[ Thanks to brett
neely for this link. ]
“There have been mammals on Earth for over two hundred million
years. For most of that time, an extremely successful competitor,
the dinosaur, filled all the large, important niches. To survive,
mammals needed to do things differently and a little bit better.
Most importantly, they had to find niches which the dinosauria had
left vacant. This means that they had to diversify. It served the
little furry buggers very well when the poop hit the fan about
sixty-five million years ago. Now, it’s the mammals who have all
the important niches and the bird-brained dinosaurs just flutter
around in the trees.”
“Whenever I ponder Linux’s future, I am inevitably drawn to this
mammalian scenerio as a parallel. Like the Jurassic mammal, Linux
is adaptive, light, and nimble on its toes. It is also positioning
itself to become equally pervasive, as it sinks into one niche
after another. At the same time one wonders about Microsoft’s
Windowsaurus. Locked into a single technological niche, I have
little hope for the big guy if his kind cannot diversify.
Unfortunately I have seen little evidence that Microsoft can
innovate quickly enough to respond to today’s dramatic shifts in
the computer market.”
“This is why I laugh out loud whenever I hear the Chicken
Littles shouting, “Linux is fragmenting! Linux is
fragmenting!” Why? Because, if my analogy holds true,
fragmentation means speciation, and from speciation comes
innovation and survival.”