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Technology Stocks : Audio and Radio on the Internet- NAVR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John F. Poteraske who wrote (13614)	4/8/1999 12:47:00 AM
From: Brian D. Potts	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27722

For anyone who is interested A VERY BRIEF UNIX/LINUX history I'm not sure of the exact origin, bell labs perhaps, but ultimately UNIX was released to the public domain (read that as FREE). Universities picked up on this big time. An operating system with no licensing fees and the source code was available for modification. The perfect combination for university computer geeks (I say that in the nicest way). The drawback? public domain software has no support. This was an acceptable drawback for a free operating system. Time passes... each university and other people that have picked up on UNIX develop their own customized flavor of UNIX. Enter LINUX, a UNIX for the PC and an attempt to standardize at least some of the customized UNIX systems. At this point LINUX is also public domain without any support. Finally some companies pick up LINUX (and UNIX) and offer support and easy installation for a fee. This is where Red Hat and companies like them come in. There are still many "flavors" of UNIX available. In fact I believe many software products that are written in UNIX identify the "flavor" or "flavors" of UNIX their software will support. This can be a real pain for software developers as you can imagine. Hundreds, or thousands of customized operating systems that you potentially need to support. Also, the "die hard" UNIX folks (universities and the like) are ticked off at people like red hat for trying to make a buck of public domain software. The good news is the UNIX/LINUX is a VERY old operation system (stable) and there are a few "versions" that are definite front runners. Since LINUX is public domain there are no royalties to be paid to the likes of Microsoft (big margins) If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. Looking for NAVR to make a move bdpotts