[kwlug-disc] interesting piece on the power of open source

[Darcy Casselman]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Lori Paniak
<ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com> wrote:
> Under the hood, Apple OSX is just some BSD distro.  What makes people
> line up and pay big $$ for it?  Whatever it is is in the missing 30%.

Apple gets to focus all its testing and development effort on a known,
small set of hardware.  I think there's room for someone to take Linux
and do the same.

When Dell started shipping Ubuntu, I was hoping it would be part of
that--using its clout with its hardware suppliers to wrest out decent
drivers and contribute back to upstream. It doesn't appear to be doing
that, but I still like the idea.  Smaller players like System76 do
about as good a job supporting Linux.

The only way Linux has a hope in making a difference on the desktop is
through OEMs pre-installing.  I'm all for people wokring to get
whatever OS they happen to like to work on their machine.  That's
great.  But I don't think you can have any sort of realistic
expectation of an operating system working on your crazy hardware if
the hardware vendor doesn't support it.  It's not Linux's fault you
bought the wrong hardware.

Darcy.