Subject: Re: The sky is falling
From: James Zuelow (e5z8652@zuelow.net)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 23:04:31 AKST
On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 19:14:33 -0900
"W.D. McKinney" <deem@wdm.com> wrote:
>
> James, it's just not as big in the U.S., but Europe, South America &
> Asia have a desktop market in Linux. Must be a lot of rain in southeast
> Alaska eh ? :-)
>
> Have fun!
>
> Dee
>
Clear & sunny for the past week or so. Maybe that's why I just don't see the gloom and doom.
Let me reply to your post and Jim's post at the same time.
The U.S. doesn't really have a Linux desktop market. OK, that is definately true. Europe, the rest of the Americas, and Asia. Hmm. Linux perhaps has a larger desktop market there, but there isn't any big technology difference. Linux isn't better in Argentina, it just speaks Spanish more often. Basic things like cut and paste are still a problem. Install xgalaga on a modern Linux system and you have a good chance that the sound will not work. And I'd challenge anyone to find a country where the percent of Linux desktop gets to double digits. Any company that is banking on Linux on the desktop is banking on the future, not the present. And that is exactly what RedHat said - "we can't make money on it now, because if you buy our $80 box we'll spend more than $80 talking to you on the phone or answering your e-mails. Give it a couple of years first. In the mean time, we have share-holders." Now it's up to companies like Mandrake to make a go of the commercial home desktop ma
Now, if you very carefully put together a standard build - testing applications, making sure everything works, and then clone the system you can get a pretty good desktop. That's great for the corporate world. In fact, companies like RedHat are pushing exactly that. Sun goes so far as to say that Linux is good for the desktop, but not for the server - mainly because they want to sell Solaris licenses, but there's your desktop. Novell/SuSE will probably offer Netware 7 on a Linux foundation with all Linux desktops.
Let the user get involved, and oh boy. Finding two identical Debian or Gentoo installs that are owned by different people is probably impossible. The maturity just isn't there for Linux desktops to reliably support all the different things people get up to at home. I know that I break my desktops all the time doing things I can easily do in Win98. For me, and for most of the people on this list, that's part of the fun. For my wife, she just wants to know why "Nautilus does not have a default application for this file type" after she just TOLD it that .pdf files should be opened in xpdf. And she told it correctly, right mime type and all. Pfah.
So IMHO RedHat is right. Don't try making money selling Linux desktops to the masses. It's not ready. Keep it to a corporate structure where the IT people can control the build and set up mime types beforehand.
Now. Financial support. Jim brings up the point where we're not financially supporting companies like RedHat, and we should be. In my office, I've got every rev of RedHat from 6.2 to 7.2. That's how long it took me to figure out that it was more expensive to buy every boxed set of RedHat than it would be to buy every new version of Windows as soon as it came out. Add the $20 a month fee for up2date on top of that. I don't make enough to keep RedHat solvent, especially when each boxed set got more expensive. That's when I started getting into Debian in a big way. It's non-profit, so I help in other ways. I donate to EFF and FSF. It's not Linux, but you can find my name on the OpenBSD liner notes. I keep a small web site up, which according to my logs has helped a few people put Linux on old IBM hardware. Doesn't help IBM, and doesn't help RedHat, but it just might help Linux.
But there are people in Alaska with enough money to help keep RedHat solvent, and more importantly, Allan Cox gainfully employed. Those people are the IT folks at the Municipality of Anchorage or the State of Alaska. Maybe BP. And that's where RedHat sees it's future. Great! So send $25 to the EFF, and a letter to your legislator (or the editor) asking how much money the state sends to Microsoft every year in this time of 400 million dollar shortfalls. Do that two or three times a year.
Don't worry about RedHat and their boxed sets - RedHat could collapse into a big pile of dust and we'd still have Linux. Every commercial distributor in the world could collapse and we'd still have linux. Maybe not as flashy, maybe not on everyone's computer, and we might have to do with only one Linux monthly magazine, but we'd still have it.
Cheers,
James
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Nov 04 2003 - 23:04:35 AKST