On Thursday, 1 February 2018 at 20:52:43 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
On 2018-01-31 09:43, Joakim wrote:
Back when I first wrote about mixing open and closed source
like this in
my 2010 Phoronix article, nobody considered it a world-beating
model.
Maybe people now assume I'm just keying these ideas off the
success of
Android in using a similar mixed model, but my article was
published
when Android had only single-digit market share so I hardly
paid
attention to it, as it was only one of a gaggle of mobile OS's
competing
at the time:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Market_share
While I had heard of a few companies using similar mixed
models here and
there, none were that successful back then, so my article was
based
mostly on theory. I think the evidence since then has proven
that
theory resoundingly accurate, given all the huge projects,
such as
Android, iOS, Safari, Chrome, LLVM/clang, using mixed models
now. Even
Microsoft, who used to look askance at open source, has gotten
in the
game, open-sourcing .NET and several of their other projects.
Apple has been using a mix of open and closed source for
decades. The source code for all versions of macOS, back to the
first one, is available here [1].
[1] https://opensource.apple.com
I know, I was aware of it, but I wouldn't call OS X's
single-digit market share or iOS's 16% market share in 2009 "that
successful:"
https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/google’s-android-becomes-world’s-leading-smart-phone-platform
Also, they were notorious for having a mostly closed tech stack,
and not getting almost any outside contribution to the OSS
portions.
