OSNews: The Future of Linux is Proprietary

“Linux can be made profitable and it can be made so without
going the enterprise route or by relying on the traditional
services an support model–as long as technology companies are
willing to sell the operating system on their own highly optimized
and performance enhanced proprietary hardware…

“Consider for the moment, the example set by Apple. True their
Operating System is a proprietary fork of BSD and the MACH kernel,
and not Linux, but consider the untold ramifications of their
example purely from their position as a POSIX compliant *nix-like
Operating System. I highly doubt that in the beginning Apple
anticipated the wellspring of open-source and ‘free’ applications
that have since flooded the Macintosh platform thanks to Apple’s OS
X. The head CEOs may have expected a few universities to port their
favorite *nix utilities here and there, may even have anticipated
that a few oddball *BSD loyalists would port over a few text
editors or some disk utilities; certainly they likely imagined any
such port to be command line only. The current reality today with
the Macintosh being able to run just about any *BSD’Linux’
applications you could name (and most of these as GUI applications
that run seamlessly blended into the background with Apple’s native
applications) would likely have floored them had they known…”

Complete
Story