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by RcouF1uZ4gsC
2594 days ago
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>about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. This led from a model where the user ran their applications (open or closed) on their machines to one which turned the user's machine into a dumb terminal to access the network. This resulted in defacto loss of user privacy and control. In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran locally with some network based syncing? It would have been a smart computer, dumb network world instead of the dumb computer, smart network world we have now. One of the great ironies of computing is how free software in its quest to enable user freedom actually enabled a world with less defacto user freedom than before. |
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Anybody remember the dot-com boom? Sun Microsystem's silly "The Network Is The Computer." ads? No? Linux wasn't even a blip on the radar back then at the enterprise level.
> In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran locally with some network based syncing?
Um, obviously yes? The fact that Sun and the other UNIX server vendors and Oracle other server software vendors were charging various fees for their OS and software, on a per server or per CPU basis, did nothing to put the brakes on the dotcom boom. Network-centric computing took off well before free software became the buzzword of the mid to late '00s.