Ahh yes... the good ole chicken and egg... The way I see it, things like this are going to keep hapening, it's almost too late for propritary software on linux.
Because propritary software vendors would not bring their products to linux citing "lack of customers", open source developers stepped up and picked up the slack. Now we have several high quality products like, firefox, k3b, kde, gimp, gnome, apache, xine, totem, openoffice, gaim... that have a hold on their respective markets. Now it will be exteremely difficult for propritary software vendors to peddle their wares unless they are top notch or they are coming into an area that is lacking.
Opera is an exception here, as they have been around for a while on linux with a fairly good product, of course now they are loosing marketshare to firefox...
People are no longer looking for photoshop, office, powerdvd, and such programs on linux, now they want their open source equivlants to add that one extra feature that will make the package complete.
The largest area not already controlled by open source software is games. Commerical games still have some time to take over the linux market, but with time open source games will fill this niche as well...
I guess we are still kind of seeing the chicken and egg thing, companies don't want to invest the resources it takes to get a top notch linux version because it will not pay out in end, but what they have yet to realize is, if they don't enter the market now, they may never get the chance to (maybe they do realize it and I am just way off).
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Chicken and Egg
Posted by: Matthew on April 05, 2005 10:08 PMBecause propritary software vendors would not bring their products to linux citing "lack of customers", open source developers stepped up and picked up the slack. Now we have several high quality products like, firefox, k3b, kde, gimp, gnome, apache, xine, totem, openoffice, gaim... that have a hold on their respective markets. Now it will be exteremely difficult for propritary software vendors to peddle their wares unless they are top notch or they are coming into an area that is lacking.
Opera is an exception here, as they have been around for a while on linux with a fairly good product, of course now they are loosing marketshare to firefox...
People are no longer looking for photoshop, office, powerdvd, and such programs on linux, now they want their open source equivlants to add that one extra feature that will make the package complete.
The largest area not already controlled by open source software is games. Commerical games still have some time to take over the linux market, but with time open source games will fill this niche as well...
I guess we are still kind of seeing the chicken and egg thing, companies don't want to invest the resources it takes to get a top notch linux version because it will not pay out in end, but what they have yet to realize is, if they don't enter the market now, they may never get the chance to (maybe they do realize it and I am just way off).
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