Re: [PLUG] FW: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 10:16 AM, Art Clemons wrote:
> > Personally, I've started using Gentoo, so I guess I'm ok at home.
> > At work, well that was as different story. Until I saw this:
> > http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html
> > Since we're a novell shop, it kind of works out for us.
>
> Don't be too sure, Novell has a long history of buying things and 
> letting them wither away if its practices don't just outright kill it 
> off.  Think of the history of WordPerfect and Novell before you expect 
> Suse to be around for the long term.
>
> We may actually be reaching the end of packaged distributions of Linux 
> products, unless we all start paying more for said distributions.  
> I've never been a RedHat fan, but its changes are a good indication 
> that not enough money is being made selling to individuals, who also 
> don't buy support.  Suse being sold is another indication that things 
> don't always work out.

This is all also a direct reaction to the SCO "suit." SCO's goal is to 
put the "cheap" development of software into the dustbin of history.

By eliminating "free" versions of Linux ... i.e. cheap packaged 
products masquerading as proprietary versions with full support ... SCO 
resurrects the huge margins associated with support contracts. They 
eliminate the idea that Linux is "Enterprise Ready" -- that you can bet 
your company on something like "free Linux." Only "proprietary Linux" 
versions (aka Enterprise Linux) will be available, for which 
substantially higher prices will have to be paid, rendering Linux less 
and less "interesting" as an alternative to Microsoft. That this 
completely destroys the market is of no concern, it is a very typically 
short-sighted "grab-market-share-at-any-cost" tactic, which, sadly, 
usually works.

Greed is a very nasty motivator -- it normally leads to the results 
attributed to the old Communist Joke -- Peasant: "Commissar, my 
neighbor has a goat, and I have none." Commissar: "What would you have 
me do?" Peasant: "Kill my neighbor's goat."

. . .

I have also heard Suits laughingly describe how Linux and Free Software 
(aka Open Source) are the real reason for the lack of Programming jobs 
in the US ... not their being shipped to India! One recent comment went 
-- "Why should I pay a Programmer to write and maintain code when our 
SysAdmin can get it off the net for free?" This from a company with no 
programming staff, who expected their SysAdmins to obtain, support and 
maintain, the company's entire computing operation solely with "Free 
Software." They attribute the success of their company over the past 10 
years and now worth several million dollars, to their ability to hire 
no more than two "cheap Linux programmers" at a time, to run their 
computers for them. It was a most enlightening interview. Scary, but 
enlightening none the less.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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