On Mon, 7 May 2001, Eric Armstrong wrote:
> The difficulty with proving the proposition is the invisibility of the
> effect. Once, there were 20 different unix competitors. (That was not
> a good thing, mind you. The lack of standards was apalling.) Now, there
> is Linux and Solaris. Will others ever exist? It's hard to tell. It's
> *extremely* hard to identify how much work is not going on in a given
> area, due to the lack of ability to derive compensation from it.
Before Linux and the free BSDs started becoming popular, the UNIX market
was in decline. Microsoft was making serious inroads into corporate
markets with NT, and the talk of the town was that UNIX was dead. In the
past four years, the overall market for UNIX has once again been growing,
and Linux and Solaris have been the only two major operating systems with
increasing market share other than Microsoft. That doesn't sound much
like killing an industry; sounds more like saving it from assimilation.
> That is a great example. It shows how great things can happen. But to
> whom does the browser industry now belong? To the only company that
> was actually making a profit at the time (and that from doing other
> things).
To a company that wouldn't allow OEMs to license software from its
competitors. The two major browsers at the time were both proprietary.
Open source didn't kill the browser industry; a monopoly did.
-Eugene
-- +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+ | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they | +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+Community email addresses: Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 08 2001 - 11:54:07 PDT