Gerald,
I think I've answered this already but here goes again,
Sun, IBM, HWP, and Apple make their own hardware. The
hardware design is patented and owned by their respective
companies. No one is allowed to go out and sell an
Ultra-based server without Sun's licensing approval.
They make their O/S to go with the hardware, but they
make money selling the hardware. Even if they sell apps
to go with the systems they sell, they are not a
signifcant part of their companies revenue streams.
In fact, they can give away the apps and still make
their margins.
PC's are qualitatively different and have been since
their inception. They were purposely designed by IBM
then donated to the public domain to introduce price
competition from any number of vendors who wanted to
assemble what was an off-the-shelf product.
Since PC's are inherently cheap computers, they sell
lots of units. There is no reason for anyone selling
a desktop O/S (even RedHat) to NOT want to get into
the applications business because they can't make money
selling proprietary computer hardware (which is by
definition more expensive than an off-the-shelf product).
If you want to be a PC vendor of software and make money,
you have to sell apps, hopefully to lots of people. What
better way to do that than to tie your apps to your own
O/S and lock out the competition??????
I hope you can see, Gerald, that that is problematic,
by definition.
cheers,
cherylw
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