This list (linux-kernel) was established so that the kernel developers
would have communications amongst themselves and those doing a lot of
kernel testing. Be a good guy and remove your 'linux-lite' discussions to
a more apropos list.
No, I'm not a moderator, but I value highly the work that gets done on
this list.
-z-
"An American is a man with two arms and four wheels."
-A chinese child
On 24 Jan 1997, Zygo Blaxell wrote:
> In article <9701231427.ZM8441@platypus>,
> Jason Benderly <jbenderl@PaineWebber.COM> wrote:
> >Sorry for the waste of bandwidth but the subject is
> >the most important one facing Linux, and it has been
> >mentioned on the list.
>
> I second the motion to have a separate list for Linux advocacy
> ("linux-future"); I'll probably be subscribed the same day it's created,
> unless I've missed it already. All this *technical* discussion about
> the Linux kernel gets in the way of the interesting topics. I assume
> that everyone who doesn't care has killfiled the subject by now. ;-)
>
> >The Linux community should also shed the notion that everything
> >should be free. Prices should not be what they are for Sun or HP
> >products (multi thousand dollars for a GUI painter) but should
> >be similar to PC market prices. I know I am willing to spend some
> >cash.
>
> Adobe, Sun, and HP get most of their business from large customers;
> they don't really have the infrastructure for dealing with millions of
> individual users.
>
> Quote from my boss: "What the hell is taking [the WINE project] so long?
> Can they solve their problems if we just gave them money? We have to pay
> for dozens of Win95 licenses *anyway* so it's not like it makes a
> difference to us to give the money to someone else."
>
> It will be interesting to see if non-MS implementations of MS API can
> compete at all. I wonder how much real financial loss MS incurred when
> people gave up on MS and switched to something else because the new
> Win95 apps wouldn't run under WABI or OS/2? Until Microsoft has market
> pressure of this kind, they aren't going anywhere.
>
> The big problem for Windows clone vendors is that there's very little
> profit margin in it and a lot of risk. The cheapest working Windoze
> implementation is still a PC running Microsoft you-know-what (remember
> that the reason Microsoft did so well is that the clone vendors took over
> the lionshare of PC sales from IBM by selling much cheaper machines).
> OS/2's Windows implementation is sometimes better than rebooting the
> machine into Win95 and costs less than keeping extra partitions around if
> you *must* run or develop OS/2 apps. Sun's WABI is cheaper than buying
> thousands of Windows boxes for your company, if you already have Sparcs
> with X terminals lying around. Administration also scales better;
> WABI can maintain the low sysadmin-to-user ratios customers are used
> to with Unix. WINE is free software and the same cheap hardware, but
> it was incomplete the last time I checked.
>
> >Microsoft operating systems are second rate. Everyone knows that.
> >Microsoft applications and applications architectures are the very best.
>
> Half of the Microsoft applications are horrible, and the other half only
> exist to solve problems created by the first half. Several application
> features in Windows don't exist in other places because the problems they
> solve just aren't there.
>
> >Everyone knows that too, and that is why they hold 90% of the market.
>
> There isn't much space in business plans for explaining why, despite
> holding 80-90% of the software market, Microsoft is not better.
>
> --
> Zygo Blaxell. Unix/soft/hardware/firewall/security guru. 10th place, ACM Intl
> Prog Contest, 1995. Admin Linux+Solaris for food, Tshirts, anime. Pager: 1613
> 7608572. "I gave up $1000 to avoid working on windoze... *sigh*"-Amy Fong. "smb
> is a microsoft toy, like a "child" protocol that never matured"-S Boisjoli.
>