Linux support could cost 50% more time for support, while the market is <10%.
Except Linux users are traditionally self-reliant, so the actual support cost is likely closer to 0%. So essentially, Linux is a license to print money. Yay!
No, it isn't, because the GNU/Linux world is all about FREE software - and I'm still betting on that for most of its users the 'free as in beer' part is more important than the 'free as in speech' story.
Red Hat, Novell, O'Reilly and maybe IBM are still the only ones who make money in the Linux market - and not with software, but with services around the software. Which is kind of interesting, because it somehow invalidates your statement: Obviously, at least enterprise-level Linux users need (and pay for) support.
There is one significant difference between a mobile phone and GNU/Linux. Only one of them is a viable development platform. The iPhone, as fancy as it is, with it's full size virtual keyboard thingy, would still be utterly horrible to develop ON
Well, whoever wants to develop for the iPhone has to do it on a Mac anyway -- neither Xcode nor the SDK run on any other platform. Development for mobile phones is --always-- cross platform development.
Well, when I think about the entire 'BlitzMax for mobile phones' story in bright daylight (as we have it here right now), I think Dark Half is absolutely right:
MARK IS WAY TOO BUSY TO EVEN CONSIDER IT.
The really funny thing about BRL is that it would seem it has the average of .8 developers on staff.
It's just not gonna happen. Unless maybe somebody buys the company or at least the full rights to the BlitzMax product. And that's also not going to happen.
This quote from OnStartups.com (taken from an article about C# and Python) unfortunately also applies to niche languages like the ones we all like so much:
Lesson 2: Closed languages owned by a single company without the resources to build out an ecosystem can and do fail eventually. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes completely. (But, open source is a different ball game.)
http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/129/Python-vs-C-Understanding-Personal-Bias.aspx
I don't know about you guys, but I'm having some kind of Déja vu here. The same discussions keep popping up very frequently on this board, the BRL folks don't comment on anything and the situation in general just doesn't change.
It's not very reassuring, and it reminds of a language manufacturer that I've worked for a couple of years ago which was a larger company than BRL. The company was dying a slow death because of the very same non-information policy, wrong development focus and because the people in charge did not care for the demands of their customers in the first place but were only interested in, well, crap that they cared for themselves.
After they went bankrupt, they launched another company which, of course, also went bankrupt after a short while. Then they started another incarnation of the same company with the same product - which might survive, not because they changed their attitude and course, but because there are only four of them left and their customer base might still be large enough to keep them afloat.
It looks as if BRL found a similar niche for themselves - one that allows them to stay in business and make a living and, most importantly, work exclusively on the things that interest them. This is great for BRL and I congratulate them. Just don't expect them to all of a sudden become customer-oriented.