Linux has won

Joshua Judson Rosen rozzin at geekspace.com
Wed Dec 15 11:52:29 EST 2010


"Ken D'Ambrosio" <ken at jots.org> writes:
>
> On Wed, December 15, 2010 10:24 am, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> > So, while I've been slaving away in the world of corporate IT, it
> > appears Linux has quietly won the OS war.  I just didn't notice. Linux may
> > already be out-shipping Microsoft Windows.
> 
> Oh, indeed.  In the embedded market, Linux is there, and then some. 
> Indeed, I'm toying with the idea of installing the third-party Linux
> "distro" for my Samsung, so I could browse SMB and NFS shares.
> 
> *wonders if his microwave is Linux-based*

Maybe not, but Electrolux *does* have a *fridge* that's Linux-based:

    http://www.enlightenment.org/?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=26


A few years ago, I was at the movie-theatre down in Lowell,
with a friend who had a thing for photo-booths, when I discovered
that the photo-booth there was running Red Hat Linux.

`Embedded Linux' was already pretty pervasive, even at that point--
having worked its way into a lot of types of devices that people
don't even expect to be `digital' inside, let alone be `computers'
(e.g.: photo-booths, A/V amplifiers and stereo equipment, batteries,
telephones [before Android], the telephone *network*...).

Now it's toys for small children, refrigerators, televisions,
e-Books, motorcycles, guitars, personal audio-players,
video games....

As Mark Weiser wrote in `The computer for the 21st Century'
<http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html>:

   "The most profound technologies are those that disappear.
    They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life
    until they are indistinguishable from it."

They're the things that happen without anyone noticing that they happened--
change that become visible only in retrospective.

And it's by design, actually.

Part of what's going on here is that more and more `mundane' objects
are advancing technologically and becoming `smart'; and, when they do,
they use Linux--because Linux is the thing that's making that advance
possible in the first place. Develop your own thing from scratch?
Pay to license something more obscure, and get a smaller talent-pool?
Linux is a commodity. You're not supposed to notice when it gets used,
just like you're not supposed to notice when 5-volt circuits
(with connectors made by what manufacturer?) get used.

At least, that's my perspective from the inside--that's why
*my* groups have been shipping Linux for the past decade :)

The amazing thing is that Linux-uptake just seems to *keep accelerating*....

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."



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