On 12/12/2018 17:51, jdd@dodin.org wrote:
a huge amount of efforts *selling* OS :-(
Actually, no. Mac OS X -- or "macOS" as the company prefers now -- is a free download. Of course you are only _supposed_ to run it on Apple hardware, but I have built a Hackintosh and I used it for some years as my main computer. It worked very well indeed. Windows 10 is not officially free, but it was a free _upgrade_ and it's close. The free upgrades from Windows 7/8/8.1 still work, and you can download an ISO from microsoft.com and run it unregistered and it works well -- it is less crippled than older versions were if run unregistered, because MS worked out that crippled illegal versions were a reservoir and vector for malware. Apple's business is selling _hardware_. Microsoft's business is selling Office and server software. The end-user OSes are all but freeware. (Yes, I *know* freeware != FOSS.)
for example selling to French Defense Minister a contract for more than 188500 computers, *hardware* an software. No linux company can compete :-(
Sadly, there are solid commercial/technical reasons that things like this happen: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/04/munich_linux_costs_ownership/ I find it very interesting that, for instance, ChromeOS machines are selling into a few enterprises that use the commercial gMail/gApps offering. All the companies offering desktop Linuxes spent a huge amount of time and effort on trying to look like, work like, and be compatible with, Windows. Rich email clients, rich productivity suites, over-engineered feature-heavy chat systems. Why, because everyone knows how to use Windows, and Office, and Outlook+Exchange is *the* groupware solution. Google looks at this and goes "nope, not going to try." It does a good-enough, not-very-customisable web groupware system. It makes sure it has good 3rd party support. It makes a good-enough, not-very-rich web app system. They're web apps, so they *can't* compete with the best rich local apps. Instead, they play to their strengths: collaborative editing. And it offers a sort of web-aware thin client, based on FOSS, that uses Google's single-sign-on, and does basically nothing locally. Real engineering effort is put into just one part: a very smart, low-tech but robust, self-updating system. Package management, desktops, all the stuff that distro vendors do, is basically ignored. And it sells hundreds of millions of the resulting devices. I think it was a very smart move. I remain surprised that basically nobody in the FOSS world has tried to copy it. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org