Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 09:39:57AM -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> It's not enough for open source alternatives to be better than 
> proprietary counterparts. They have to be compellingly better in order 
> to get people to change direction. This is often simplified during 
> update cycles, when the cost of sticking with the chosen path itself 
> requires new expense in software, training and support upgrades. The 
> task is also made easier when the proprietary version is badly botched 
> -- and yet look at the hard time Firefox has had getting a significant 
> market share despite all of IE's well publicized security holes.

Well firefox leaks memory like a sieve, and at elast the windows version
will spin on the cpu if you leave it open while suspending a laptop and
then resuming it later causing the resume step to take many minutes
instead of seconds, and then you still have to close firefox and start
ig again to let the cpu go back to normal load.  Maybe some of it is the
GUI code in windows, but I suspect the majority is that firefox just
contains a lot of very crappy code.  It was based on the descendant of
netscape 4, which has to be one of the most awful browsers ever written.
I think sometimes you have to rewrite your code from scratch to clean it
up, except that isn't exciting so most people don't want to volunteer to
do that.  I could be wrong, but I don't think the mozilla project is
attracting the worlds best coders, certainly not the ones that carefully
test every function they write to make sure it has no memory leaks or
bad pointer calculations or anything else that could deteriorate the
quality of the overall project.

> We are up against senior IT staff with political and social turfs to 
> protect, asses to cover, aversion to change, and a reluctance to 
> implement technology that new employees will likely know better than 
> their longtime managers. Given all that, combined with the lack of 
> marketing muscle of "Linux Inc", and I don't think the pace of growth is 
> anything to be ashamed of.

Imagine how many less people would be employed reinstalling machines, if
everything ran linux instead.  What if your only IT skill is
reinstalling windows?

Len Sorensen
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