From: tzs@carson.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Alpha release Linux/GNU/X unix clone on CDROM for PCs Date: 28 Nov 1992 18:33:09 GMT
>Personally, I wish the FSF were a company that understood what a market
>is and sold Linux as a cheap UNIX with support.
Imagine what FSF could do with Bill Gates' money:
1. First, convert Gates' stock to real money. Let's say that
yeilds 5 billion bucks.
2. Invest this. This gives easily 500 million a year to
throw around.
3. With that 500 million, do the following:
a. Hire 1000 programmers at 100K/yr to write free
software.
b. Hire 2000 support people at 50K/yr to support it.
c. Create 3000 "Free Software Grants" of 100K/yr. People
who wish to develop free software can apply for these
grants.
(the above breakdown is just to give an idea of the
magnitude of what could be done -- other breakdowns
might be better, such as including an explict
documentation category)
So, why didn't something like this happen? A lot of people reading this
now were quite capable of writing a BASIC interpreter for an 808x back in
the late 70's. Why was it Bill Gates? I'm also pretty sure that there
are a lot of people reading this who could have written something comparable
to the first version of DOS in about a week.
I know what excuse I and the people I hung out with then have. We were
hacking our PDP-10's back then, and didn't want to be bothered with
toys like the 808x. Does anyone else care to reminisce on the topic
of "What I was doing instead of making billions"? :-) :-(
--Tim Smith