Roger wrote: > Linus Torvalds moved to the USA in order to further his career in Linux > development.
Linux was already doing rather well when he decided to move. I have no doubt that, career-wise, Finland wouldn't have been much worse for him than the US, particularly after the creation of OSDL. Now, if you've ever been to Helsinki in winter, you can quickly think of several things that might have tempted him to move to California :-) (Europe has some pleasant spots, too, but he might also have had some language preferences.) Well, he's happy there, which is all that counts in the end :-) > Likewise the german SuSE Linux distribution became much more widely > known in Europe after Novell's takeover. Hmm, I wonder if SuSE's perception really changed that much. At least within the community, they more likely lost recognition because of that. SuSE was already known and used worldwide well before the merge. > By contrast, look at companies that stay Europen. Target and EasyPC are > extremely valid products when compared with Eagle. Yet Eagle is far > better known on a global scale and they have a distributor in Italy, > which the European companies do not have. Yet, CadSoft is a European company. Even cadsoftusa.com is registered by Deutsche Telekom :-) One important difference is the size of the domestic market, which affects how soon a company has to face the overhead of going international, and how big it is at that time. US-based companies have a clear advantage there. The EU may help to some extent, but you still get varying local regulations, cultural and language barriers, etc. Entering the US market also means that businesspeople would have to travel there frequently, which nowadays quite a few resent, feeling offended by immigration procedures. By the way, you also get quite introspective US-based companies. E.g., OQO still don't ship abroad (you have to go through companies specializing in shipping odd products around, like Dynamism), and for about two years, their power supplies even tended to self-destruct if used on 220/240V. Whee, quite off-topic. How did we get from footprints to this ? :-) - Werner -- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina [EMAIL PROTECTED] / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/
