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

To: JC Jaros who wrote (1958)	12/16/1999 1:15:00 AM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2617

Sounds right to me. In a services model, there is not really any practical difference between PD and GPL (or BSD, or Artistic, etc). And the economics of scale will usually favor big ASPs, no matter what the license is on the software they use. And that Java thing will never catch on... nobody in his right mind would give up the power of Fortran.

To: JC Jaros who wrote (1958)	12/16/1999 12:39:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2617

True. GPL favours the Phd or gov't, institution employee who can contract out fix-this-thing-so-it-does-this service. Really, software is almost always specialty use stuff in enterprise places. All enterprises demand special task automation or special inout and output modes for interaction. Each organizations database and business function is different and require different computing and computing skills. Oen package fits all stuff fits Microsoft's business model. But all to often you find the packages are slick and extremely limiting at the same time. In some cases you need line numbering, in some cases you need global search and replace with regular expressions that seek line length, EOL and BOL characters and can group type characters in innovative ways. Unlimited length editors and edotirs that do columns or embedded format commands are efficient tools. Don't see MS for this kind of thing unless you want to pay through the nose. I just decided one day that MS continuing to obsolete code and make it so PC tools or Norton utilities or Lotus did not work was too much for me. And too much money. Ultimately Linux is much cheaper if you want to do real computing. Linux is the ultimate professor's computer, the ultimate small do-it all machine. Harder to use? Definitely, but not harder to use at a high level of skill and computing power. EC<:-}