From: dale@mkseast.uucp (Dale Gass) Subject: Re: GNU Public license and the future of Linux... Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1993 03:51:45 GMT
wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>
>dale@mkseast.uucp (Dale Gass) writes:
>> I would really love to see Linux and/or BSD/386 help promote Unix as the
>> operating system of choice.
>
>Agreed.
>
>> In order for it to become anything other than a toy, you're gonna
>> need commercial applications.
>
>Probably true, if you defined "toy" as "not a commercial success".
>Linux is not toy even now, for the people who use it seriously.
That's not my definition. I'd define "toy" as something that is only
played with, and not suitable for meeting the operating system needs of
a wide audience.
Yes, I know there are people who can survive with Linux and GCC and TeX and
GhostScript, etc., etc.. However, most people need a bigger selection of
friendlier packages to choose from. Myself (other than the fact that I
develop on DOS, OS/2 and NT for a living :-) I would probably get along
just fine with Linux as my sole operating system, if I had the equivalent
of WinFax and FrameMaker avaialable for it. Others might get along fine
if Lotus 1.2.3 and WP were available for it. And so on. There's lotsa
great PD stuff available for Linux, but not the stuff that'll make Linux
the "operating system of choice" for people other than the Unix folk.
The Unix folk might think that is just fine, and prefer to keep Linux for
themselves. When I see the potential of Linux against the new tangle of
386 proprietary OS's each with their own silly limitations, it's just
sad that Linux couldn't be a contender in that market. Not to be a
commercial success, but to meet user's (and developer's) operating system
needs at a wonderful price...
>> The inherent performance, stability, networking, flexibility, cost,
>> etc., of Linux would make commercial operating systems second
>> choices.
>
>Technical excellence has nothing to do with it. Marketing or pure
>luck is what decides.
Which is why it might have been nice to see Linux be put truly in the
public domain. Some marketing genius might have picked it up and brought
it to a much larger audience. Even if the much dreaded MicroSoft were
to have done this (not likely, eh?), it wouldn't have been a *threat* to
Linux. If they butchered it, there's still be the free version of Linux,
which people would find out about quickly enough and use instead.
I guess even with the GPL there's still people packaging up Linux onto
CD's, etc.. You'll never see the intensive marketing force, though,
such as the strong effort MicroSoft made to get application developers
developing for NT.
>> While it might not have been the original intent, I certainly don't see
>> that as a harmful side effect; I certainly don't see it as threatening.
>
>It might be threatening, actually, since if Linux were to become the
>heir of MS-DOS, it would make it much, much more difficult to develop
>it further: a few dozen million users tend to dislike if they have to
>upgrade their whole system every few weeks.
Not quite sure I understand what you're getting at. Sure, Linux is changing
quite rapidly now. I would suspect that at least the program interfaces
(system calls, shared libs interfaces, etc.) would be settling down pretty
quickly in the next year or so. As long as those are reasonably stable,
applications should run. No need to upgrade the system every few weeks...
>> It sounds like you want to keep Linux for yourself (i.e. the Unix
>> hacker) rather than for the masses.
>
>No. I want to keep Linux free.
And I still don't see the relationship between having commercial products
available for linux, and Linux losing it's freedom. I really don't think
that companies who develop commercial applications would simply give
away their code instead of selling it. If they didn't see a demand of the
product (or saw resent of commercial products among the users :-), the
alternative would be to not develop the product at all, not to develop
it anyway and give it away. I think the options for such developers
are a given commercial product, or nothing. It'd be sad to see Linux
users opt for the latter.
>> So technically, there's no problem; let's just hope there's not a prevailing
>> anti-commercial-products attitude among Linux users.
>
>I don't have anything against people doing commercial versions of
>Linux (as long as they stay within the bounds of the GPL, of course).
>Trying to make it the primary goal of everyone concerned with Linux is
>not that exiting, though.
Agreed. I don't think there's any danger of that, though. The very fact
that the poor student, hobbyist, hacker, whatever, can get Linux for free (or
cheaply on CD-ROM) will always tend to attract people who write code for
the hell of it.
>I think that some of the people who wish to make Linux a commercial
>success should start working on that. The matter of copyrights
>certainly has been discussed to death. The copyrights are not the
>problem. The problem is being able to afford ads in all major PC
>magazines, get favorable reviews in the same magazines, provide
>guaranteed support, and create a rock-solid, easy-to-install product,
>and the zillion exciting applications for it, roughly in that order.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in any case. As soon as Jana
Publishing gets their next batch of CD's out the door (and as soon as I get
some spare time) I'll be switching from Xenix to Linux.
(I almost half-suspect Linux and BSD-386 to get a large part of their
mainstream usage in the form of turnkey system developers who use it
(instead of, say, the pricey Xenix or Qnix) as a base for dedicated
multi-user applications.)
-dale
-- Dale Gass, Mortice Kern Systems, Atlantic Canada Branch Business: dale@east.mks.com, Pleasure: dale@mkseast.uucp