Your article is full of factual errors as well as serious misconceptions
about the impact of the Open Source movement -- of which Linux is just
one component. (Others include Apache, BIND, sendmail, and Perl.)
I strongly recommend reading Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar", as well as the Keith Porterfield "Information Wants to
be Valuable". I also suggest spending a few years on the appropriate
mailing lists, newsgroups and web sites in order to gain an understanding
of just what this is all about.
For one thing, it's *NOT* new. It's been going on since Richard Stallman
announced the GNU project 15 years ago this month. It's why you
could send this message (sendmail), visit the web site (Apache),
and not have to type 12.34.56.789 as the address of it (BIND).
It's just recently come onto the radar screens of corporate America,
who by their trailing-edge nature, are always the last to catch on
that something is happening.
On Thu, Nov 05, 1998 at 11:08:03PM -0800, Andreas Ramos wrote:
> Linux is a low-level, short-term threat to Microsoft.
Wrong.
Even Microsoft doesn't think so. Read Halloween I/II in their
entirety with Eric Raymond's annotations.
Linux means the death of NT. By the time NT 2000 (if they keep
that name following the trademark snafu) is out -- and *usable*,
Linux will have even more market share than it does now; it will
have all of the key applications (has most of them already); and
it will retain its key characteristics that differentiate it from NT:
reliabilty, performance, scalability, portability.
> Linux is just an OS, without the intergated environment that one
> finds in Windows or Macintosh.
Wrong.
It has an integrated environment. What it does not have is an
integrated user interface, and that is a feature, not a drawback,
because it allows one to choose the user interface. Current
choices include:
- the usual Unix command line interface
- X
- KDE
- GNOME
>From an end-user point of view, it doesn't matter whether the
user interface is layered on top (as it should be) or integrated
(a very bad idea): it matters whether or not it works reliably and
is usable. All four of these do so.
> Linus Thorvald has already finished the first phase; he got a job.
Wrong.
Linus is still involved with Linux on a daily basis, and provides
critical guidance and decision-making on the internals of the OS.
He isn't "finished" with anything.
> Linux is in the second phase; Red Hat and other organizations
> are taking over Linux and establishing it as a credible enterprise.
Wrong.
They can't take it over because the licensing terms forbid them
from doing so. Not to mention the incredible backlash from the
people that they depend on -- the masses of people working on the code.
> This will also drive away the volunteerism.
Wrong.
The number of people cooperating on Open Source products is increasing
exponentially. The actions of any one company -- or even any group
of companies -- have a null effect on that.
> Netscape's browser is now open source. Yet the Microsoft memo points out
> that Netscape developer interest has fallen very fast.
Wrong.
That's Microsoft's posturing. It is not reality. See next item.
> Is anyone going to spend dozens of hours to improve the Netscape browser [...]
Yes.
See www.mozilla.org, one heck of a lot of developers are contributing
to the development of the open source browser.
> The real casualty of Linux is (as I pointed out here several weeks ago)
> other UNIX companies. Linux is a fatal threat to SUN.
Wrong.
Sun will survive this nicely because they are already accomodating Linux,
because they sell hardware, because they have layered products,
and because they have Java.
> Microsoft itself points out that Linux performs better than other UNIX
Wrong.
Linux performs quite well -- and better than some UNIXes in many situations.
But that's not a universal statement, and in part it depends on precisely
what you mean by "perform" and "better". That's why some of PC-based
installations I've done run Linux, some run Solaris, and some run BSDI.
> SUN's UNIX, on the other hand, runs only on SUN workstations.
Wrong.
It also runs on PC hardware, and is being ported to Merced. It's also
been internally ported to other architectures.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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