Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 19, 2006 15:06 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Resisting the binary blob by landley
Parent article: Resisting the binary blob

The same data says a clear software winner will emerge in 2008. It will also be retroactively obvious.

Your findings for hardware are very well documented and very clear. But not all of your data suggests the same for software. For example, the last software switch on servers (not on the desktop) has happened on these last years (early 2000), when the industry has mostly abandoned proprietary Unix and embraced Windows and Linux. However, the last shift happened around the early 90s when mainframes gave way to those same Unix servers (including *BSD machines). And I see no explanation in your paper on why servers are different than desktop machines. How come Linux and Windows could carve themselves a niche there, and then fight for the dominant positions, between hardware transitions?