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

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (678)	12/2/1998 5:21:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

Anyway all dose gyze got day jobz wid de govmint or someting. cause dey shore don make no money rightin sofware. How dey make anee reel monee? My idea is to make software for the right price. Not like Microhard or Boringland. But make it better. When Boringland put out its embarrassing fonts and practically free ones were much better what did complaining do? Did they automatically upgrade and patch the stuff to improve? Did they source any free fonts out there? The idea is to remain responsive to the users and have the flexibility to offer better and wider choice. With 2000 programmers independently/ co-operatively adding ideas and different code segments that they want then the chances of better code surfacing is maximal. It's just like free software and open source except it's for a fee. And much of the better shareware out there is fee based. The large Beta test base would make the code better and the programmers more responsive to upgrading and improving. And we are not talking 1000's to get a system going. We are talking high incentive for programmer/groups to fire out good code and remain on the job and improve it. Lets's say we define a set of code that a person may want. A video handler, CD player, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, graphical mailer with address books, XML browser, handy X editor, grid data base, popup organizer, dialer, graphics tool editor, wysiwig website editor, Graphical language, easy xtendible graphically based editor, printer handler (drivers). Ok, we have 17 weird programs. That's not a bad set of tools to start. I know there approximations for all of these in Linux but elegance, feature and ease of use is lacking. Say each of these programs sold for an average of 20 dollars. That is a whole 340 bucks. Now that seems high but lets look at the equivalent in Windows. I think if you include VB and MS office we are pushing at least 1500 or more. And that is all most people need. If they want more features and more pizzazz that is where many different people can add features to their programs and go after the power users and charge more. Sounds fair to me. I have spent more than that on books figuring out how to use Linux by now and if you paid me 1 dollar an hour for my time spent I am way past that. EC<:-}