Paul Boutin (who has written for Wired, for Salon, and now for Slate) generally knows what he’s talking about, but I think he got one thing wrong in his otherwise smart analysis of a report that Linux will soon overtake Apple’s Macintosh system, measuring by number of desktops in use.
Linux is fast, cheap, and reliable, in defiance of the old engineer’s adage that you can only have two out of three. |
That sounds good. And yes, Linux is a fast operating system. But the way I’ve always heard this adage applied, “fast” meant how quickly a piece of software can be developed, not how speedily it ran. (I was first introduced to this saying years ago by Dan Shafer, Salon’s first webmaster.)
And Linux, in truth, has not been “fast” in that sense: Like most good software, it has taken years to grow and evolve and build its strength, from the early ’90s, when Linus Torvalds wrote the earliest versions, to the late ’90s, when it became the cheap Web server of choice (and Salon moved its entire server platform to it), to the present, when the desktop-user side of things is just beginning to come together. One constant theme of Andrew Leonard’s superb coverage of the open source/free software movement for Salon since 1997 has been this: that its developers, whether of Linux or Apache or Mozilla, take their time; they’re not rushing to market to meet a corporate deadline. They’re iterating, as programmers like to say — putting some code out, weeding out the bugs, building some more code on top, and gradually assembling something great. Cheap and reliable, yes, but hardly fast.
On the larger Linux vs. Apple point: Yeah, I imagine Linux will surpass Macintosh in sheer numbers of installed desktops at some point. As Boutin says, free is hard to fight. What I find interesting — and what Boutin doesn’t really acknowledge or deal with in his article — is how effectively Apple has rekindled developers’ interest.
At geek conclaves like the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, where once you’d see Macs only in the hands of the occasional journalist or graphic designer, it’s the programmers who are now sporting PowerBooks and showing off their tricks on Apple machines. By rebuilding the MacOS on a Unix base, Jobs managed to stoke some serious geek energy. For the first time in years, there are interesting new applications — media tools, outliners, odd little programs — coming out for Macs that Windows users can’t get. That’s an amazing comeback, whatever the consulting firms say about desktop market share.
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