Murdock started Debian in 1993 using GNU, FSF and Linux
Google was only founded in 1998
It appears that di Bona is wrong. The Linux elitists were there a long time before Google. Google (and everybody else in this forum perhaps) needs Linux elitists more than Linux elitists need Google. To the contrary of what di Bona claims, FOSS could exist quite happily without Google but maybe Google could not exist without FOSS.
I wouldn’t use the term Linux elitists at all. I would suggest these are simply people who are self-sufficient with computing.
Imagine a world, where Google pays huge heap of licence fees for Microsoft for their server instances
Google surely would not exist without Linux(!), not just FOSS in general.
Yes it does, though chromium was the first, then Google came along and took chromium code and added their own spin calling it Chrome. So yes in a way Linux owns Google. Just that Linux has no say in the running of Google, which is a shame, as I’m sure there would be a lot of things that Linux would do differently with Google?
Alas, self-sufficiency often leads to pure selfishness. Ayn Rand would approve.
It’s a sin that is very seductive, unless you are at least moderately introspective.
Just keep them out of my hair, and my remaining altruism.
Didn’t they also take Linux and call it Android?
Ah well… Torvalds took Unix and developed Linux from it.
And previously, those Bell guys Thomson and Ritchie took Multics, and shortened it to Unix…
Nothing is new that hasn’t been stol…uh, borrowed.
Here’s what SUPER-ULTRA cheeses me of about Google…
They actually give staff the option to use a Linux desktop / laptop machine - but - their offerings in the desktop software space are glaringly absent - I mean there’s not even a proper “ridgy-didge” Google Drive solution… At best, on Linux, we have to implement kludge fixes to get google drive (yeah it kinda / sorta, works in Gnome desktops, dunno about KDE)…
Mac? Sure here’s our Google Drive app - fire away!
Windows? Sure here’s our Google Drive app - fire away!
Android (need I bother?) : fire away!
iOS? Sure heres our Google Drive app - fire away!
Linux? F–K off - but by all means use our search engine to see what other punters have done…
Android originally had nothing Google inside it whatsoever. Google saw a viable money making mobile spying machine in their eyes and bought the rights. Money the route of all evil. Can’t wait till we get the replication machine that is on Star Trek. Probably not in my lifetime though?
Torvalds actually wrote a line of Kernel Code (1991 first Prototype Linux Code got Released). Got in contact with a friend of his, saying that he’d just written a line of code, that could be used to potentially run an operating system. He then published it to the public and the public added to it.
Canonical company was formed by Mark Shuttleworth, who was already a millionaire and wanted to invest some money into something. His team of programmers and himself Came up with Ubuntu Warty Warthog 20th October 2004 based upon Debian, or their own version of it. They had married themselves to Gnome 2 and they were the days when everyone looked forward to the new Ubuntu release, as buggy as it was back then, nothing to how buggy it is now in my opinion. It was great back then, making sure you had enough CDs to burn your copy of Ubuntu on, yes CDs. Not knowing if you had enough bandwidth to download for the month, including keeping new Ubuntu updated, writing your own code into the Kernel for particular hardware like those 3G broadband Dongles. Another story for another day. Yes I am a geek. If I could I would marry all my computers.
Though I did not start my Linux journey till the end of 2009, the sheer anticipation of waiting for the next Ubuntu release and reading about whether or not they had fixed the buggy mess that was the Ubuntu Store? Every release they would announce that the Ubuntu Store had been fixed, but it still did not work. So everyone opted for Synaptic, which was installed by default. These days it’s Snaps this, Snaps that, but mostly Snaps don’t work.
Ungoogled Chromium is set as it states ungoogled, but you can use the Google Store and as a add on I believe you can install Google Drive. Yeah I hear you though, Linux always gets left out in the cold. Imagine if Linux did own Google? The world would be so much better? Problem is though, wouldn’t it be like missing the chase after becoming a millionaire, not having to scrimp and save? Missing the chase of want, wanting or needing that particular thing here in Linux, missing the doing of implementing workarounds, to get things to run. We are the administrators of our Linux Desktops, to keep them running, at the end of the day, you go to bed. I hate that saying at the end of the day. Always a long pause after saying at the end of the day. Yes you go to bed, or if you’re working a night shift you don’t.
Yes, that is the case, but we shall not forget why that happens. Big Tech plays a role in it, obviously, as they are deciding what platforms they are building for. That is correct. However, Linux is not the victim. It puts too much salt in its own soup.
While all other major and popular operating systems (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS…) focus on UX and usability, Linux constantly drifts into uncharted expert territory, that the vast majority of users don’t care or don’t even know anything about and will probably never use in their entire lives.
If Linux operating systems for end-users would focus more on UX, usability, compatibility with hardware, etc. then market share would increase and Big Tech would have more reasons into making stuff work on Linux.
The medal is never one-sided. We shall not forget that.
If Linus Torvalds would own Google, it wouldn’t be bad, though I don’t know if it would be good. Ironically, Linus is not a Free Software blinded Linux freak, as we usually see it among the self-proclaimed “Linux experts”, who are so far in the tunnel of “only FOSS – I rather have no GUI and everything breaking than using proprietary software”, that it always results in utterly & inherently broken Linux GUI systems. So, with Linux there would be a chance of improvement.
Though, with Free Software fanatics, as described above?
Google would stop existing within 5 years, max.
That is exactly why Llnux/Unix is king in the scientific world. It is always doing something new, and occasionslly comes up with something that is dramatically different and extremely useful.
If we could all see GNU/Linux as a research project, we would be less concerned about UX issues.
and
Linux had the solution to UX years ago , and it threw it away. Remember X terminals? They were the perfect X11 client , but they have disappeared.
So there is the solution. Linux can solve all its GUI problems in one swoop. Just put the whole GUI into hardware… X, wayland, DTE ., everything. Then we could just get our favourite UX client off the shelf, and be free to concentrate an the really exciting side of Linux.
Yes. The problem is, that people constantly say stuff like “why is Linux not more popular?” and “why do people not use Linux?” and “Windows/macOS is so crappy, why don’t you just use Linux?”, which absolutely baffles me. It’s pretty clear why people do not use Linux as end-users. Because it sux for every day purposes.
So, I am telling those people my view of how to improve the situation and then suddenly some of them become defensive and are acting as if Linux would be perfectly fine and sufficient for end-user tasks, when it is clearly not.
If everyone would accept Linux as a scientific or just general expert distribution and wouldn’t complain that Big Tech is not making anything compatible on Linux, then I would close my case, because there would be nothing to talk about.
But as long as people complain about the “bad bad” big companies, which do not care to release their software on Linux, I have a case to explain about why that happens and, to their dismay, they don’t like the answers to their questions and complaints.
In short:
Either make Linux just as usable on Windows and then Big Tech will produce software for it or stop complaining that Big Tech is not making software for Linux, as long as Linux is walking a fringe “only for experts” way.
Putting things into hardware, which might as well be software, is absolutely terrible. You are making things much more complicated, insecure and expensive, when there is no need for it. You can’t just “patch” hardware. You must manufacture hardware. There are so many issues with hardware. Hardware should only be used for things that simply do not work without existing in the real world.
But the Windows GUI is perfect. All we need to do is freeze it in hardware, and we have it for all time. And all that useless GUI code in Linux can be deleted.
The trend is for things to migrate into hardware. Think about I/O. We once used to compile drivers into Fortran, to drive peripherals. Then they got peripheral processors. Then we got I/O cards. Then we got i/o chips on the motherboard. Putting the whole dte in a chip is perfectly feasable, and it will naturally progress to that. Then Linux will have the same GUI as Windows.
Actually, the trend is the opposite. People are moving away from hardware, as much as physically possible. For example, Cloud Computing becomes bigger & bigger, where people do not even need their own PC to run a PC via the cloud.
It wouldn’t work like that, at all.
GUI code is the most important code for end-users. Without GUI, the entire computer is utterly useless for normal end-user humans.
We just end up with a GUI terminal , and a cloud ( or maybe our own server)
The way most users use Windows, it basically is a GUI terminal already.
We might as well freeze it in hardware and they can have exactly what they want, without any need to go near microsoft or linux.
