Re: RedHat = MS-Linux
Bruce Sass wrote:
>
> On Tue, 30 Mar 1999, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> > The issue is not that the Linux kernel would still be available
> > as open-source, the problem is what happens when 85-95% of app
> > developers are writing their software only for RH. The 'open
> > source' community would not be terribly affected, and would
> > certainly continue support of Debian and others, but if RH can
> > wrap up the commercial side of the Linux phenomenon, Debian will
> > never go much farther than it is now.
>
> If the "'open source' community would not be terribly affected",
> why should the growth ("go much farther") of Debian be affected?
Maybe I should have said "Debian will not grow any more than, and
not beyond, the open source community. For some, this may not be
an issue, as the opensource community has developed all of the
kind of software that they need. I strongly suspect Linux's
current popularity is primarily coming from its capabilities in
the server OS market. For the rest of us, we don't want to be
dual-booting with Win 2010, a decade from now. We hope for enough
popularity of Linux to produce commercial software that we can't
get from the OSS community. Just as importantly, I want to be
able to do the above with Debian, and not be forced to switch to
RH just to get access to commercial software that only supports RH
(or whoever dominates the Linux distro market a decade from now).
Dual-booting with Win is bad, dual-booting with RH to run the
commercial stuff not available to Debian will be just as bad.
> As long as RH remains OSS, the worst that can happen is that developers
> have to translate everything from RH into Debian. The fact that RH is
> commercial doesn't enter into the equation.
Yes, as long as RH remains committed to working with and for the
larger Linux community . . . . now read the "Heinz ketchup"
article referred to earlier in this newsgroup. RH wants a
dominant brand name; when they get it what will they do with it?
> Are you saying that Linux users will take a commercial product over a
> free one, just because it is commercial?
Some folks have chosen to use the commercial OSS sound drivers
instead of the ones that come with the kernel source, although in
general I'll agree with you that a majority of Linux users have a
strong preference for opensource stuff. But, what do we do for
software that has no opensource equivalent (yet)? How many
questions do you remember from debian-user and elsewhere that want
to know if there is an opensource word processor that can read and
write MS Word files? There are several commercial versions.
> There is the commercial world and the free world; the free world has
> been growing in spite of the commercial world, adding one more
> commercially supported OS will not change that. In fact, since the free
> world gets most of its users from the commercial world... an increase in
> the number of commercial Linux users should result in more converts to
> free Linux distributions.
Basically I agree here, but what I'm concerned about is what
happens *within* the Linux community when one distro comes to
dominate all. Also keep in mind, that an increasing percentage of
new converts to Linux have a rather ambivalent attitude toward
OSS. These folks are *used* to a market dominated by one OS; they
won't have a problem with a RH dominated Linux community unless
they are also (hopefully) OSS converts as well as Linux converts.
>
> Consider this:
> Did the arrival of a commercial Unix stagnate the free unix
> distributions (in any way), or did the commercial Unix increase the size
> of the unix user base (some of whom switched to the free products
> when they realized that unix was ok)?
I'm not an expert on the history of Unix, so ...
I'm not aware of any truly free Unices early on (we now have the
*BSDs as true, and free, descendants). Most of Unix's history has
been a long running battle between commercial Unices that had no
need nor desire to put together a 'standard' for Unices, allowing
app makers to write software which could run on all the Unices
without major effort on their part. Lets also note that much of
the time and resources of these Unices were spent concentrating on
each other, and not on growing the user base. Until the arrival
of Linux and the free *BSDs, the Unix community was deeply
fragmented. This is precisely what I fear will happen within the
Linux community, and at this point, its RH which is in the
dominant position, so if there is to be fragmentation it will
likely be RH that starts it.
See ya,
--
Ed C.
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