Common in Canada, where they were invented. They're square head. Nearly impossible to strip, will stay on your driver with no support at almost any angle.
Not well known in the US because of a decision Ford made nearly 100 years ago to not pay Robertson the price he was asking.
Thus, to this day, any product that comes with screws is likely to come with Phillip's head, and all of its terrible downsides (I keep a supply of Robertson heads so that I never have to deal with Phillips' inherent shittyness).
Bad legacy decision making and inertia conspire to aggravate generations, long after the original thinking behind those decisions stopped making sense. The parallels to PHP are pretty clear.
Robertson screws are nearly impossible to strip? Since when? They're just as easy to strip as Phillips screws. I've done it plenty of times. It's not fun seeing a round slot where a square slot used to be, let me tell you.
I, on the other hand, am struggling to think of the number of times that Phillips screws have aggravated me that much. Maybe my needs are not as complex as yours. Perhaps there is a PHP parallel there, too.
Wikipedia paints a different picture. It indicates that Robertson didn't name too high a price for the license, but that he refused to license at all. Maybe you can cite where you heard otherwise so Wiki can be corrected? In any case, the problem of licensing being the cause of holding back superior technologies is just another example of why patents should be abolished.
Common in Canada, where they were invented. They're square head. Nearly impossible to strip, will stay on your driver with no support at almost any angle.
Not well known in the US because of a decision Ford made nearly 100 years ago to not pay Robertson the price he was asking.
Thus, to this day, any product that comes with screws is likely to come with Phillip's head, and all of its terrible downsides (I keep a supply of Robertson heads so that I never have to deal with Phillips' inherent shittyness).
Bad legacy decision making and inertia conspire to aggravate generations, long after the original thinking behind those decisions stopped making sense. The parallels to PHP are pretty clear.