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Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

Disruptive innovation -- innovations that render entire industries obsolete, challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc. I have also been to plenty of European locales -- in France, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Norway -- and I have seen and met with plenty of people doing innovative work, but not much in the way of disruptive innovation.

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In the energy sector alone:

The first full scale fusion reactor: https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines

Europe is striving to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

Both of those projects/initiatives “render entire industries obsolete” and “challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc.”

So your examples are government projects that have yet to be completed? Also I fail to see how either of your examples challenges any cultural norms, and while a successful fusion reactor would render an entire industry obsolete, how does a mandate to be climate neutral do so (obsolete does not mean "we changed the law so that you are not allowed to use this technology anymore")? I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished (assuming that the American efforts to deploy practical fusion power are not finished first).

Well, would you consider the Internet to be disruptive? Guess what; that was a government project.

Libertarian capitalism isn't the only source of disruptive innovation. I'd even go so far and say that without government intervention, disruptive innovation cannot be created. In your own example; by forcing technology to be carbon neutral, the EU forces companies to innovate out of well trodden paths and to consider new paradigms that otherwise would be worth cost. LED light technology wouldn't be where it is today without governments forcing out incandescent light bulbs.

I did not say government projects do not count, I said government projects yet to be completed do not count, because incomplete projects have not disrupted anything. The fact is that you can only identify disruptive innovations post facto -- plenty of inventions that were supposedly going to be disruptive wound up being flops that have been mostly forgotten (easy example: the zeppelin).

As I said, "I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished..."

Edit: To your other point about the EU forcing companies to innovate, the reality is that innovation cannot always be forced. The effort could simply fail to achieve its goals, or it may turn out that the technology needed to achieve those goals is not economically viable, etc. It is also possible that the innovation will not actually be disruptive, it may wind up augmenting existing industries and allowing those industries to grow by balancing their carbon emissions with e.g. some kind of carbon capture (powered by existing renewable technologies, avoiding the need for things like base load by being opportunistic with carbon capture), never actually challenging the status quo or enabling anything that would be unthinkable today.

Ever heard of Linux? Consider it disruptive? Did you know it was invented in Europe?

Actually, the Linux kernel is from Europe, it is in no way disruptive (it never challenged the status quo), and GNU software that is typically used with Linux came from the USA and is also in no way disruptive.

The Linux Kernel had many, many, competitors when it came out.

It was incredibly disruptive, and continues to be so where 90% of servers runs off of it and almost all embedded systems use it.

Are you just trying to troll, or are you trying to rewrite history?

That is not what "disruptive" means. Linux is popular, but it did not create any of the markets where it is used. Linux did not break any business models (the GPL might have, but that license is not specific to Linux, nor is Linux specific to the GPL, nor did the GPL come out of Europe). Linux did not change how we use computers in any fundamental way. I am not even sure what "innovation" the Linux kernel represents -- what about the Linux kernel, other than how it was licensed, was game changing? What is fundamentally different about Linux (specifically Linux) compared to other kernels?

I'm not sure disruptive is best attributed as to only mean market creation. Even the basic definition of the term doesn't suggest the construction of something new, but rather to undermine an existing system. And in that sense, I'd say the linux kernel did help dissolve the previous era of Unix-as-a-product market, and the industry that ran on that model (solarix, aix, hp, etc).

And while linux itself did not construct the open source market, linux + GNU did together strongly reroute the software (syadmin, dev) market towards open source models -- which of course screwed with all tooling development companies dramatically, creating the awkward divergent setup of SaaS w/ subscription vs Enterprise on-prem companies we have today (on-prem for non-enterprise mostly getting covered by OS) -- and that divergence is a pretty clear indicator that some kind of disruption occurred

It sounds like you agree with what I said: the GPL disrupted the market. Linux did not have anything to do with that and GNU was already making waves before Linux came along, and the effort to release BSD under an open source license was already underway in the late 80s. The shift you described would almost certainly have happened if Linux had never been written.

Linux is the one that won. I don’t see how things would be much different if some BSD version or another Unix won out for server market share.

I assume disruptive means the world would be different without the product.

Similarly, Git not being around wouldn’t change much practically speaking. For all we know, Git won because of Linus. Otherwise other version control were and are similar enough. Mercurial is a prime example for the nascent time period.

OTOH, GitHub changed things. Moved from Sourceforge and in some cases, some of the mailing lists/personally hosted source codes + being part of the reason some open source stopped using some of the popular but in my opinion, kitschy and lackluster bug trackers. GitHub also inspired the copy cat Gitlab project which is now itself a unicorn worth $2B or so. Yes I know Gitlab has differentiators before and even more now. It being very heavily inspired if not lifting from GitHub for parts of it is a point of GitHub’s influence, not a critique of Gitlab.

It isn’t as certain that we would have one such dominant platform like GitHub and the new runner up and alternative of Gitlab if GitHub didn’t exist.

Linux kernel powers Android making it the most used OS kernel in the world: “Android is more popular than Windows globally; it has battled Windows for the most-used rank with them switching sides, but currently has 15% more use” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... – Ergo, disruptive.

I think you are confusing "popular" with "disruptive." Linux is popular, but it did not open a new market or revolutionize an existing one. If Linux had not been written we would have used a different kernel in smart phones, likewise with our servers, our desktops, our laptops, and everything else Linux runs on.

We are on the same page here it seems. This isn’t the only case of this issue, but mixing popularity with disruption is a prime example. Another common one is the most popular product is the best because otherwise it wouldn’t be the most popular. Android and iOS vs webOS (I am incredibly bias in my love for it) or Windows Phone 7.

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