> Andreas writes:
> >> The sun rose this morning.
>
> Rich replies:
> >Wrong. The earth rotated.
Rich is right, the earth rotated. But as usual there are different
points of view on the matter, and that is what makes life interesting.
> Why was this document written? Why was it send to Eric Raymond (and
> especially him, of all people?) Why has Microsoft not bothered to demand it
> removed (on basis of copyrights, etc.)? Think about that.
Now there is an interesting question...
> >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.
>
> Oh, c'mon. Intel, IBM, and Red Hat are distributing Linux. They are not
> doing this for charity.
When I was working at IBM earlier this year, their internal people had
a lot of Linux machines running. They are in it to support something that
they, themselves, see is superior to MS and even OS/2 for certain types of
applications.
> Tell me, Rich, are you going to spend several hundred hours to improve Linux
> and thereby improve the stock price for IBM and Intel?
That is not why people like to tinker. They like to tinker because
they like to tinker, and to a lesser extent, because they want a better
system. With the lack of basements in modern housing, we need someplace
small to tinker in. Our software basement fits in the space of a bread
box. Come to think of it, that is one of the old standards for some kind
of gadget people use to build -- the size of a bread box.
> Silicon Graphics (it was once a UNIX computer company) clung to their
> workstations and their flavor of UNIX. Intel machines with Windows NT were
> faster and cheaper; in two years, SGI lost 50% of their market to NT/Intel.
> SGI is now an NT company, running on Intel machines.
SGI provides a variety of machines. Most of them, by the way, are
not full blown computers, but OEM RISC chips. Lots of compute-heavy
embedded systems use them. Their systems scale up from the chip level, to
Cray-like supercomputers. How do I know? I've talked to them about
projects, and used their RISC chips in other projects. They won't roll
over and die.
> As for Java, well... has SUN made any money on it at all? No. Are they going
> to make money on it? Is there such a thing as a programming language that
> has generated substantial (billions of dollars) revenues? No. SUN has Java,
> but then again, it's not worth much.
Oh? Gee, then IBM's Language Products Division is a myth? (They
probably pulled in more than a few Billion.) Guess I have to take an
eraser to a good chunk of my resume. Guess MicroFocus, (Cobol) Borland...
(C/C++, Pascal, Prolog, etc. and dBase) And MicroSoft (C/C++, Visual
Basic, Access, Foxpro, Fortran, Cobol, et al.) Symantec, and a good number
of other companies should just not exist. MS's first product was a $500
basic, which they modified and were selling for ROM'ing into various early
personal computer products before IBM noticed them. MS build the core of
their early business on Basic, Fortran, and Cobol language products. IBM
went to MS because of their language products. MS actually had to buy an
operating system to resell to IBM as part of the package deal. Language
products are Big Business!
Think for a minute... If it were not for language products... how
would we use these machines? Do you really think developers would code in
binary??? Language products are a HUGE market!
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