phone should do much better, also Windows on ARM.
Windows simply could not fit the GUI/Power requirement in a post PC world.
From a technical point of view, the windows of today is just as secure as unix. It's had modern security elements, such as privilege separation, fine-grained file access control, DEP, ASLR, etc., since Vista. While Unix has always had privilege separation by design, its various implementations didn't adopt some of the other features until recently. For example, it took OS X until Lion in 2011 to fully implement ASLR. And it's unclear whether FreeBSD has ASLR yet (perhaps someone in the know can clarify).
With respect to scalability, you may have a point about scaling up to the level of supercomputers, but Windows has had a major presence in servers and embedded systems for years, so clearly its scalability can't be that shabby. Windows Phone runs great and the lack of adoption of the platform has little to do with any technical defects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corrections
Your premise of the "premise of the article" is simply wrong. Either your reading comprehension is pretty terrible or you're trying to cloud issues by making a straw man argument about how great open source is.
The article clearly mentions WebKit, and if you Google the web for LLVM, AI's DED article from 08 on the subject is in the top 5 hits. So don't trot out your education about how Apple is also using open source. The article also makes no connection between security and closed software, another strawman you erect to show your superior boxing skills. I'm sure there are some actual flaws in the article you could argue against; you don't need to invent your own.
The article makes it pretty clear that, if you're taking about "superiority," "market performance," "efficacious impact on the world/technology/culture" or anything along those lines, it's just silly to compare Google's copy of software being handed out to a bunch of visionless cloners who were making boring PCs a decade ago to a series of real products Apple is making, products that have defined the culture and changed how people act and think, from the iPad to iPhone to iPad.
Where is all the supposed innovation across all of the Android landscape? The most unique thing running Android is perhaps a SLR with a smartphone camera back, and that just doesn't seem like a great idea. Why not just attach a smartphone? What else has Android come up with apart from copies of the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV? The community should be able to devise a few really cool things that at least catch on, but instead they are churning out nothing but me-too copies.
Apple has leveraged open source software to do great things. It gave the world a third browser (rescuing some KHTML code that would never have gone anywhere otherwise), it has built a next-generation coding toolchain with LLVM, LLDB and Clang, it made *BSD relevant again and took advantage of really cool things the various *BSDs have created.
But Apple doesn't brag about having given away the most web browser engines the way Google brags about having deployed the most (yet most defective!) smartphone OS licenses. And having given away so much Android has not resulted in some sort of superior platform for development or deployment. Smells a lot like Linux on the desktop to me.
Apple's kernel is open source, and they might use some open standards code like Open CL, etc. but they have closed it to run on their own hardware. Same goes with all of these different flavors of Unix by Sun, IBM, HP, etc. I don't know of too many people with an HP server running Sun Solaris on it. I think HP might have a difficult time servicing them.
Apple did have the Darwin project but they pulled the proprietary stuff off for obvious reasons.. The problem with Open Source OS where you can freely modify it is the mechanism for support for the consumer and businesses. For a college student learning? Sure, have at it, but once you go out in the real world, it doesn't make sense. There's been so many Free OS's out there they all are more for college students to hack around with so they can go to a real company and help develop an OS for a specific device (regardless of what it is)
The Freedom to customize is childish. I think if someone wants to make their own device, sure, but close the thing up once you're done so you can give great support to your customer if you take your product seriously, so will the user.
I see a HUGE potential in a DIY smartphone. Pick from cases, screens, motherboards, etc. so you can put your own OS and name on it. Maybe there's an opportunity.LOL.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
It's a lot easier than stealing something closed, isn't it?
It is FREE you moron, so you do not STEAL. Comprende?
Quote:
Originally Posted by otbricki
iOS is built on BSD.
Probably most or all modern OSs are based on a KERNEL that came from Open Source, with the exception of Microsoft, but that's the just the kernel, but Apple closed the OS just to run on Apple hardware. So I think the more appropriate way is Open Source kernel Closed Source architecture.
Microsoft is a proprietary OS, but they write it run on a variety of different processors, license it to the typical PC mfg, and then sell an off the shelf version to DIY crowd, but you still can't modify it. They've been trying to get Microsoft to release the Source Code for the Educational and Government Crowd to mess with, but not the general public. SO, it's a closed kernel, open architecture with a commercial license because you can buy the license to put on whatever hardware it's meant to run on to use but not modify.
Programmers that can't get a job with these smartphone mfg to assist in the development of an OS is where these people belong, or using some Open Source OS for college studies but please, not in the real world.
Quote:
Originally Posted by drblank
I see a HUGE potential in a DIY smartphone. Pick from cases, screens, motherboards, etc. so you can put your own OS and name on it. Maybe there's an opportunity.LOL.
Google's already one step ahead of you. I guess we'll see if you're right and if there is a huge market for that. They're also boasting that it'll be assembled in the US.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DroidFTW
Google's already one step ahead of you. I guess we'll see if you're right and if there is a huge market for that. They're also boasting that it'll be assembled in the US.
Google is more of an Open Loop architecture.
Google already one step ahead? Actually, not really. You can't take a Samsung chip, with a LG display, stick components from HTC, Samsung that are specific to certain models and stick it in a Oppo case. come on. Get real. It's not that DIY. All it is is a cheaply designed business model to save them money from having to have the overhead costs that a REAL computing company like Apple that actually designs more of their own product than anyone else, that actually supports it, updates and deals with not allowing malware whenever they can. Android on a Samsung S3 is a different flavor than the S4 version, than the Admire, than the HTC One, etc. etc. So they are not only fragmented by the version of Android, but by the various modified versions running on all of the different mfg/model phones.
So, far, Android (if you add all of the different flavors) has more market share, but not profits. Profits keep the doors open. No Profit closes doors.
It's almost like comparing HP/UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, etc. and adding them together into one market share number and calling it UNIX market share vs Linux Market share.
Some market share numbers can be misleading.
Ugh, I hope new and up coming programmers never share your views on this subject.
On what? Not on desktop and laptop, I'll guarantee that.
A lot of those devices are things like gaming consoles, kiosks, speciaty equipment, but those are not desktop and laptops and servers.
What's your source?
I said servers, just servers.
Here is an article on revenue;
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-servers-keep-growing-windows-and-unix-keep-shrinking/10616
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-its-where-the-jobs-are/10358
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption
Apple also uses Linux in their datacenters
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/07/21/the-technology-inside-apples-new-idatacenter/
Quote:
Originally Posted by Relic
You do realize the majority of the servers in the world are running Linux by a huge margin. So it seems you stand alone on this.
Linux 93.8%
AIX 3.6%
Hybrid Unix/Linux 1.4%
Other Unix 0.6%
Windows HPC 0.6%
Here's some numbers to look at.
GO look at the market share of desktop computer OSs, Linux is down in the Less than 2.1%, while even Macs are at around 7%. Linux is not mainstream even as much as OS X is. While Windows (all flavors combined are around 90%).
Linux is used in a lot of specialty equipment that are designed for you NOT to hack into. There are medical equipment systems, gaming systems, kiosks, car systems, etc that run on Linux, that's because they it's FREEEE for them to develop their own OS that gets locked down afterwards, if they're smart.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacTel
Open has been successful though. Android took the feature phone and buried it. Everyone has been better off with Android on the cheaper phones.
I don't know if Google has been all about profit. Maybe they just want to elevate the level of technology out in the world. In other words - be good. Google Glass is a good example of that.
For a business, "success" has to translate into making money. That's how you pay your employees. That's how you pay for components to make the next great product.
And your statement that Google may be just trying to "elevate the level of technology out in the world" is one of the most asinine statements I have heard in a while. The fact that Google spouts such patently false nonsense makes it even worse. Google wants to make money as much as the next corporation. The reason they give Android away for free is because your eyeballs looking at ads have far more value to Google than your cash ever could. And since they have a profitable product in search, they're not afraid of losing money on Android if that ever happens.
I think you're analysis is mostly correct, however I think your concept of success as "making money" and failure as "not making money" is wrong. Google wants to make it easy for people to click on ads, and while people might be able to block ads on their phone, they did remove ad blocking apps on the play store which means 90% of users now have no idea how to download them. Google's profit from mobile web ads has skyrocketed in the past year.
You also ignore that there are high end Android smartphones that have some advantages to iPhone. Also if success is making money, why do you consider Apple to be successful despite their stock price being so low?
Here's an idea.
They should have a product line called the Android Freedom phone. NO SUPPORT, NO WARRANTY, and there's NO guarantee that you actually use it on a cellular network.
Then they can use the marketing tag line. YOU ARE FREEEEEEEEEEEEE. and then just give them away and all they are are the oldest crap that's been returned that no one else wants.
Those numbers are for the top 500 supercomputers, I failed to realize and Linux servers is over 25% in 2013.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2013/03/report-enterprise-linux-growth-outpaces-windows
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23974913#.UU-PJBm_SJJ
Source Date Linux Windows Unix z/OS Total
IDC Q4 2012 20.4% 45.8% 17.6% 12.3% 96.1%
Top 500 SuperComputers
Linux 93.8%
AIX 3.6%
Hybrid Unix/Linux 1.4%
Other Unix 0.6%
Windows HPC 0.6%