I replied to that thread.

OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.

Not to mention a rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to read analog 12 hour clocks, so the analogy is not that helpful.

This, 100%. The only value of preordering is guaranteeing stock of a physical item that threatens to be out of stock if you were to buy it walk-in. In the modern digital age where downloading tens of gigabytes that take up no space, ship near-instantly on demand, and have theoretically infinite supply, preordering is pointless if the actual game itself is all you care about.