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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Howe who wrote (63193)	11/20/2001 3:45:10 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 74651

Director of Sales, formerly CEO... at least he figured out his priorities

To: David Howe who wrote (63193)	11/20/2001 4:47:29 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Respond to of 74651

Re: Open Source Limits Without a viable source of commercial profits the real question becomes "Who will write this code"? As far as I can tell, their are four sources of "subsidized development" that Linux can look to and each has its strengths and weaknesses. The four are: 1. Universities. Obviously the key strength here is an inexhaustible labor pool and a considerable amount of brainpower to match that brawn. The downside is that universities are attracted to projects of "academic interest" rather than commercial value and such interests tend to be both narrow and subject to shifting fashion. For example, there is little academic interest in mundane things like creating device drivers for every new piece of hardware that shows up, or in regression testing to ensure that the latest enhancement works well with software created by the graduating class of two years ago. Such "fit and finish" work accounts for a huge percentage of the costs of making a viable commercial product but it is not something that universities should be spending their time doing. 2. Government laboratories and agencies. Outfits like Sandia, NSA, etc. love Linux because they can control everything (plusses for security) and can add all sorts of specialized capabilities needed for their unique applications. Some of these certainly have larger commercial application (e.g., Linux clusters) but most of these enhancements tend to be very specialized and buried within classified projects. 3. Embedded systems. Here again the attraction is cost and control and the development is subsidized by the hardware. But once again these tend to be very specialized applications and are also subject to protective control. Sure, a TiVo box may be running Linux on the inside, but does that mean that TiVo is making all of its software available for free so that anyone can clone a TiVo box on the cheap without having to buy their product? Not really. 4. Commercial hardware vendors. This is where companies like IBM fit in. Their main interest is selling their hardware and Linux is simply a means to that end. But they walk a delicate line between providing needed enhancements for commercial viability and competing against themselves. The jury is still out here as to where this will lead. Certainly IBM intends to use Linux as a weapon against SUNW, but IBM itself has no interest in seeing Linux obviate the need for its proprietary hardware.