"I have a copy of phpnuke/moodle/wordpress running in my bedroom" != server.

And yes, active directory is a big reason enterprises are Windows focused.

It's 20-fucking-14 and the Unix world still doesn't have an out of the box working directory service. No, i don't want to create my own LDAP schema and fuck with kerberos and PAM.

No, NIS+ is not a replacement.

No... ISA was a pretty shitty bus even in it's day. Compare to Zorro in the Amiga, which was fully plug and play from the outset.

Yes, technical merit is important, but it is not the most important factor for most software

In every case you mention, I think you'll find the deciding factor was support. DOS won because it ran on any shitty generic PC clone. Windows won because of software support. Office won due to platform support for integration with other MS products. X86 won due to software support. ISA won due to industry support from multiple vendors. DirectX "won" (well, not really OpenGL is still alive and well for non-windows platforms and killing it in mobile with ES) due to MS platform and developer support.

Something to note for those in the Linux community who decide to flame people who are just trying to get their shit to work. Support will make or break your product, especially for business. It can have the shiniest bells and most aurally seductive whistles known to man, but if Bob at Initech can't call on someone when it breaks and actually get help, rather than insults, then it will not fly.

Even worse when the developers are actively hostile to particular classes of user (looking at you, Firefox).

And this kids, is why Linux will never enjoy significant market share on end user devices.

And yes, I'm sure someone will mention Android. Yeah sure, it's Linux. Just keep telling yourself that.

Nothing, unless they want people to actually contribute and spread the word. 1 user who gets screwed by an update = a heap of people told about how linux still isn't ready for prime time, and the support forums are full of assholes.

Does wonders for enticing companies to provide platform support.

Modded troll, but it's pretty true, albeit derogatory towards the second half. In the above time-frame, I've seen nowhere near as much breakage in FreeBSD. FreeBSD even ship compatibility shims in the ports system to enable older applications to work. Microsoft has managed compatibility far better, even apple has done a far better job, and they're probably the most likely vendor to break user-space apps out of the lot.

The above poster also forgot the ipfwadm/ipchains/iptables/nftables debacle - sure, FreeBSD has multiple firewalls but they're all supported and not deprecated from release to release.

OGG was too late. You don't just need to be open, you need to be solving problems that weren't solved years ago. MP3 was good enough. There are better replacements, but the hardware support hit the ground way before ogg or any of the alternatives were ready. People ripped all their stuff to mp3 way before the alternatives were ready.

The Vorbis/Vp8 guys don't need to be competing with h.264. That ship sailed years ago. They need to be beating the next generation of codec.

Fact: If you do not allow commercial use of the code, your codec will fail. Open software no one uses that doesn't work with anything open software that can also be used commercially.

If you don't trust Cisco you better get off the internet. Seriously, if you're worried about this, a binary blob running in your web browser is the least of your problems. There's a very good chance that the network hardware at your ISP is Cisco. If it's not, it will likely be Juniper.

so mozilla gave up, to make the web a better place?

Fixed.

video tag. for the IE8 users, give them alt text.

If the open source world releases something (unencumbered with the GPL - i.e., BSD licensed) with encoding and decoding tools that actually works as well or better than the closed alternative, in a timely manner then I'm sure people will use it.

It will never happen. Get used to it. There is far, far less complex stuff in the free desktop that has been broken for the past 20 years and still not fixed.

If you think CIsco need to backdoor your browser to own all your shit, you are tragically naive.

Why the fuck would they bother, when they can just do that to all of the backbone routers you use?

"It boots" does not necessarily constitute success. You really need a test environment. There's no real getting around it.