Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Free software does have its heroes, Richard Stallman foremost, followed by Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, Ian Murdock, Andrew Tridgell etc. But given the loose-knit nature of the whole FOSS ecosystem, no one figure has ever come to dominate the scene.
Even in the case of big FOSS companies like Red Hat, no individual has come to dominate things to the extent that if he/she were to move on, panic would set in. When Cox left the company recently to join IBM for technical reasons, there was no big brouhaha, even though he is, arguably, one of the top Linux developers.
There are people in the FOSS sphere like Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth who have gained quite a following. But anybody who knows anything about FOSS, is fully aware of what he has actually done and the extent to which others have contributed to the success of Ubuntu.
It is not always technically competent individuals who gain respect and come to speak for a technology or a branch of computing. There are rare instances of people like Bruce Schneier who are top of their trade technically and also gain a media profile.
What is much more common is that the man/woman who can project himself/herself comes to be identified with a product or a brand. The best instance that comes to mind is that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, easily less technically talented than the painfully shy Paul Allen, the other co-founder. Yet Gates is often referred to as the lone founder. Few people remember Allen.
FOSS has no people like Jobs. But then one doubts that such people are needed - the way Linux and other free software spreads in the community and in business has much more to do with acceptance rather than marketing.
The masses rarely buy a product because it is technically superior - there are dozens of other reasons. Jobs, therefore, serves a purpose in the corporate world of Apple and proprietary software; the downside is that when one becomes something of a cult figure, then often the cult itself suffers when one moves on.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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