Re: Food for thought?

[John Adams]

By the way, I'm not saying I necessarily agree or disagree with the article overall. It made some good points and failed to convince me on others. In other words, I think it's food for thought.

There are also some very interesting points in the discussion threads underneath the article.

Here's one at http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP-0016

So the question is how do we market ourselves? There is no such thing as opensource marketing. You can't get it for free, and the combined financial strength of 100,000 programmers, each with $10, can never match the strength of a single person with a $1,000,000.

(If it's all about marketing, the answer is *not* write new programs.)

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Here's another at http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP-0008

The market has already shown its ability to tolerate security and stability abominations. Tolerance is not preference, however, and there is great opportunity for secure and reliable Open Source solutions that provide the desired functionality . Trouble is that the world works in a free-market mentality. Those darned users seem to think that they're the ones who decide what's important to them. A nice reliable system that doesn't do what they want isn't going to be used.

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And one more at http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP-0018

Broken record does'nt even begin to describe the behaviour of the open source/free sw community in some respects. One of the reasons, I personally believe is that , most open source/free sw have never really held any real jobs that expose you to the pressures and demands of a real corporate environment.

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Anyway, as I said, it's food for thought. Here's a little more: Did anyone else in the terminal room at OSCON notice, as I did, that the machines booted up on Linux were visibly slower and less reliable than those booted up on Windows? What does that tell us about the prospects of Linux on the desktop? And does that tell us anything about open source in general, and Perl in particular?

    John A