Re: Re: Upcoming MacOS 14.5 with software “notarization” requirements

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:
> The frightening thing about this is that Microsoft produce a fairly 
> shoddy product, and as Linux has signally failed to displace
> Microsoft from world dominator, it will become ever worse and
> shoddier without any healthy competition.

If we limit our view of computing to desktop OSes, that's definitely true.

Microsoft had a 92% market share before more than a dozen jurisdictions
around the world found them guilty of multiple antitrust violations. 
Now after all these years of legal "remedies" from those trials, Windows 
still has an 86% share.

This may be a cautionary tale as we look ahead at new laws being 
considered to protect people from the de facto monopolies of the 
Information Industrial Complex, the big five that control nearly 
everything in the infosphere:  Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon.

While we wait for laws to catch up to modern business, and reflect on 
the self-evident inadequacy of existing antitrust laws, let's step 
outside the desktop to look at the scope of modern computing today:

Phones w/Android Linux: 82%
Tablets w/Android Linux: 73%
Embedded systems w/Linux: ~80+%
Servers w/Linux: ~60+%
Top 500 supercomputers w/Linux: 99%

On the desktop, both Linux and Apple are niche players in a 
Microsoft-dominated world.

But beyond the desktop, Linux has become the de facto standard of modern 
computing.

If nothing else, being a developer in the 21st century increasingly 
means building client-server systems.  Familiarity with Linux is a 
valuable skillset that enables cloud services for your client software 
regardless which OSes those clients run on.

There's a reason Apple had a booth at the SoCal Linux Expo: hiring. They 
sell Macs snd iPhones to access data and services run on Linux server farms.

And the most popular OS on Microsoft Azure?  Ubuntu, of course.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com