On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 10:02:50AM -0500, dep wrote: >begin Collins Richey's quote: > >| They've finally caught up with gentoo <grin> > >they're a pain in the ass, but they're not *that* bad.
I haven't tried gentoo, LFS, or any of the other do-it-yourself forms of Linux, primarily because I would rather spend my time building things on top of a working distribution. It's enough of a problem keeping up with new releases of software, and still have time for development and support of our own stuff. I chose to become a Caldera reseller when they first started their reseller program for the same reason we became SCO resellers in 1987, we need a stable platform for commercial systems. We have always purchased boxed sets for all our our customer installations to support the Linux distributions and kept copies on hand for sale to local people (and I have a pile of unsold Caldera OpenLinux 1.1->2.3 to prove it :-). We don't make any money selling Linux itself so we now buy SuSE from our local CompUSA store rather than go through distribution, and make sure that our business sales rep. at CompUSA is aware of this in hopes that this encourages them to continue to keep it in stock as an alternative to Red Hat. I want to be able to tell people that they can go to the local store to buy stable Linux rather than having to buy it on-line, download ISOs, or built it themselves. At one time CompUSA had Caldera, Mandrake, in addition to SuSE and Red Hat. Mandrake disappeared from their shelves several months ago. Frankly, the only way I can see any commerical Linux distribution company making a living selling Linux will be to market direct through web sites delivering product directly to the final installer eliminating intermediate distributors. Desktop Linux just can't be sold for enough to cover the costs of the traditional distribution channels (as a rule of thumb, the manufacturing cost of any product sold through these channels is about 20% of the final sale price). As someone who has made my living by providing IT solutions to commercial customers since 1966, and mission-critical Linux solutions since 1997, my main contribution to supporting Linux has been to provide bug reports, and fixes back to the source where possible (Caldera was pretty good at ignore my reports and patches though :-). The first time I can remember fixing a program for a vendor was about 1972 when I rewrote a major chunk of the RJE handler for Burroughs Medium Systems, and patched MCP giving the changes back to Burroughs. At the time I did this because the company I worked for needed to get RJE working, and it wasn't a priority for Burroughs. One of the primary reasons I like Linux and FreeBSD is that this type of thing is a lot easier to do than to convince a proprietary vendor to make their source code available to outsiders to fix. Open Source works because there are thousands of knowledgeable people working on problems that they need to have work, feeding their results back into the system. Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``Guns are no more responsible for killing people than the spoon is responsible for making Rosie O'Donnell fat.'' _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
