Sam MacDonald wrote: > A General Pot Stir. > > Where is SCO in all of this? Why are they not having a fit about > SuSe, could it be SCO can't do anything about SuSe? Could it be SCO > has a case against IBM/RedHat? I think it says that Novell doesn't think the SCO has a case. They've just spent $210M on an asset that is most likely worthless if SCO prevails against IBM. > > Why does the Linux community only bash MS? > Why are IBM, Novel, and other large companies immune to the same bashing? I'm not sure that Novell has done anything lately that deserves either praise or bashing. IBM doesn't get bashed much because they've adopted two relatively open technologies, Linux and Java, and contribute back to those projects. MS, on the other hand, is only too happy to scoop up some code (like the BSD network stack) and throw it into their own code without so much as a thank you. > Doesn't MS buy up the competition as well? Because the DOJ would be all over them if they bought up Redhat. They could have bought Apple for a song 5 years ago, but Apple is worth more as a competitor than as an asset. And of course, why would they buy anyone when they can simply download the Redhat ISOs and fork a MS-Linux. If Microsoft announced a version of Linux tomorrow it would immediately have more name/market recognition than Mandrake, SuSe or Redhat. The big question is how long does it take before we see a distribution from MS that contains a bunch of proprietary .so files that make it play nice W2003 server or even has support for trusted computing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time they'd adopted an open standard and then tweaked on it a bit effectively making it proprietary, e.g. Kerberos. > Who owned PowerPoint before MS? > Who owned Excel before MS? > > I find it interesting the amount of support being displayed for SuSe > being gobbled up by Novel, at the command of IBM. I don't see why > it's good for IBM to put $50m in to Novel and for Novel to buy SuSe, > other then to eliminate the competition. > In 10 years SuSe will not exist, everyone will be saying "Do you > remember that cool IBM Linux distribution before IBM owned it. What > was the name of it, "Sugi?", it was great. What was the window thingy > called, "KBE?", was that it? > You certainly run that risk even if you don't buy into the conspiracy theory. Linux goes along for a few years, becomes a mainstream produce and remains free. ABC comes along and starts to sell a reasonably priced version packaged with support. A bunch of people decide they're willing to pay $50 a year so they can run Linux but don't have to participate in the global scavenger hunt required to get their MP3 player to work, or to print to their new printer. The decentrailized nature of Linux is a two-edge sword. The downside is that there is no one to sign a license if you want to include proprietary technology into Linux. A commercial entity like IBM or MS or Apple finds it easy to license a DVD decoder or driver for the latest 802.11x chip set. In the overall marketplace that is a big deal, and at some point ABC Linux effectively becomes a separate product and the Free Linux goes back to being more of a hobbiest's product. Now maybe ABC is IBM, maybe its Redhat or even MS - I think there's a decent chance it could be Apple, i.e. what would the world look like with an Intel version of OS X? > These big companies spend money like it's water. They don't want to > pay people in this country a fair wage so they send the jobs to other > countries. But it's just fine for them to spend $50m on a company to > get control of it. > Get use to it. In a world with unrestricted capital flows, global wages get equalized. --rick _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list