Granted, Android has a larger share in iOS than some markets, but iOS still made it to mass market first. I think it’s fair to say (phone salesmen, correct me if I’m wrong) that normal phone buyers (read: non-geeks/non-apple haters) see Android phones as cheaper alternatives to iPhones, and would still buy an iPhone if money was no object.
Chrome on the other hand, I will give you. Even in an apparently saturated market it’s taken a significant share from IE. And more people using non-IE browsers makes my life as a web developer *so* much nicer 😉

> So do you think the business model might be the problem? The fact that open source doesn’t give you the same “freedom” to run a business?
> Or could it be that people that are succesfull entrepreneurs are not usually open source supporters.

That’s the crux of my question. I remember seeing a talk not long ago about whether there was a “critical mass” (in terms of revenue) for a company who’s product FLOSS. Perhaps that critical mass is too small to interest the kind of investors needed? Seemingly the only way to mitigate that is to get value from something else, which in Google’s case with Android (and I assume to some extent Chrome) is the user’s data, and that’s not ideal from a freedom-lover’s view. I’d much prefer my data to be distributed and encrypted (e.g. Diaspora), but then where’s the value going to come from? Seems like a Catch 44.

> It doesn’t have a huge impact on the consumer market but it’s there and I think it can grow.

Here’s hoping!

So do you think the business model might be the problem? The fact that open source doesn’t give you the same “freedom” to run a business? Or could it be that people that are succesfull entrepreneurs are not usually open source supporters. I know I can see that over here in Romania but it’s not as bad everywhere. For example in Germany there’s a really strong open source culture that goes hand in hand with small businesses and antrepreneurship. It doesn’t have a huge impact on the consumer market but it’s there and I think it can grow.

A fine example of this would be Ogg Vorbis. While it’s technically a superior format, MP3 had wider market adoption first, so it’s become the defacto standard even though it’s arguably not a free format. As a result, Spotify dont support you playing local Oggs, since there’s not enough demand from their user base (cue cries of hypocrisy for me using Spotify, but there’s another example). Therefore, if I want tracks on my Spotify playlist which aren’t on Spotify, I *have* to use MP3.

Of course I accept that there’s plenty of server technologies where free software leads the way, but servers are never going to be “the next big thing” 😉

There are some aspects of the desktop Linux experience that are definitely innovative and have been picked up by Apple and Microsoft. I don’t just mean the Compiz eye-candy, but genuinely useful stuff like multiple virtual desktops, and package managers aka app stores. And as Sorin says, there’s loads of stuff under the hood.

Great episode otherwise, folks, welcome back

Live show was awesome. I love all the little mistakes you guys did, makes it much more real.

Also when you were talking about whether or not “Free Software world actually drives innovation” I hope you were strictly referring to consumer products. I do agree that free software doesn’t dazzle the market much but in other areas it basically took over. There are so many projects out there that are leading the way I don’t think I have time or space here to name them all. Here’s a couple to refresh your memory: Joomla, WordPress, Ruby, Apache, jQuery, KHTML/WebKit and just about everything that is any good in Java (must be hundreds of projects). But these are quite different because they are not “products”. So if the question is “can a community driven product make it on the market” then my answer is NO. There are open source based products on the market but none of them are community driven: Android, WebOS, Chrome, TiVo(runs linux), cloud services(Twitter is written in Python AFAIK) and so on. Firefox looks like an anomaly but it’s not: Firefox is not a product but a movement amd it was always about making the web free, which they succeed.

keep it up,
Sorin.

I didn’t do too well on the quiz, but I was shouting ‘Ubuntu Studio’ at you in the car