Forwarded message:
Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 11:59:01 -0600 (CST) From: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)
Jim Choate wrote:
succeed in making a serious bid for MS parity. It is still a rare thing for an employer to provide Linux as a the default os on a new-hires pc. How many companies do you know that when a person comes in and configures their pc it contains Linux by default? Not many. Further that percentage is *not*S
This is true, but you have to keep it in the right perspective. The much more interesting question is a broader one: how widespread is GNU copyrighted freeware?
Outside of Linux applications? Very small. I have never worked for a company nor dealt with a customer who as a matter of course used GNU software and was in fact the accepted cannon of that companies computer use policies. Students, individual hobbyist, and small companies (one of the reasons I focus on SOHO in my consulting) are the marked exceptions. The reason these folks can get away with it is their customers if they have any are concerned about the end product and not the process. This isn't true of larger companies who are as concerned with the process because of the impact of budgets, quality control, purchasing, etc.
One can configure a Sun workstation so that it looks, works and feels like a Linux system, runs things like elm, fvwm2, vim, GNU utilities, and so on. I have seen a lot of such configurations, and in fact I do use one like that myself.
As I do, I have a ELC and a Tadpole 3XP that I use Linux on as well as Solaris. I also have a IBM N40 RS/6000 laptop that I run AIX 3.x and PPC Linux on. I've been waiting 2 years for the Linux68k to be ported to the Sun 4/380 platform so I can get rid of BSD on that machine, and the /dev/fb for the Tadpole on Linux SPARC has been in the wings about that long as well. In the Austin area (1M pop.), I have yet to find a single other soul who as a matter of course uses Linux on those platforms. At best I know of about a dozen people who play with it and every case I am the one who got them the CD and prompted their activity. My experience would indicate the interest and by extension future is not there for these platforms except as a point of esoteric interest. Believe me, I *wish* I had more people to talk to and work with on these platforms. I can kill just about any discussion in a Linux user group meeting by asking about SPARC or PPC versions, nobody (figuratively) uses them and nobody is really interested in learning about them. I know of only a couple of articles in the Linux Journal that has even discussed SPARC Linux (and that would indicate a lot of folks don't use it) and have never seen a PPC article.
How many millions more of these do exist?
Very few. The total number of SPARC or PPC (not Mac mkLinux) is measured in the 10's of thousands at best. Consider that out of all the Linux distributors only a couple carry SPARC or PPC versions. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|