Some defense contractors are beginning to come around. The National Guard
ported a simulator a year or so ago to Linux that ran for years for thr
regular Army on HP-UX. What was originally budgeted to purchase
hardware/software for that platform ended up saving $8 million dollars in
the process.

Chris Mitchell

----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Densmore <DensmoreB@ctbsonline.com>
To: <kclug@kclug.org>
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 12:38 PM
Subject: RE: will lack of corporate support kill off Linux?

> Well, what I see is the government and government contractors using open
> source. I was recently reading about a private corporation that builds war
> simulators. They ported a mainframe simulator to a Linux cluster and it's
> much faster and more powerful. There is no place for reselling open source
> programs. But open source OSes are here to stay. It's the infra-structure
> that will best be made open source. I don't really care if my word
processor
> is open source. It would be nice, but I can't see companies spending tens
of
> thousands of dollars to write a shrink-wrapped products and  then give
them
> away. what we really need are "available source" applications.
Applications
> that are written and sold, but the license to recode and resell remains in
> the control of the original authors. That way others could buy the
software,
> fix bugs, recompile, and submit those fixes to the authors (if they want
> to). Of course I live in perfect world, were everyone gets along. ;')>
>
> Brian
>