On Sat, Sep 26, 1998 at 05:08:28PM -0700, Andreas Ramos wrote:
> It's very nice that Linux is free. But I wonder how Wall Street analysts
> will evaluate Oracle, Sun, and other UNIX-based companies. If these
> companies are based on volunteer-based, free, public domain software that is
> basically a fad of people who have a deep personal hatred of Bill Gates,
> then the stock of these companies will be rather worthless.
It's not a fad, and it has nothing to do with Gates. We've been
doing this since the days of BSD back in the 80's. Almost all
of the technology that you take for granted: HTML, HTTP, Perl, MIME,
NNTP, Kerberos, tcl/tk, PGP, etc., started as freeware. Much of
it still is.
BTW, "free" != "public domain".
>
> The same with Linux: if it's free, there's not much basis for running a
> business on it. Red Hat can't exist in an environment where they are
> competing against free.
Sure they can, and yes they will: same way that Cygnus has been making
quite a nice living supporting free GNU software. There is a continuing
and growing market for integration/support, which is where companies
like Red Hat and BSDI come in.
> At some point, volunteers will get tired of developing something for free
> and they'll go on to other things. Linux will be abandoned.
There is no factual basis for this statement. The GNU project is
now in its 15th year and is going strong: it's outlived any number
of commercial companies. The Linux community is about 8 years old
and growing like wildfire. Even if 90% of the people involved in
it quit tomorrow, the developer community would still outnumber
the entire staff of Microsoft by 10:1.
> Just set your mama down in front of a UNIX machine and see if she can figure
> it out. Forget it.
Been there, done that. I've put *thousands* of non-computer literate
people in front of Unix machines and they've managed to send/receive mail,
read/post news, write their first programs, and so on. It's not nearly
as hard as is frequently claimed.
> Anyone who has done training knows that one can put a total newbie in front
> of a Mac or a Win95 machine and in ten minutes, they can open programs,
> write files, save, and print.
They can do the same thing with a properly-configured Unix machine
loaded with similar applications. And the Unix machine won't crash
or lock up just because somebody tried to run half a dozen things at once.
> Linux is apparently being downloaded in large numbers (I say "apparently"
> because there's no way of verifying these numbers.)
Nor is there any way of verifying the numbers reported for other OS's.
How many copies of Windows/Windows NT get thrown away? (I know that over
the last several years I've personally accounted for the purchases of
several hundred PCs for clients: NONE of them are running Windows.)
> Now, SGI is an NT company. Yep. They develop for Windows NT.
Which is why they're doomed. They'll simply go down with the NT ship,
which is already sinking.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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