doc wrote:If you revisit some of your own Linux-centric posts over the last year or so... you'll find the use of FOSS this and FOSS that, throughout most all of it. The reason for that is "Free & Open Sourced" is at the very heart of the GNU-Linux project. Gentrified or not, those folks simply do not see the world of software, development and/or business through the same set of eyes as a traditional Window/Mac developer. I personally don't see that changing any time soon.
I agree that the FOSS community is especially enamored of FOSS. My point was simply that as the Linux audience grows it also becomes more diverse.
Today some of the most desired apps for the platform are not merely proprietary and commercial, but also sometimes fairly expensive (Photoshop being at the top of that list).
There will always be some who will use only FOSS apps, but that percentage will get ever smaller as the audience continues to grow.
Today's Ubuntu audience is quite willing to pay for apps that deliver value, and the numbers from game developers I provided earlier support that.
doc wrote:Surveys are great, but in the real world, if there really is such demand, then where are the popular commercial apps that you find on Windows or Mac? Where are the players in the marketplace? Why don't we see Dreamweaver, Turbo-Tax, Rosetta Stone, Skype, etc. on the Linux platform?
Skype is available for Linux. As for the others, companies like those were much like the majority who didn't jump on the Mac platform for many years after it launched.
With Linux, the platform ecosystem has historically been hampered by the biggest disadvantage that Windows and Mac never had: people don't buy OSes, they buy computers.
In that sense, Linux isn't a whole-product solution, since it needs a computer to run it and most computers ship with some other OS on them. It never occurs to the average person that they could replace the OS that came with their computer with something they downloaded off the Internet. It's rather amazing that Linux has come as far as it has with that limitation.
That's beginning to change.
Every quarter for the last couple years we've seen announcement of new models from Dell, Asus, Acer, and others with Ubuntu preinstalled.
More recently, such OEM agreements with Chinese manufacturers have led to this, a headline once completely unthinkable:
Canonical: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTA5ODM
True, if you're in the US you can't walk into WalMark and buy a computer running Ubuntu.
Yet.
While these OEM agreements continue to grow outside the US, here at home we find two factors that suggest an opportunity for OEMs to consider a line of Ubuntu machines:
1. OEM margins are falling, to the point that the two biggest, Dell and HP, have in the last year pondered whether they can remain in the game at all. Historically they've delivered a pixel-for-pixel user experience identical to all of their competitors, Microsoft Windows, which has forced them to differentiate only by lowering prices. The only way out of that hole is some other form of differentiation. Ubuntu is one option for that.
2. People are increasingly comfortable with multiple OSes, thanks to the exploding mobile market. Today's computer user jumps between their Windows PC, their Android phone, and their iPad with an ease unknown in previous years.
It's too early to tell if PC manufacturers will have the insight to finally begin differentiating, or if their shareholders will continue to mystifyingly allow them to bleed cash every quarter with ever-lower margins. But it would be kinda dumb of them not to try, and their explorations of Ubuntu bundling outside the US may provide some inspiration.
OEMs and app devs are the two sides of a chickens-and-eggs scenario, in which devs will jump on board when they see a larger audience, the audience can only grow when they can buy Linux computers, and computer manufacturers will only make those machines when they see the audience grow.
Historically this has been an intractable conundrum, but I think we're seeing just enough OEMs coming on board now, with app devs like Valve and EA on that front, that we may see a bit of a tipping point not long from now.
For myself and a growing number of my clients, the cost to port LiveCode apps to Linux is so low that we can contribute to the app side of the equation and still make money today, before that tipping point is reached.
doc wrote:Due to the very nature of the beast, it is impossible for LiveCode and/or LiveCode apps to fit into the FOSS model.
Not necessarily. I've discussed this with David Bovill and other FOSS advocates in the LiveCode comminuty, and the consensus seems to boil down to this:
With LiveCode what we have is effectively a virtual machine, and we write our code using scripts that call its APIs to do its magic. In that sense it's no different from writing FOSS wares which rely on APIs in proprietary OSes like Mac and Windows.
In purely rational terms (recognizing that not everything in life is rational <g>), if using LiveCode is somehow verboten, then all FOSS projects that run on Mac and Windows are equally invalid.
doc wrote:As you stated concerning the game-centricity of your stats...
Of the top 20 apps (paid or free) that I found using your link, only 6 were non-games and even two of those six are utilities to provide the ability to play Windows based games in Linux.
Skewed indeed, but not in a bad way: the number one reason people cite for dual-booting Linux is to keep a Windows install around for games. Games are a big deal (note how much energy Apple's devoted to evangelizing its platform for gamers and game devs), so in a world dominated by Windows games it's encouraging to see so much attention given to native Linux games.
doc wrote:I still see a lot of smoke and mirrors with Linux, as a developer and as a user.
I just see an operating system, in a world in which OSes are increasingly recognized as commodities.
FWIW, Red Hat passed $1 billion in revenue from a business built around its free OS:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/red-hat/