[Gllug] caldera calls out.

[David Damerell]

On , 23 Aug 2001, Nix wrote:
>On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Simon Trimmer gibbered:
>>He's not the most respected person in the community, but some some
>>of what he said is true. I came to a similar conclusion a while back
>>that you can't make money out of a linux (or unix) distribution.
>They make a good loss leader though; ask Red Hat.

Who are actually in the black these days.

I think you have to see all Caldera's remarks in the right context;
having inherited SCO's shrinking OpenSewer business, they want to make
sure that all the people bleeding away to GNU/Linux go to Caldera
rather than anyone else, and these noises are really only aimed at
giving these proprietary UNIX guys the right corporate warm fuzzies.

Caldera are pretty insignificant in the rest of the Linux market; it's
a source of constant shock to me that anyone takes them seriously.

Of course, another way to make money is to infiltrate enough non-free
components into the distribution that eventually you can start
charging a per-seat license, which is what Caldera have done. An
interesting mental exercise is to consider which distribution has a
non-free setup tool and could therefore easily start doing this.

>>an ongoing process of new bugs being created whilst others are fixed. They
>I have trouble believing that they have trouble with this. It's the way
>every software development process in the world works...

Hmma, well; the proprietary UNIX boys do have much better regression
testing than we do.

>If they're writing drivers, they really should be reading linux-kernel;
>then they'd know what was changing, and get a chance to argue about it
>to boot :)

Yes; I think the answer to "hardware vendors have trouble writing
drivers" is that they shouldn't try; one of our strengths is that our
hardware drivers are sometimes written by competent people.

>>I don't think I've changed the fundamental operation of the microcode stuff
>>in months, perhaps a year, but I need to keep putting out new releases every
>>few months because of the differences in the startup methods of the
>>distributions (and we still don't have SuSE's right).
>The LSB should fix this; it has a standardized way to add and remove
>programs from the set run at startup. I don't know if anyone implements
>it yet.

He'll love us when we copy the new shiny BSD init.

>>Linux started out as a hobbyist's operating system and to many people it
>>still is. To have full time developers and to have us doing work on the
>>boring or complicated bits someone has to finance the work and hardware.
>Boring, yes; complicated, no :)

... and there are several models for this, only one of which is
companies trying to make money out of the software. Hardware vendors
may fund work (eg, Creative); companies that _use_ the software may
employ people to improve it. Both of these are preferable because
there is not the same incentive to sneak restrictions on modification
and distribution in by the back door.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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