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Re: Woz and Amelio start new company
sicklittlemonkey wrote:
Microsoft's posturing has little to do with the future of computing in
developing countries. They were probably never a contender for the OS
of a $100 machine based on LinuxBIOS. In fact open source is making
great inroads in developed countries too - at least where pork barrel
tactics don't hold sway.
The ubiquity of the PC infrastructure and the relative ease of
pirating software (including the OS) had made the Wintel PC a
de facto standard in many developing countries. There are
government/political pushes for other OS bases, but the ground
truth remains the PC, often running Windows.
Government adoption will drive large corporate adoption, and that will
trickle down. Winning from the bottom up has been intractible for
reasons related to some of the points you bring up. But things like
national security and interoperability will trump market concerns in
the long run. Look at the recent US/UK spat over the Joint Strike
Fighter source code.
There are no silver bullets that solve the problems of application
availablility and ubiquity. Open source is an interesting, but
still quite problematic approach.
Hmm, we seem to have strayed waaay off topic. ;-)
Any further and I fear a Grue may get us.
<CHOMP!>
-michael
Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
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