Technical superiority

Technical superiority

Posted Dec 16, 2006 4:05 UTC (Sat) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)
In reply to: Is this about free software? by vblum
Parent article: "BadVista.org": FSF launches campaign against Microsoft Vista

Yes, I think technical superiority has a lot to do with the long-term success of Free Software.

Notice I said long-term. Note also that there are plenty of examples of commercial products that lost out in the marketplace to rivals that were arguably technically inferior in many ways. There's the hoary old Beta-versus-VHS example; in the era of operating systems, don't forget BeOS, or the earlier OS/2.

However, the operating system and other software examples I can think of are all closed-source. The companies that developed them had only a finite amount of capital to develop and promote their products; after several years without any significant market penetration, their investors got antsy and abandoned them, and that was that.

What makes Free Software different is that it's not beholden to any one company in this way. After all, it's taken fifteen years for Linux to get to the point where it is today. If it had been a closed-source product, would any company have had that much patience to persevere with it? No way.

So, ultimately, Free Software has better staying power than any closed-source product. What keeps the closed-source products in the game is the fact that they make a profit. But that profit comes at a cost, in terms of ever-growing complexity and feature bloat, because those are the only selling points you've got over your competition. At some point you evolve yourself into a cul-de-sac, and I think with Vista, Microsoft has finally reached that point.

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