I admire Linus Torvalds’ candor (this is the guy who freely admits his own family doesn’t use the Linux desktop, after all), as well as his foresight.
In an excellent interview posted on Simple-Talk, Torvalds covers a range of topics, including the Linux operating system’s place in history:
I have the ability to certainly envision the Linux kernel becoming obsolete–anything else would just be sad, really, in the massive picture.
He’s completely right. Much as we may pine for this or that project to reach market dominance, it is one of the cardinal virtues of open source that there are no legal or business policies that would entrench it as a monopoly. People may choose to use it for a long period of time and to the exclusion of other products/projects, but there are no nefarious designs in the code to make it so.
Hence, Linux may fade away. At some point, we should certainly hope so, in order to make way for the next phase of operating system, one that’s preferably open source.
Other interesting tidbits from the interview are Linus’ comment on patents:
… Source:The Open Road
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Oracle is a shrewd, shrewd company. As reported by Sarah Lacy in Businessweek, Oracle long ago recognized the potential for Software-as-a-Service, both to liberate customers and to decimate its profits. Noting that the two may very well go together, Oracle has demurred from jumping into SaaS:
On-demand software has turned out to be a brutal slog. Software sold “as a service” over the Web doesn’t sell itself, even when it’s cheaper and actually works. Each sale closed by these new Web-based software companies has a much smaller price tag. And vendors are continually tweaking their software, fixing bugs, and pushing out incremental improvements. Great news for the user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative huge upgrade each few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the software….
Why isn’t Oracle a bigger player in on-demand software? It doesn’t want to be, Ellison told the analysts and investors.
… Source:The Open Road
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(Credit: Matt Asay)Anyone else see this notice today? The site has been down before, but not recently. It’s now back on the internet, fortunately, so I can get my ticket.
Anyone know why it went down?
Source:The Open Road
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I’m not sure what to do with this information, but I think Seth Godin is probably right in his estimation of the Long Tail theory:
A lot of people don’t seem to comprehend a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it’s superior to make …
Source:The Open Road
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