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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (63291)	11/24/2001 10:53:45 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I think that is correct. But I am pretty sure that Red Hat will reconsider it's religious belief in open-source in a way, that will allow them to bundle commercial software, just like their competitors do (e.g. SuSE). So if you get the OS with your computer, there is nothing that prevents it from having voice recognition etc. included and fully supported. It differs a great deal between the different people in the open-source arena, how much of the software should be free. The general attitude is that the infrastructure on which application are made, should be free, and that communication between software should be welldocumented and free. This gives the most competitive market and the best user experience. Some people, like Richard M. Stallman, goes further and requires all software to be free, and Red Hat goes pretty much in the same direction. This attitude helps many projects get started, especially because any free project is preferred to any non-free project by the FSF, Red Hat etc. But when it came to DNS servers, Bind was used by even Debian, although it didn't use the GPL license. Simply because it was a part of the operating system, where you cannot compromise quality and where the non-free solution was the only one that was good enough. I also remember Red Hat 5.0 - it came with a paid Qt license. You could copy most of Red Hat 5.0 to your friends, but not the Qt parts. Essentially, this meant the entire KDE environment, and this was also the reason why Gnome was started. Today, Qt is available with a GPL license. Open-source is about making things work. If it doesn't work, use something better. If you are religious or an open-source developer, use Debian Linux. If you are a business and just want to get things done, open-source or not, use SuSE Linux or Red Hat. And if Red Hat doesn't learn the lesson soon, SuSE will take over as the Linux supplier of choice for businesses and consumers. Lars.