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>last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years. //

Like other's said, Android. Along similar lines - and sometimes called "open source" - there's Khan Academy.

Makerbot (! http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57520633-1/pulling-back-... and RaspberryPi are open[ish] projects but perhaps still too geek to be public interest.

Maybe "Course Builder" is public enough, or perhaps too restricted to educational space: http://www.itproportal.com/2012/09/13/open-source-education-....

Perhaps someone could answer "yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some [closed source] software project?" to give us an idea about what is meant.

Do the "general public" get excited about software as opposed to full products.

Obviously Linux on the desktop will never happen for mainstream people, but I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud).

As for belief that technology can make society a better place, that was never universual on /. (or the YRO section wouldn't exist) and I for one absolutely still believe it.

In many ways hn is a much more grown up version of /. we recognize that communism isn't a workable philosophy, that money can be pretty sweet and there is nothing wrong with making them so long that you provide real value for it.

Oh, and that AB tests are like printing money, once you have users.

But in the end, and even considering that my /. user id is much more than a few digits, I am pretty happy that it exist. The teenage me would not have been so into tech if it hadn't been for /.

So a happy birthday from me.

>I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud).

How does replacing the Windows PC with an iPad(70% of tablets sold are iPads) lead to a better future? If anything, it makes it a lot worse, locked down single hardware vendor, 30% cut of app price, 30% cut of in-app purchases etc.

This reflects the problem with many on Slashdot and even HN to some extent, the unhealthy fixation on beating MS (see Ubuntu bug #1) rather than promoting better and open software. MS is always seen dying by the next quarter from the 15 years that Slashdot has been in existence.

The amount of misinformation,knee jerk FUD, slanted coverage and story selection just gets annoying and repulsive after a while. For a small example see the summary and comments on this story from 2009 about Windows 7.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-dr...

The lesser said about the DRM FUD spread about Windows Vista, the better. And I see much of the same on HN too, articles not negative about Windows 8 are flagged off the front page quickly even if they ever reach it and all we ever seem to see are the negative ones.

This kind of insularity causes broadminded folks to leave the site(s) and makes the problem worse with the echo chamber.

Tablets may be 70% iPads now, but the future isn't a single, locked down platform.

The future is the web. And no single company can ever have a monopoly that is strong enough to stand against the combined work of humanity.

You are too narrowly focused on the app store. As Apple fucks things up more and more (see e.g maps, which Jobs would never have allowed) and with the new Nexus 7 coming out the future of computability is only going to go one way -- HTML5 will become more and more powerful, Javascript interpretators is going to become better, faster and leaner, and Android Tablets are going to be better and better.

But even if we assume Apple is always going to reign supreme for all eternity (and honestly, has any company ever done that?), they allow you to install any 'app' of the internet. It is available on the little icon next to the browser bar and you can develop these apps on a windows PC, if you want. No license, no control, more freedom than you ever had with MS and much easier to get started too.

> ..they allow you to install any 'app' of the internet. It is available on the little icon next to the browser bar

Apple's already dragging its feet on things like HTML5. Jobs' memo about deprecating Flash for HTML5 was 2.5 years ago, and we still see major issues with HTML5 that are easy in Flash.

Not to mention using patents to put the kibosh on very important things like touch events.

http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/12/is-apple-using-patents-to-h...

http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/12/09/apple-w3c

> Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia?

Android?

I think Android is the "exciting" open source project at the moment.