well, i must say that yesterday's Haifux's (HAIFa linUX club) meeting was different then all that were before. oded's lecture brought up a lot of arguing and controversy, and the meeting was quite noisy - in a good manner (i.e. no one shed blood eventually :) ). oded has raised a few points regarding linux's strengthes and weeknesses, and i'd try to summarize a few notions that came up (and some things of my own), and that might help with guiding how to outspread the word to curious wanna-be linux users, companies, etc. oded's lecture slides would go on the club's web site (http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~orrd/linux-club/) soon. 1. companies in israel tend to use windows almost exclusively these days. in the US, there is also a large market for companies who develope on and for unix systems. this naturally tends to help forming an easier transition to linux. this situation begins to change here, as a number of players are moving up into the linux market here as well (including linux support, integration services, complete projects developments, and startup companies basing their busyness on developing software for linux). 2. In the embedded market, where products are supposed to be cheap and sold by large numbers, having to pay royalties for an OS becomes a big problem, and here linux (especially RTlinux - www.rtlinux.com, not to be confused with zentropia's site - www.rt-linux.com). 3. linux starts to become a viable desktop system slowly, but still not for the companies secretary (ask mike about his experiment of switching his company's secretary's machine to a linux system, and what happened to him after one week ... ;) ). 4. development environments in unix systems are many, and have different looks. some of us like them alot. the problem is that people that got used to visual studio would not (yet) find an equivalent system on linux. remember - this is not an argument about techical superiority, and trying to convince these people that 'xemacs is your ultimate IDE' won't lead most of them to conversion. 5. the drivers problem would be solved when companies see that linux has gained a big market share, making it profitable to release (and support) linux drivers for their hardware. it won't be solved by vulanteers writing drivers _on a scale as large as the windows market_. 6. in places where 'stoleware' is the rule, rather then the exception, linux's law-price does not pose a great factor. 7. availability and "freeness" of the source code is a good thing for a company that does its own internal development. however, it's still not sure what the bonus that it gives to the breadth of other companies. my personal opinion is that "well, you could always hire someone else to maintain that source code if you want" is not a realy good reasoning, since most companies cannot afford to pay enough for real features development, and even if you find someone to do that, it'll take them time to learn the source code base, which makes the transition to a new maintainer a costly step. 8. as usual, for international markets, problem with internationalized software would still exist (you know, that hebrew thing.. arabic...) just to give you an idea of how effective this is: in japan, in the last year, it is estimated that the number of linux-based systems sold was slightly larger then the number of win98 systems. the reason is mostly due to the fact that there is a completely japanized linux system (turbo linux), while the number of japanized windows applications is not so large to make people prefer win98 over linux, as is the case with english software. btw, regarding maddog's claim that HP hasn't decided yet, in last month's dr. dobs, there is an announcement of a new NC (network computer) by HP, running on a linux OS. hope everyone had fun in the meeting, guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
