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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.