Russell McOrmond wrote:
> Countering the propaganda from these companies is very important for the
> open-source movement as it is the strongest force in opposition to the
> adoption of these alternatives.
No amount of countering will make any movement successful unless it is
widely adopted by the people whose decisions matter -- the corporates.
They spend more money in IT than a single person would and it is their
involvement that makes a movement grow by leaps and bounds. Red Hat got
angel money from the largest chipmaker in the world --Intel-- when you
get that kind of support you can relax and get on with your job.
> I put those URL's there to correct the misconception another person had
> about what Microsoft had done for the industry. In actual fact it has
> held the industry back from any reasonable level of expansion. Once the
> whole "manufacturing" mentality is erradicated from the software services
> industry, we might even make some of these computers do useful things.
If you mean I had a misconception you are way off. I never had any
misconception about what Microsoft or any other company is doing. I
still believe Microsoft's products sell because they offer value to
THEIR KIND OF PUBLIC - mostly coporates, finance types, people who
havent got the time or inclination to learn new and much better software
like Linux, Perl, Python, etc. Most importantly in India, most people do
not buy Microsoft software - they get it 'preloaded' on their assembled
machines without even knowing that they are using pirated software.
If you think people should use software because of technology, well we
are not there yet. People still use any product for value and will
continue to do so. What needs to be looked at is how Microsoft or any
other monopoly arm-twists its competitors to sell their own software -
as we can see from the DoJ trials.
The quote from Bob Young --Red Hat's CEO best sums up the situation we
are looking at -- * his goal is to "shrink the size of the operating
system market," commoditizing what he feels is currently an overpriced
product category. He's not after Microsoft's multi-billion dollar
business; instead, he thinks he can own a big piece of it if he can
shrink it down to a $500-million market.
Young also believes that services and support, not product sales per se,
are key
to his business. He says: "In effect we give away the technology in
order to
generate the services and support revenues that all large technology
companies
generate. Digital Equipment Company earned more revenue from support and
services than they did selling computers, and they were a $15
billion/year
company.* --
excerpt from Tim O'Reilly's article "The Open Source Revolution"
ref: www.edventure.com (look for the Nov 98 issue of Release 1.0
Newsletter)
Arup
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