alan c wrote: > can be made easily. The foss rising tide will mean this may not be > with computing. > Should there be any such 'rising tide', and it become entirely clear that there is no money to be made in software R&D (only in supporting 'innovation ... elsewhere') then where is the investment money going to come from? Do you really want software to be controlled by the hardware vendors again?
I can remember when we all had sparcstations on our desks, and there were Open Systems. Open Wallet Systems, we used to call them. I bought a licence for Sun C++. It came with a really crap GUI builder from Imperial and not much else. Shortly afterwards, a new version came out, but I wasn't entitled to it without paying the full support wack. For slightly less money, I got MSDN Universal, with updates all year, several development tools, databases, office systems, operating systems, and a lot more documentation. Microsoft earned their market share. They might have screwed me over on OS/2 and Windows Libraries for OS/2 and all the rest, but you can't really blame them for IBM's failure to 'fess up that you didn't need a PS/2 and Compaq's failure to market it *at all*. I don't. James -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.org/UKTeam/
