RE: [Jeff Covey @ Freshmeat] We Are Losing the Browser War

From: kragen@pobox.com
Date: Sun Apr 01 2001 - 03:01:46 PDT


Josh Cohen <jcohen@avogadro.com> writes:
> >And Linux doesn't? You need to check around more. Linux eats NT's
> >lunch for a lot of small shops out there and a number of large ones.
>
> The little small shops and basement ISPs werent
> gonne buy either solaris or NT anyway..

My little ISP runs almost exclusively Solaris, although they have some
FreeBSD and Windows boxes sitting around for workstations. Lots of
little ISPs run NT.

> This argument about sales vs installs is getting old.
> THe days of most Linux being installed from downloading
> are clearly over. Most people I know (and I know lots
> of linux users) buy a redhat CD.
> Yes, they share it among their friends or burn it and share
> it around, but this is not different than Windows...
> Those same people have pirated copies of win2k on their
> 'other' machines just as well.

At KnowNow, we have one copy of Debian which one of us burned; we have
a bunch of machines installed from it. At my previous company, we had
an InfoMagic subscription, and had three or four machines in the
office installed from various Linux distributions therefrom. Neither
office has any unlicensed copies of any version of Windows.

> >Although weighted strongly by buying power, I doubt if the HPUX and
>
> >Solaris desktops are nearly as numerous as Linux now. If you subtract
> >government, finance, and heavy engineering they would be dwarfed.
>
> I was comparing server usage.

No, you weren't; you were talking about why MSIE was ported to Solaris
and HPUX (and IRIX, although you didn't mention that) but not Linux.
Server usage is completely irrelevant.

> I can only imagine the outrage if Microsoft shipped a new
> product runnin on linux. Aside from the jokes
> about MS's own OS not being good enough, people
> would be incensed that MSFT was allowed to get away
> with "using" or taking advantage of the sweat of
> the open source developers...
>
> Such hypocrisy...

You can find better things to do with your time than imagine hypocrisy
and then get outraged at it, I hope. Or is Avogadro running through a
slow time right now?



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:25:22 PDT