Ranter or evangelist?

[Tim]

On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 09:31 +0500, gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> It's really weird. I already said that you have a gift for explaining,
> which means you're certainly not completely dumb. How come you can't
> understand the importance of market share for Linux?

a. This is Linux, other than for the few for-sale distributions "market
share" is inappropriate terminology.

b. As I've already pointed out, just because you measure success by the
percentage of users on different systems, doesn't mean others do, as
well.  You're the one failing to understand things.

Linux has been the success that it is, all these years, despite the low
numbers, as far as you're concerned.  It continues to succeed, despite
the low numbers, because it does what its users want it to do.

It'll never replace Windows, because it'd have to be Windows (warts and
all) to do that, and *we* don't want a Windows clone.  There's no point
to that, we've already got Windows if we want those problems.

Linux isn't going to magically vanish because the relative number of
users falls below some threshold.  It'll go when there's insufficient
people involved to keep it going.

Things like proprietary media formats will always be around, even if
Linux gets a huge /market share/,  And open formats still have a place
even in a completely proprietary market.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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