[ocaml-biz] defining commercial success

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Goerzen wrote:
>
> I've had this argument with you before on freeciv-dev, and
> want to just
> reiterate this here: in my book, a language doesn't succeed or fail
> based on how well it does in "the marketplace".
>
> If we went by that, we'd conclude that Linux is a failure,

It's so obvious to me that Linux is a commercial success, that I
completely forgot to mention it in my various rebuttals.  Linux utterly
fails to support your premise, such as it is.  Unless your premise is
that if something is to succeed, it must succeed the moment it is
invented, and a 5 year ramp-up is not allowed.  I cut teeth on Linux
kernel 0.99something back in 1993.  Linux had been extant for about 1
year, IIRC.  By 1997 it was commercially proven, it had displaced *many*
expensive UNIX boxes.

Lest these ramblings be seen as gratuitous debate, the points to extract
and abstract are:

- we can and should define 'commercial success'
- we can recognize failure in other languages
- we can learn from their history (or be doomed to repeat it)

Linux succeeded in large part because of the GNU tools, which comprised
80% of the system and had been around for some time.  So, you can see
the rampup as longer than 5 years in some respects if you like.
Equally, you can also see that Linux did something that GNU and BSD Unix
failed to do.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur