> By 1993 Sun and other companies had made it impossible to get OS > source. The vendors, who owned the clustering space at the time, cut > their own throats by refusing to release source. People voted with > their feet. Sound familiar? :-)
Yes, but the tune I hear in South Africa's business community today is not greatly concerned with Open Source, it is concerned with continuity. I probably saved my primary client a few million Rands (say a million US dollars) in licence fees and hardware costs in the nearly twenty years I have consulted for them, but they will probably spend it all (they have alredy spent most of it, I believe) to catch up with their peers all of whom run Windows. Why? Because they believe than no matter how large the costs, it is cheaper than to depend on my skills, that after they have effectively refused to allow me to train anyone in their organisation to replace me or even tobecome familiar with the software I have supplied (NetBSD and a hundred or so shell scripts for administration, one or two C programs, a growing base of Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL applications), a "saving" I am not including in my estimate. So they believe that Windows will "liberate" them from this dependency and I have no arguments to save them from themselves. In fact, any arguments I have would seem to be in the opposite direction. I could have run at least some of their needs on Plan 9: just Fossil and Venti would have provided them with a backup facility that much more closely matches their operation. But they are not willing to pay the cost of research nor the risk of failure, so they have to do without. Thing is, they would not understand the difference and therefore would still want to migrate to what they like to call "industry standard". Apropos of Plan 9, the matter is that my client, like most "users", are terrified of being different. They believe in the comfort of "convention". Plan 9 isn't for them, not yet, possibly not ever. But some people buy Ferraris even though there are very few mechanics that can look after them. They know that what they want doesn't come cheaply and are willing to pay for it. I would far rather Plan 9 presented itself as the Ferrari of operating systems (after all, it's the F40 that has a piece of steel cord in a nylon pipe to open the door from the inside, isn't it?) than that it aimed itself at my client's staff whose ignorance concerning computing is frightening. Let them have Windows, if that's what they want. And if Linux (specially UBUNTU) is capable of filling the middle-class slot, magnificent, too. But to see where computing could be, you have to look at the operating systems that didn't become mundane: Plan 9 first, QNX, BeOS, no doubt some others. ++L PS: The Ferrari analogy is new to me. But I think its aptness is real.
