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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bryan who wrote (34012)	11/26/1999 9:13:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108040

Some Linux background......."Linux [pronounced with a short "i" like Lynn-ex] is probably more dangerous to the long-term outlook of Microsoft than the Justice Department. It is an "open source" operating system that can be altered to meet the needs of the users and the basic "kernel" is, importantly, free and can compete directly with Microsoft Windows. Linux is far from perfect at this writing?in many tests Linux comes up slower in use than Microsoft, it is tricky to install and it is not as "user friendly" as Windows, but to concentrate on some of its short-term weaknesses is to be looking at the trees and missing the fact that Bubbles LaRue in all her magnificence is behind those trees [I could have used "?missing the forest", but Bubbles LaRue is a hell of a lot better looking than any damn forest] and users may spend a significant amount of time trying to integrate various components such as security and access under Linux. The Justice Department Could be Linux' Best Friend Microsoft's Windows NT (soon to be called Windows 2000) when run on low cost PCs. Costs about $1,100 for a 10-user license?Linux is free and MSFT might find itself under pressure from this operating system in time. Assuming MSFT does not embrace it, as I would suggest to Bill. Add to that the vagaries of the Justice Department's very successful prosecution of MSFT as an anti-competitive entity and we have the potential for a mix that could very well favor Linux in ways that we can only guess at this writing. One could argue that Linux is just a poor man's UNIX system without all the bell and buckets [I hate whistles] but with the complexity of UNIX. At this point?that would be accurate. It's not a free ride for Linux?yet. Open source is therefore a type of software that includes Linux, which is a specific UNIX-compatible kernel. Included also is Apache server software, the Perl scripting language and others. . Programmers are drawn to this software because it gives them rights they could not obtain from Microsoft, rights such as the right to copy the program, the right to re-distribute those copies, the ability to improve and change the program and the right to view code that is created by others. The strength is Linux is in its flexibility and that flexibility is at the user and developer level?therein lays the difference! "