Ubuntu 8.04 and KDE

[Derek Broughton]

D. Michael McIntyre wrote:

> On Sunday 30 December 2007, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> But that means that it's always to our
>> advantage to have development occuring on as many fronts as possible. --
> 
> Talking about evolution, and organic stuff, I started thinking about
> polarizing software pairs all the way back to before the DOS days.  It's
> nothing new.  Every niche has at least two competitors in the arena; each
> with its own rabid fan base.  Until Microsoft buys one of them, and kills
> it.

That's not really fair to MS - they didn't invent the practice in the
computer world.  IBM was doing it in the '60s & '70s until anti-monopoly
regulations stopped them.  Computer Associates has always done it in the
mainframe software world.  Outside computing, AT&T and Standard Oil got
stopped by the same legislation that caught IBM.
> 
> Their practice is like forced inbreeding.  

Yes, good analogy.

> We have the opposite here, with interbreeding writ large.  I guess you can
> argue we take it too far in the other direction though.  When you have
> gnomes bred with kdedids in 42 different flavors, it can start to look
> like one of Mephisto's five-assed monkeys.

Sure, but - still like biology - most of those hybridizations are going to
be infertile :-)
-- 
derek