[kwlug-disc] How Canonical makes money ...

[Paul Nijjar]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:25:13PM -0400, John Van Ostrand wrote:
> ----- "Paul Nijjar" <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > When reading about website design, the part I don't get is the talk
> > of
> > supporting "two, three browsers".  Yes, there are differences between
> > browser implementations, but deep down, HTML is HTML and CSS is CSS
> > and JavaScript is JavaScript. 
> 
> Perfect example Paul, except sarcasm should have been part of your post.

Oh, believe me. Sarcasm was part of my post, smudged with tears of
frustration. 

And now I am going to break the analogy by identifying an elephant in
this room. The brouhaha over supporting Oracle and friends over "two,
three distros" is precisely because the proprietary apps profitable
companies want to sell on Linux are proprietary. Having many different
distros and package formats matters a LOT less when you have access to
the source, because then packagers just take the source and massage it
so that it works with their distro's packaging system, library
infrastructure and file layout. The onus for getting a piece of free
software working is on the distro more than the upstream developer. 

With proprietary software, this is no longer the case. Now it is the
onus of the upstream developer to support ebuilds and .debs and .rpm
and who knows what else, and also to make sure that the individual
quirks of different distros are handled. That does not scale well, so
proprietary software makers always want to limit the number of
alternatives on which their software runs. This is why proprietary
software makers hate diversity, and do their best to stamp it out. 
They don't want to leave themselves in the clutches of one distro, but
they don't want to put effort into making sure their proprietary app
runs on Puppy Linux either. 

- Paul

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org