On Dec 28, 2011, at 1:18 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:

I think that there are things that can be done on both points, and I wonder
what other people think:


IMHO the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad drives the Android market. People invest large sums of money developing apps for iOS and if they are a success, the developers port them to Android.

There is nothing to stop anyone from developing a free app for Android but there currently is a high cost of entry into the market, the price of the device. As Android devices go down in price, and more people have them, more people will start developing apps for them.

It was that way with Linux too, device drivers only existed for those devices standard on a commodity PC. If someone in the Linux community had a different device and wanted to write a driver, they would, and many of them were written by amateurs (and performed accordingly).

Eventually device manufacturers found that while only a small portion of computers ran linux, it was enough to provide a few samples and some documents to people who were willing to write the device drivers.

In your case, you have the device, you can obtain the development kit and the market account, feel free to develop something. Maybe you have that right combination of abilities to produce an app that people want.

As for making money on Emacs and ls, well, Emacs was hardly a revolutionary product, it was just another text editor in a field of lots of text editors, that just sort of grew. There are many text editors available for Linux and I doubt that most Linux users don't use it. I know for sure that most UNIX users don't.

Ls on the other hand was basically a copy of the BSD ls, which was a copy of UNIX's ls, which was a copy of the file listing command on one of many timesharing systems, that went back to the early 1960's.

Actually, considering that RMS has made a reasonable living with the FSF, he did figure out how to market Emacs. :-)

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(














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