Yes. Linux was created on Linus's spare time. If it weren't for the PAID contributions of SuSE, IBM, Novell, and Redhat Linux wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today. Joe I.T. guy in Podunk,USA (or Andrew Baudouin in Baton Rouge, LA) with a wife and kids has no time to go home from his VB.Net job and start hacking away on Linux.
I had a short-term open source job once locally, and it paid a measly $8.00 per hour. Can you buy a house and support a family on that? I applied for a Linux networking admin job once locally, never even got an interview. I also saw a PHP job in the paper advertised for $8 an hour. Those THREE JOBS are the only ones even remotely related to open-source technologies that I have seen advertised in the Baton Rouge paper (disclaimer, only was looking between 8/2001 and 8/2003, have been employed since then) Companies don't usually pay for custom software to be created and then allow it to be released into the public domain. In my experience, people are deathly afraid of computers and have no idea what to do when problem X occurs with their favorite software program (that has nothing to do with Windows' bugs, spyware or instability). They have no interest in learning how to fix it, they just want it fixed ASAP. Any technical explanation you might give goes in one ear and out the other. They don't want to learn, they just want it fixed! They are not going to switch to Linux because of some elitist's free software ideal. _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
