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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (1885)	12/1/1999 11:58:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 2615

Bob Young (RH honcho) gave a talk in Toronto. What he said was kind of humourous. He went around Linux land looking for companies and people who could shore up a promotion of Red Hat. What he got was a lot of gee whiz this thing worked wonders for us guys but in a small sampling not one used Red Hat! A couple had Debian and one Slackware! What he said was that Linux was all about hands on control of the product. In the old write your own software days that was what the DOS PC promised actually. But it had few enterprise solutions until Novell. What people need is home grown or flexible controllable solutions. Too much out ofthe box and you get stymied in capability where it counts. If you want to connect two gizmos on the retro rockets and ref the thing to 100,000 the message on the screen is "get the latest upgrade" While Linux is still upgrade intensive as far as desktop solutions go its networkability and big computing capability is still screwdriver and sweat and the promise of real bang for the buck. When I set up a computer with a SCSI CDROM and adaptec card from early days I found that Linux off the CD would come up and install much easier than 3.11. In fact to get drivers to see the 1542 card AND the SCSI CD took looking around for old drivers and a lot of trouble in 3.11. The drivers off the net did not work in a 1521 or a 1542 card. I had often found that free software of shareware was cheaper and would get the job done where commercial stuff or MS "solutions" were just too expensive, hard to try out to see if they worked and frequently limiting. Once I bought a 700 dollar version of MS Basic that had a database engine. Great program, did great things. Up to a point. It would not work on a network. It was limited to 128 megabyte database. And When I called about its "upgrade" to Visual Basic or to Windows I was told It is not a windows product. It will not upgrade to VB, you have to go out an buy VB. We do not support Basic 7.0 anymore. Nice. Real nice. Real, real nice. I decided then and there that MS was a waste of time and money and many ofthe commercial developers were that too, who played with MS. All their programs were too limiting. I appreciate Richard Stallman's frustration in his dealing with Xerox on the same plane. I still went out and bought VB for its promise to enter the world of finished commercial products. No such deal awaited. Sure you could write cutesy stuff that used windows, but a finished product that used all the communication and advanced features of windows? Forget it. You would have to add 5,000 dollars worth of add ons. Nice business. No usability for sweat equity. If I have to start from scratch I will start were the playing field is even and the upward path has no roadblocks. The ground is fairly bumpy with Linux. It is not a toy but it is no Rolls Royce either. It has a stick shift and four wheels and a hand crank to start it and you estimate your speed by counting telephone poles. But at least I know what is under the hood even if the manual is in Chinese. And I own it. EC<:-}