Today, Paul Lussier gleaned this insight:
> More than 90% of all e-mail is sent to external-to-origin sites via sendmail
> which is completely free, and which, up until 1998 had absolutely no official
> commercial support. Companies running sendmail, almost never pay for sendmail
> support, and pay for the software even less. If you don't count e-mail as
> mission-critical in today's day and age, then I don't know what is.
Man, I'd really like to agree with that, but you must consider that a
large chunk of those got it with their (commercial) operating system, and
bought support contracts for said, making support for sendmail available
by default.
>
> Additionally, more than 60% of all websites are running on Apache, which falls
> into the same category as sendmail.
Now you're talkin'!
> But also, keep in mind, the word "free" as it relates to software doesn't
> *have* to mean just that you don't give someone money in exchange for the
> ability to run their software. The most important aspect of "free" software
> is the access to source code, the ability to change said code, and the ability
> to redistribute that changed code. With that in mind, I don't know why any
> company would want to run their business on anything *but* free software.
It boils down to ignorance and nievette. Most businessmen know nothing
about software, how it works, or how to evaluate how good it is. And they
don't want to. They believe that they should pay someone else to worry
about all that for them. And mind you, rightfully so, as that is how it
has always been done. More importantly, no one can know everything; while
it's certainly possible that a person could gain a strong understanding
of both managing a business AND software engineering, it should not be
expected... That's too much to learn for the average Joe.
But in today's increasingly complex world, there needs to be at least one
person in the organization who understands each of those (but not
necessarily both), and those people need to be able to COMMUNICATE
with eachother and TRUST eachother in order to evaluate how the business
can successfully exploit the technology.
This never happens.
--
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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