On 9/1/2012 3:29 AM, dE wrote:
How does Google benefit by making the project opensource?
That's a fait accompli: The fact that it was open source gave it a
competitive advantage over iOS and Windows Mobile in the eyes of the
various hardware manufacturers, because they could customize it however
they liked to "differentiate" their phones.
Honestly that "differentiation" was mostly awful, but it was what they
WANTED from a phone OS, and so they chose Android (except Nokia, R.I.P.
[1]).
Largest e.g. is Linux desktop, who's administrations despite being
> hard is used by ~1.5% of the world and the primary reason for most of
> these people is that it's GPLed software.
Linux desktop is losing market share to OS X. Sad, but true. And having
tried to use Linux desktops, I can't blame them, though personally I
can't stand being forced to use the mouse on OS X (how do you call up
the menu from the keyboard? You can't.), and so would jump to Linux
desktop myself rather than reduce my productivity if I needed to leave
the Windows platform.
> So we can't conclude that people will not given a damn about
> Apache/GPL/GNU projects, had it been so the 1000s of developers
> wouldn't have volunteered to develop opensource software and
> development is quiet a lot of effort for charity, finally they're
> also people. And we see even more of non-developer contributors
> daily.
Developers who care about open source are a small, small fraction of
people -- there certainly are not enough of them to make a difference in
something like a consumer cell phone market. It only takes a few
developers to make a product used by millions, and frankly all the
millions really care about is "free" and the user experience.
Tim
[1] http://realmensch.org/blog/rip-nokia
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