Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Len Bullard scripsit: > 1. Uncertain business models. The lack of indemnification > is a showstopper. They better work that out pronto if > they want to compete for big accounts. True. > 2. Lack of IP. This makes it hard to stay competitive > unless they innovate and obtain IP. I don't mean the > competition to get market share, but the competition > to keep cash flow given costs. I think the SCO > episode is at least indicative of the problem. They > do need multiprocessor capabilities in Linux. Linux *has* multiprocessor capabilities: 4 processors in 2.4, as many as you want (within reason) in 2.5-2.6. (The difference is that the new scheduler schedules tasks in O(1) instead of O(n).) The claim that these capabilities are derived from SCO code is nothing but a lie: calling it FUD would be too polite. > If the open source community owned common IP, they > could make good deals and maintain cash flow positions. > Otherwise, the low cost position evaporates in the > face of licensing costs. Indemnification costs > exacerbate that. Now can they acquire tradable > IP and still meet the "exquisitely high standards" > of the W3C patent policy? They can't. The positions "What I have I keep" and "What I have I share" aren't compatible. The only way to make it work would be to acquire *irrelevant* IP, things that were not needed for open-source implementation, and use that as leverage. > As to the operating system itself, at home I > choose a platform for which a host of reliable > sound processing utilities are available. So > it gets pretty specific when one starts to consider > the desktop apps. If I could afford it, I might > switch to an all Apple solution, but then when > I have to go home and do FoxPro work, I'm back > to Windows. Here's the WineHQ status report on FoxPro. Summary: it basically works. http://appdb.winehq.com/appview.php?appId=296;PHPSESSID=c6754c61eacca78ae628ce6b7826da20 > Good enough is good enough until it isn't. I don't bet > against open source. I'm counting on it. But they better > get a lot smarter about what is required to do business > in environments that require guarantees, warranties, etc. The warranty becomes what you sell, yes. The ketchup analogy works well here: there is no IP in ketchup recipes, but most people buy rather than making their own. -- All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part John Cowan that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part www.ccil.org/~cowan that cooks with olive oil, and the part that www.reutershealth.com cooks with butter. -- David Chessler jcowan@r...
|
