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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

> [...] someone with serious name recognition like Linus Torvalds starts to lead that kind of effort [...]

Linus is a kernel hacker, and already busy tending to his own project.

"GNU/Linux" is effectively a committee of communities, with sometimes conflicting goals. It took Canonical and Valve to put things into shape on the desktop, and that's mostly because desktop was becoming less relevant.

I see two ways for things to change here:

- A massive, for-profit corporation, someone willing and able to challenge Google and Apple on an even ground, is hell-bent on making a Linux-based phone (Microsoft failed even after acquiring Nokia);

- Another platform shift happens, making smartphones irrelevant in comparison (think: when smartphones displaced desktops).

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Microsoft was stupid, in EU they were slowly reaching 10% when they decided to kill WP, it was getting momentum as the alternative for those that didn't want Android and weren't going to spend Apple money for a phone device.

And actually the development experience was much better than Android to this day.

But that isn't coming back, especially after they killed all developer good will on Windows OS for everyone that invested into WinRT as platform.

How much of that 10% was them basically paying OEM's and consumers to use Windows, which is what the Nokia deal amounted to? It wasn't sustainable.

Whatever benefit we'd have from a Windows Phone today, it's laughable to think that Microsoft wouldn't be doubling down on exactly the sort of locked-down devices Apple (and now Google) have or are moving towards.

Their only vaguely "open" platform (Windows) is like that because of legacy compatibility and customers, but for anything new Microsoft always wanted to sell you an Xbox that could make phonecalls. Try writing and deploying an app on that without a developer account.

I really would like to have been payed to use Windows phones, especially as former Nokia employee.

I was in Espoo, the week following the burning platforms memo.

However it represented a third option, to a percentage no Linux phone distribution has ever achieved since Open Moko.

Maybe Maemo could have been it, had not been for Nokia's board decision to bring in Elop.

    > I really would like to have been payed
    > to use Windows phones

I meant paid in the indirect sense of being the beneficiary of a loss leader for Microsoft.

I.e. I'm poking holes in your (somewhat unstated) premise that they'd already reached around 10% of marketshare, and could have just organically grown from there. As reporting at the time shows[1] the average selling price of these phones was €72.4.

So Microsoft (Nokia, but we all know who was really running/paying for the show) were spending a lot of money to buy themselves into the market, and just barely holding on to double digit market share for a bit there by subsidizing entry level phones.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/01/microsoft...

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