I have been thinking about this lately also. Marketing of small
computers is an interesting and complex task. Here is some stuff I
came across:
http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/JohnZedlewski/JohnZedlewski4.html
http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/JohnZedlewski/JohnZedlewski1.html
In fact I would go through the old pages in OSOpinion there are some
good thoughts in there amongst the dross.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue46/al-mohssen.html
http://www.businessweek.com/cgi-bin/bwdaily_full?right=dnflash/apr1999/nf90427b.htm
The major threats are, internal politics, splits or people just
leaving because of arguments. Software patents or trade secrets from a
developers day job wind up in the kernel. A large company could just
ignore GPL and grind up the volunteers with a long lawsuit. How many
depositions would you want to set through before you gave up and
stopped coding for Linux? It would be a very dirty campaign but dying
companies will do desperate things. Microsoft Linux or MS-BSD with
all sorts of non-GPL add-ons.
Evil thoughts I should stop here.
PBen
