On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 10:04:04AM -0500, Tom Marble wrote:
Given that Apple's BSD based devices alone are responsible for 65% of
revenue [0] representing over $100 billion in annual hardware sales [1]
it seems that a significant portion of the "stone soup" developer community
is already relying upon permissively licensed kernels.
There is only one developer contributing to Apple's MacOS X --- which
is, of course, Apple. The economic size and success of the
application development community used by iOS is not really what is at
issue here.
The big question is how many kernel contributers --- especially by the
ARM community, the embeddeded and handset community, etc., might have
been deterred by anti-Lock-down clauses. And note that number of
Android devices alone is four times the size of iOS by some estimates.
Furthermore, there are some significant network effects, where some
new company might decide to use Linux because of how many other
companies have been using Linux, and hence the device driver support
is present where it might not be with FreeBSD. (Or Hurd --- have you
checked to see what the device driver support is like for Hurd? It's
either very amusing or very sad, depending on your point of view....)
And yet Linux seems to be thriving.
There are may who believe it is because we are active friendly and
encourage contributions by everyone, and we don't turn people
away.....
If we take the integral under the curve over all time for Linux
commits
and put the Tivo (and friends) commits in to a "stone soup" category
how big a percentage is that? How big a percentage is it likely to
to be in the future?
Quite large, I suspect. Linux is used in every single Samsung and
Sony TV, in many Samsung home appliances (dishwashers, washing
machines, etc.), and so on. Linux is used in a *very* large number of
places, and the contributions made by one of these company to support
one particular hardware or wireless chipset, can help ensure the
continued rich availability of device drivers in the Laptop and PC
world. Contributions to improve power efficiency for handsets is
helping to improve the environmental impact of cloud servers. The
model right now is *working*. Why the heck should we make changes
that we *know* would cause some people to move away. (Hint: there is
a *reason* Android devices use their own libc, instead of using the
GPL'ed glibc.....)
Best regards,
- Ted