[Gllug] caldera calls out.

[Simon Trimmer]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, John Clement wrote:
> http://www.cw360.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=998476933&REQSESS=990O396I&REQH
> OST=site2&2131REQEVENT=&CARTI=105163&CCAT=1&CCHAN=126&CFLAV=1

passworded link, I assume it was "Caldera chief pleads for Linux unity"


> Excuse me for being relativly new to the GPL concept and therefore I may
> have this completely arse about face, but isn't this guy talking crap???

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.

Ransom Love mentions standards, the software industry is big on standards and
for some very good reasons.  I work with Solaris developers and I'm having a
lot of trouble teaching people how to develop on linux.

They can't understand that the kernel changes every few weeks and that it's
an ongoing process of new bugs being created whilst others are fixed. They
find it hard to believe that the interfaces between drivers and the kernel
are fuzzy and prone to change at a whim.

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).

Organisations like standards to keep the ongoing support costs down.


> And how much of the OS they are now going to be selling was contributed
> from people like us[1] who donated it to the cause.

So, are you suggesting no money should be made from Linux? :)

The GPL is all about freedom. It does not preclude people taking code and
making money out of it and it certainly isn't concerned with how this money
should be distributed; doing so would not be in the best interests of "the
cause"

There are quite a few professional linux developers on the list and I'd
suggest to you that the handful of core kernel people are now all full time,
mostly financed by distributors. Where do you draw the line?

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.

I'm not attacking you, nor the GPL, the opensource community is still
working things out as we go along.... :)


> If things go on (ideally me thinks), Mandrake will probably go on and
> make a great OS that makes it easy for Windoze users to migrate,

Aaaagh! For the masses it's not the _OS_ that people are interested in, it's
the applications. Lets face it, the applications on linux are years behind
those on Mac and Windows :(

-Simon
Simon Trimmer <simon at urbanmyth.org>


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug