If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.
If Linux was dominant it wouldn’t be Linux. There would be more pressure to monetize and there would always be someone willing to sell out for that money. You can see this even in the Linux community today. I’m sorry I had to be so negative about it though, it sounds nice.
This is a very Desktop/workstation-centric view of the situation and you're completely neglecting 3/4ths of the story. Linux is alreadyhilariously dominant on the on-prem server and Cloud side of things. Like, it's not even close. Pretty much any website you visit, the odds are overwhelming that it's running Linux. Even Microsoft runs most of the underlying infrastructure for Azure and Github on Linux. Android is the #1 mobile phone platform in the world, which runs on, you guessed it, Linux.
And it's already monetized to the gills. Red Hat has multi-billion earnings per quarter, every quarter, and Canonical is almost certainly going to IPO this year.
It's already dominant in pretty much every space it touches and it has been for a very long time. Desktop/workstation is pretty much the singular exception to that.
Yeah man it’s more of what you might call an allegory for how capitalism works. Language is my thing, looks like Linux is yours. I’m sure this information will be very helpful for anyone who might read my post and mistake me for an expert. Thanks for your service.
Who, exactly, do you think would "sell out for money", and why would they have the power to do so? Linux is huge, and the pressure to monetize is there now. Plenty of people have been trying to monetize Linux - and in many cases, succeeding - for decades now. Why do you think being dominant would change that?
Not really. Having heterogeneity among operating systems is better than pure homogeneity. Say, if everyone ran Linux, and some massive security flaw was discovered, we would all be screwed at the same time. However, if we ran different stuff, and some massive security hole was found for just one operating system, then only a small portion of the world is vulnerable at once. Besides, more operating systems can lead to more innovation, as long as there is good competition between them.
If the whole world focused and used just 1 OS for every system for a long enough time line, I think it would evolve fast enough to reach a point of perfection, where there are no security holes or flaws of any kind. I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it. Eventually the best way to do everything an OS needs to do would be found; it would be faster if there was only 1 OS to work with to reach that point.
where there are no security holes or flaws of any kind
this in itself is straight up impossible to know or prove. when can you say your program has no vulnerabilities? ever hear of zerodays? finding the best way to do everything in software will never be found or stay constant either.
I do believe that while programming has many ways of doing the same task, there is always an objectively best way to do it.
I've been writing code in one form or another for some 30 years now, and my observation so far has been the exact opposite: there are many problems in programming for which there is no one clearly superior solution, even in theory. Just like life in general, programming is full of trade-offs, compromises, and diminishing returns.
It's more complicated to make money producing FOSS, capitalism or not. Lots of reasonable developers would still choose closed source even without capitalism.
Dirty secret is that FOSS is a product of capitalism and nothing else.
A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production created personal computers while the central planners in both communist countries and big companies both thought it was a dumb idea. A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production meant that someone could decide to release their product free with source code. Private ownership of intellectual property such as source code allowed people to release their privately owned code under a license specifying that changes must be made public.
From there, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. How many FOSS projects do you use, and who made them?
Nah, industrial and infrastructure should mostly use BSD. And "Never see a command line" consumer OS's should generally be forks from Linux or other FOSS. Most Linux distros have come a long way and are ready for gaming prime time, but fail the "80 year old grandma who wants to digitise her record collection but is a bit unclear on double-clicking" test.
Seconding that, made the switch and nothing broke since(almost 2 months now, o) . Can't say that for windows tho, where not only auto updates meant I had to wait half an hour to use my PC half of the time or disable them and not be up to date with security, but the OS itself was riddled with problems, sometimes just opening Firefox with a few tabs (like 4 or so) would bsod (and I have 16 gigs of ddr4 ram, so it wasn't a ram problem) not to mention now that I'm on Mint everything is faster, I didn't have to pay a license key and I know my OS isn't trying to fight me for my data.