revMobile

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 09/04/2010 10:23, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Gruber's piece is excellent.  But even if this one gets resolved, you have to
> consider that if the company supplying the platform is in a position to set
> any conditions at all that it feels like setting on both applications that
> can run on it, and content that can be accessed from it, then as a supplier
> of either to that platform, you are at their mercy.  Do you want to be
> there?
>
> Is it the company we thought it was?  Was it ever the company we thought it
> was?
>
> It applies just as much to if as a novelist you adopt the iPad as your
> preferred e-book distribution channel.  One day you could wake up and
> discover that owing to the too vigorously expressed politically incorrect
> sentiments of your leading character on page 203, your contribution to
> literature was now impossible to buy, and worse, had been deleted from all
> Pads, and refunds already given.  And this was before breakfast!
  Well, this is true of any operating system . . .  or, put another way:

Until RunRev produces its own OS, and gets the vast majority of people to
run it on their computers they will always have to twiddle things around
to fit whichever systems they want RunRev to run on.

This may be behind the reticence with regard to the Linux version of
RunRev: RunRev (the company) do not perceive Linux as a serious
commercial competitor (and the important word here is 'commercial')
to Windows and Macintosh; and, as far as I can see, a considerable
amount of twiddling has to be done to get the Linux version up to par
with W & M, thye may not feel it justified.