

Richard Stallman on the state of GNU, 25 years on - rogercosseboom
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/the-state-of-free-software-496596

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old-gregg
_And Richard Stallman thinks free software is making good progress too,
despite the lack any significant dent in Microsoft's market share_

I disagree. Microsoft would _love_ to get all those tasty Windows Server sales
it lost due to the rise of Linux, not to mention 20% of the browser market
owned by Firefox, which essentially killed Microsoft's initial attempt at
controlling the "web runtime". And what about free software powered Macs,
where only a miniscule percentage of the code shipped on the official Leopard
DVDs is made by Apple?

In fact, free software is the _only_ competitor Microsoft was unable to run
over. Not Google, not Apple, but these "crazy socialists". Google&Apple merely
repackaged and resold billions of dollars worth of code created by them.

~~~
jws
I like the theme, but "miniscule percentage" is not an accurate description of
reality, not is the assertion that Google merely repackages and sells open
source software.

(It does make me wonder about what percentage of a Leopard DVD is written by
Apple. The FreeBSD system is mostly written by others, the OS underneath
FreeBSD is Apple, the GUI and Apps are mostly Apple. Print drivers tend to be
freakishly huge on OS X and are written by the printer vendors, so that might
distort things.)

~~~
old-gregg
Leopard DVD contains not just the OS, but numerous essential programs and
system libraries that come with it: GCC, Python, Ruby, vim, Apache plus myriad
of userspace UNIX utilities and libraries.

Think of it as a free vs proprietary ratio of x86 instructions loaded in a
machine's RAM. Building anything on top of Linux/GCC/MySQL/Python/Apache will
guarantee that the best you could hope for will be nothing but a miniscule
percentage of it. Google would find life much more difficult without OSS:
Windows/Solaris licenses alone will make it significatnly more expensive to
operate thousands of cheap x86 servers, not to mention increased development
and management costs.

I find OSS fascinating. People keep underestimating its importance all the
time, mistakenly calling operating systems and compilers a "commodity" without
realizing this enormous dependence of our industry on this movement.

~~~
jws
I would not count something as "not written by Apple" just because it is
compiled with gcc.

I did neglect Apache, python, and such. I was just thinking of the BSD type
utilities.

As far as OS licenses, there are cheaper ways to get a base OS than Windows or
Solaris. I don't remember what I used to pay for QNX licenses back in the '90s
for devices we used to build, but they were cheap enough that it didn't
matter. What google does in their large farms just needs the bare core of an
OS, I'm sure they could write their own for under $100M.

I'm just reinstalling a Tiger machine. I'll list off all the executable files
and see if I can find a sane way of estimating author. It should make an
interesting pie chart.

------
nx
We'll win eventually.

