On Thursday 13 April 2006 06:23 pm, Pillai, Gishu R (GE Infra, Energy) wrote:
> > >* Fast track to [GNU]Linux, a 178-page handy guide small-sized. > > Hey glad that you brought this up.. Just watched Revolution OS this > weekend + then I bought this Digit copy > The fast track guide says pg 16. top - > "Free software need not be open source" > Is this true? I thought free = free to improve and distrib... > Since this is from Digit, I don't take it on face value. Ah English!. Free as in beer softwareneed not be opensource at all. Nor is open source free (as in beer) or open as in gpld. You HAVE to get into the specifics of the licence to understand what exactly is "free" or "open" about a particular piece of software. > > Also on the business model (can of worms alert), Stallman n co say > that the money lies in providing support to OSS. The movie showed > that despite initial hoopla, VA Linux went down under due to > mounting losses. VA linux was taken over by a Japanese company and did pretty well. In any case GNU software has very little to do with business. Bad managemnet can shred any company very quickly. And major shifts in society are the major cause of success and failure rather than any fancy management. > Anyone know of a slightly more lived success > story? This is an aspect that bothers me at times. Google, RH, Novell, Hotmail - ya they used bsd. And twisting things u could say M$ - they used bsd network stack and NCSA mosaic for the core of IE (god they would have been dead long ago), Cisco - IOS is some derivative of bsd. And scores of small companies u will never hear of. GNU software has fragmented the market to an extent that makes it impossible for behemoths to survive let alone "succeed". And the yardstick of "success" as defined by current economic practices is one can o worms u would do well to look into carefully before applying to anything other than canoworms. Hang around you will have many more"successess" as the biggest can o worms eats itself up. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
