Do you consider Windows a consumer software or not? I see pretty much a big need of support needed for that one. Just look at all the forums dedicated to solving its shortcomings.
Hmm. Should Rovio sell Angry Birds support contracts?
Windows occupies a rather unique market position of ubiquity and scale, and its still debatable whether such a thing would be viable given the R&D costs in producing a modern desktop OS, mobile OS, programming languages and runtimes, Metro, etc.
I'm not a Windows expert, but it's pretty undeniable that Apple and MS pour bucket loads of cash into their respective platforms. Linux, on the desktop, has barely caught up to the last decade's state of the art, and in many places (such as graphics drivers), it relies on closed-source software.
Underneath it all is closed source hardware (like those graphics chipsets and proprietary processor cores). Nobody tends to complain about that, since spending millions on hardware development is out of reach. Making use of software source code is equally out of reach to nearly all users: thus, they just don't care.
>its still debatable whether such a thing would be viable given the R&D costs
in producing a modern desktop OS, mobile OS, programming languages and
runtimes, Metro, etc.
Bullshit. The estimated cost to redevelop the Linux kernel in a proprietary
environment exceeds 600 million USD, and has probably even reached the billion
USD mark by now.[1]. It's perfectly possible.
The only reason Windows is still so entrenched on the market are shady monopolist
tactics, intentional lock-in practices and closed, shitty formats such as the
Office pseudo-standard. In other words, the very things RMS warned about and which
the free software community is fighting against.
>Linux, on the desktop, has barely caught up to the last decade's state of
the art, and in many places (such as graphics drivers), it relies on
closed-source software.
Your ramblings are so dishonest it's cringe-worthy. GNU/Linux is perfectly viable
on the desktop. The greatest hurdle it faces is exactly the kind of FUD that
you are spreading.
As for the drivers: yes, and this is a problem. The evil of proprietary hardware
and closed specs is something that needs to go the way of the dodo, too, and
it needs to do so fast. We could have drivers vastly exceeding anything
proprietary if the specs for nVidia or ATI/AMD cards would be accessible. For
the record, the best graphic drivers available for GNU/Linux are for the Intel
Graphic chips, and they are perfectly free.
You sell software to uninformed users. I can see the difference.