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

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (667)	12/1/1998 10:13:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2615

From where I sit on my Golden Throne in the Crystal Paranoia Palace, yes, I suggest that it seems that free software will eventually be supplanted by code that is built on an economic model. Eventually gaunt plague racked free programmers will begin to die of malnutrition and other diseases as the returns on their efforts fail to support body and soul. Fat Cats living off expensive storefront consultation enterprises that fix free software configuration problems will cater for a while to the roving band of homeless programmer begging for scraps at the shareware soup kitchen but eventually the streets will be bare and dusty winds will blow up and down the busy marketplaces sending pages of old FAQ's whirling in the shadow of abandoned freeware tenement slums. Witness the attempt to unionize Bill's horde of contract programmers. Why don't they band together and write another OS? There are enough of them. Investment Capitalists! The opportunity is there! Not that I have anything against free but I don't see how programmers make any money at it. There are precious few home consultation jobs. And if you look behind O'Reilly and all those "free" software people you will find a huge money machine in books and consultation at 100 dollars an hour. Linux had to make itself maximally available to capture a market. Fine. But it is not free really. If you want to set up a real Linux site that does real stuff there is a lot of time and money you have to go through to produce solutuions. The average person could not patch a program or a kernel. If he has to hire someone to do it, that is big bucks. Linux does not have to be free. All it has to be is more functional in a tool use sense and better as a server and OS. That it can be someday. Hopefully without X as the graphical mainstay and with some Unix obfuscation cleared away. EC<:-}