> can someone remind me when Free software came down to popularity and > recognition? > > as far as i'm concerned, it's all about choice and the ability to move to the > vendor that serves your needs. and even if that wasn't a basic tenet of open > source, the market is still far too young to declare a winner already, no?
I'd like an email package for two installs happening simultaneously. When I said I run Gentoo, they told me they'd be happy to support it if I fdisk, and install Red Hat. They worded it different, but that's what they meant. They don't have an install for Gentoo, and frankly, I can't even fake it, since they require different versions of Glibc, GCC, etc (Boy...lots of acronyms ending in c) than what this machine is set up with. I understand what you're saying, and I agree, but it doesn't work like that in real world homogenous environments. Red Hat is the biggest Distro, and therefore, developers targeting a corporate audience will develop for RH. Right or wrong doesn't matter. Debian probably has a bigger install base, but still, Red Hat is the target. Here's my choices for email. Run a RH server, and install Samsung Contact, or run a legacy Windows server and run another legacy product, Exchange. NDS, Domino, etc. It doesn't matter. Big closed source apps will require a particular distro. The truth is that sometimes we need to run closed source code. And as much as Linux is the buzzword, RH is the distro that people support, again, with Suse a close second. In a while, once everything is open source, then it won't be a problem, but for now, there are limits to what can be accomplished with what distro. We use what works. For now, that will mean depending on a particular distro. Further, RH is splashed in front of the same audience as MS. PHBs sign the paychecks, so THEY need to buy into the idea of using a given type of software. It's hell to try to get approval to buy pizza for the Tridge, similarly, I won't even bother asking to buy a thong to support KDE. If KDE asked for $10000 for license fees, meaning the paper the GNU license was printed on, I could get that approved, but a thong or a t-shirt? Probably not. This is the problem with open source and GNU. I'm not too sure what you do for money, but KDE won't be paying your bills, I suspect. And that's a shame. I like that Open Source is free. I like having the option to not pay for it. But when I install it for a company, and they know that they'll make several million (or billion) dollars because of it they have no problem contributing. But how do they do it so that it can pass an audit? I don't know how, but developers need to find a way to make something useful and sell it for a price that is legitimate. Sell a subscription to your support newsgroups. You can leave them free as well. But support subscription is something I can justify a corporate expense for. Non-charitable donations are not. Red Hat has done that. I can buy a copy of software from them. They get my cash, and they grow. Other than consulting fees, I'm not too sure how I can even pay Gentoo for the software I'm running of theirs. Never mind BIND, or something like that. Like 'em or hate 'em, RH does contribute back to the OSS community even if it's just by paying a salary for someone writing code. Maybe I don't "get" OSS. But frankly, if I want to pay you for something, even if you're not asking, I'd like to know how, and I'd like to be able to. But I need to have something that I'm buying. Corporations have no problem paying for things they use, not big ones anyway. Paying for something would allow developers to work full time at developing, instead of struggling to find work somewhere else and improving Linux in their spare time. I get asked all the time, how much will it cost to run Linux. I can't answer 2 kde Thongs, and pizza for Canberra's User Group. Actually, Samba is a great example. They finally said listen, rather than Pizza, we actually do need some cash to host our site, and send people to conferences. That notice was up for less than a month before IBM said "done, go back to coding, and stop worrying about money. We can provide that." We get good value out of these products. I'd like to offer to help finance them. That way, the need for closed source software, running on Red Hat only will dimish, because OSS replacements can be written and thereby the need to have a given distro is gone. Kev.
