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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (2320)	9/30/2000 10:39:12 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 2615

OPEN SOURCE vs Questionable commercial software It ees a grand debate n'est-ce pas? What to say? I shrug, moi. to open ze source or to close. As dey say, to discuss it over a few beers is out of dah question as there is not enough beer here. One one hand there is the intoxicating ideal of free! free! free! and easy of la source ouverte! No? But how do the progammers eat? Or get projets done on time? Or not lose interest? There are so many softwares to choose that open source is practically necessary to get all the functionality one needs without paying a million to get the thing to do anything at all. But open source is harder to configure, really. To get scanning, parallel port devices, zip drives, sound, samba, networking, dhcp, office software, multi media players, USB, and learn the myriad command line tricks of Unix/Linux is a daunting task indeed. Even doing all that in windows is tough. To get to where it is today, Linux HAD to be open source. If it had depended on commercial packages it would have gone nowhere. To compete with MS's installed base it had to go some and open was its only advantage. But does this disallow commercial packages on Linux? I would say not. In order to get good office software I went out and spent 100 bucks for Applixware and I was not disappointed. I can safely say that what I needed in printing and word processing was amply delivered there. There is a commercial future for Linux. And it will go hand in hand with open source. It still has to and it may for some time yet. When to charge? Well I think that with some careful balancing it would behoove the OS people to look at a BETTER ECONOMIC MODEL so that THE PROGRAMMERS GET PAID. would this have to cost everyone a million? Isn't the idea quality and an OPEN API? We don't have to box people in and go microsoft to win money. But some money has to come in and tech support for badly documented software is not the entire answer. Let's face it there are many improvements that could be made to Linux and particularly its GUI, X. X is an old dog and it is very tired. Never mind GNOME and KDE.. they are patches on a worn out coat. And nobody has the energy to get a group together to improve it. Colour maps in X are still a bad thing. It should not be up to the individual programs to control their own resources. Where is this going to get done? Is open source the final answer here? Maybe not? Would anybody mind a paying a few bucks for a killer GUI? It could be done open source but someone has to pay the cost? If not the user then who? Banner ads? Let's get realistic. And how long are we going to wait? E. Charters netlinux.dynip.com mailto:echarters@primus.ca