On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Russell Hires wrote:
> Can I get a witness to the original article! .... No....well, why not? All
> good rebuttals here, Mike...
>
> The part about "Not enough money in it to make it worth someone's time": Ha!
> What a laugh. Doing anything with Linux was never about money until recently.
> It was all grass roots before that. Linux has always been about no money. I
> think people invested their time in Linux because it wasn't M$'s O$...It
> didn't crash, it didn't "blue screen" on you (unless you wanted that
> screensaver :-)
>
A good chunk of people in the beginning wanted an alternative to the very
expensive unix flavors. The original people really didn't care about
Microsoft. They wanted a free Unix clone - not a free windows clone.
Once it started to hit more mainstream - right around 1.2.13 - people
started to see it as a Windows alternative, but things were still pretty
limited then. But even as far back as that people were using it to make
money. I can bet you that on some oil tank fields there are still some
486 PC104 controller/monitoring boards running 1.2.13. I'm saying to you
that doing almost everything with linux was about money for a great
majority of the engineers out there.
Sidenote: The fact of the matter is that if you can't make it profitable
for companies to install it and ship it and put it into the stores then
they aren't even going to look at it and the end consumer won't ever be
exposed. In addition, you try to sell him one of those units sitting on
the shelf with linux and then you tell him that all those shelves with the
software boxes behind him are off limits because "They don't run on
Linux." He will go pale and never even give it a second thought. You
will see linux go the way of OS/2. It was a great OS but people didn't
buy it because there were no applications. I would like us not to repeat
history because there is only going to be one shot at it. If it fails
companies will be really skeptical to do it a second time. We still have
many years to go before it will be ready to make an assault on the desktop
for Joe User and I'd rather take that time to make it better instead of
just talking about how great it is.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Mark Bishop (mark@bish.net) | Computer Engineer |
| 813.258.2390 | Network Engineer |
| http://bish.net | Embedded Programmer |
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