[Ilugc] Popularity of Windows

[Sivasankar Chander]

> 
>  My opinion is linux can become popular only with sufficient
> push from corporates. Open-source developers contribution is
> insufficient. The reasons are as follows.

  You may not be aware of the recent statistics from Andrew
Morton that show that over 95% of the patches to the kernel
now come from Open-source developers who are employed specifically
for that purpose by large corporates like IBM, Intel, HP, etc.
In other words, Linux is already being corporatized, like it or not.
Various other userland pieces also have similar corporate backing,
like gcc (RedHat), netfilter/iptables (Watchguard), and so on.

  Your notion that open-source volunteers are unpaid volunteers,
hackers, hobbyists or students in Universities was true in the
early stages of the GNU/Linux movement, but is no longer that
cut and dried.

>   End-users want information-hiding, open source developers are
> against it. For example, Eric Raymond, in his book on hackers
> culture and unix elaborates why hackers are not comfortable with
> Object-Oriented approach.

  Again too simplistic - Some end-users want information hiding,
some what transparency. In particular, sysadmins and IT departments
generally prefer the latter, since it simplifies backup, migration
and general system maintenance.

  The notion that hackers are uncomfortable with OO methodology is
simplistic - this entire ecosystem of a billion+ lines of code could
not have been written without a structure. Whether you want
to call it OO or structured programming or modularity or whatever 
IT buzzword is currently in vogue is upto you, but most open source
users and developers don't care. All that matters is that the code
is correct; easy to read, maintain and extend; and interoperates
well (all of this applies to good FLOSS code, but rarely to
proprietary code).

-Siva