The thing to remember is, all 'our' junk
is better at community-building, because it's so different. Everything else (where the 'everything else' comes down to Be and QNX?) has been 'close enough' to an existing solution (Mac, Win, Amiga, *NIX) that even those interested tended to fall back on 'established' platforms. (Linux, in retrospect, got big mostly because of the free and Free aspects, so it's something of a special case.)
So, frankly, we (in the Amiga scene) are better at being a little "Big Thing" than most else because there's nowhere we'd rather be. Even if, technically, something like Be should've been "better" than anything else, or QNX should've carved a bigger niche by now. The combination of hardware you can point at and software of its own lineage creates a tangible 'platform' that some people can manage to get real excited about. (Of course, anyone who's managed to find a way to get 'work' done with existing solutions may question what the fuss is about.)
So we have this ability to attract the nuts that
just might keep a platform alive (paying early-adopter prices, keeping developers fed, etc), and that puts us on par with Apple in terms of maintaining "thing"-ness.
Remember, besides *NIX and Microsoft,
nobody else is left.---
Note that being a '
thing' doesn't have to imply anything's any good; it just means the 'community' has enough staying power to keep rolling until things are '
good enough.'
