Jim Wilson writes: > Yes, originally, that's correct. Something to do with AT&T and a > printer driver, I think. I was just speaking of Bill...since back > in those days the profile for Stallman's project was lower > too. That is to mean lower than after the mid eighties, when > desktop/workstation unix emerged, not to mention later with linux. > The "and others" are significant. If it wasn't for Bill, linux > probably would not be where it is today.
Maybe, but I'd give the two Andys more credit than Bill. In the early 90's, Andy Tannenbaum was uncooperative enough that Linus decided to fork Linux rather than providing i386 patches to Linux (I was on the Minix list at the time); by the late 90's, Andy Grove's Intel made cheap desktop hardware powerful enough to provide a reasonable alternative to painfully overpriced servers from Sun, IBM, and (once upon a time) DEC. Strife with Microsoft gets Linux its press, but they're not really in competition -- you'd have to be nuts to try to build something like Google using WinNT or Win2K (heck, even Microsoft knows not to use Windows for HotMail), and you'd have to be almost as crazy to try to convince a big company to switch to Linux on the desktop. Microsoft may be lusting after the server market with its bigger margins, but they're not smart enough to get much of it above the workgroup level; Linux advocates may be lusting after the desktop with its high visibility and coolness factor, but it's probably too late to grab it, even if they weren't all bogged down into the KDE vs. Gnome wars. It's Sun and IBM that Linux is hurting, much more effectively than Microsoft ever could; IBM is trying an if-we-can't-beat-them-join-them campaign, but that doesn't change the fact that cheap Intel hardware running Linux in a cluster beats the stuffing out of any big iron from Sun or IBM by a couple of orders of magnitude (both in cost and performance). Google is a famous public example of this fact, but there are several private examples I've been involved with that are even more dramatic. It does Fortune 50 companies no good to make public noise about how important Linux is to their operations (they still need goodwill from the commercial vendors), but trust me, it's mission critical to at least one I've been involved with, and it's not Microsoft who's losing the sales. All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
