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"Price: $2995 USD.

        * Dual Core 2.2MHz Intel processor."

Several times over the past years I've seen announcements of DELL supporting Linux. Then it was mysteriously retracted after a day or a few. Hmmm. Anyways, Emperor Linux and others already sell DELL computers with Linux. IF, any good comp engr knows the hardware itself comes from Tiawan, China, etc and the chips are not designed by DELL (do they design any chips? at least HP does some). So, the system you buy from TigerDirect or NewEgg is basically the same. And everyone sells a warranty these days.
Best,
TimJowers, http://www.serviza.com/, We recommend Linux.

So is Win-Tel dead now that Intel is selling Linux? Imaginge the millions of people running Linux and contributing to Open Source. Sourceforge is going to have to innovate fast to keep things running efficiently.

When will Linux desktop shipments outstrip Mac OSX? Microsoft Windows? I evaluated as of Oct 24 with the release of Fedora Core 6 that the Linux Desktop is on parity with Windows. Novell SUSE, Madriva, and Ubuntu are all great desktops. Some features are superior to Windows. Some need some polish. We even have offered an "OpenBooter" with the top desktop Linuces pre-installed. Simply plug into your USB and fire away. (Of course old computers need to boot from a helper CD due to their BIOS not being able to boot from a USB drive.)

TimJowers, http://www.serviza.com/ 2007 will be remembered as the Year of Open Source. The year the market realized its technical superiority in many areas and its order-of-magnitude faster development cycles.

Good post. Guess that's why Windows CE sells for $4 per copy. I noticed Softie has droped their OS price to around $60 while maintaining their Office price at around $300. STill waiting for Oracle to start selling at a reasonable price given equivalence with free software.
Interesting economics.
Tim
BTW, the mozart music on the posted site is neither free as in GPL nor free as in BSD. Maybe someone ought to make a scroe-synth site and make the music really free (though only as good as the synth.)
http://www.serviza.com/ Serviza Monster Linux Computers and Training Bundles.

Actually, the rate of innovation in FOSS is break-neck. What happens is people innovate from need. Sony and Softie are innovating to create market traps. You can infer everything else I'm going to say; but reconsider your thought that FOSS will stay a second class citizen.
The best RDBMS: MySQL and then maybe PostgreSQL
The best server OS: Linux
The best desktop OS: A fully loaded linux such as Serviza's offering, Ubuntu or other debian-deriv, a Knoppix deriv.
The best web server: Apache
The best development platform: Eclipse
Man, the list is growing longer by the week. The foolish belief Softie and Sony are innovating will lead to wasting lots of dollars. Innovations happens not because of a mandate from a board of directors but because of a bright idea. FOSS is a way those ideas can get to market within hours, days, or weeks and do so at minimal cost. The "ROI argument" to suppot your MNC and its patent office in simply a relic. Ideas occur to people doing the work, not to people sitting on yachts. History also shows this.

Best,
TimJowers
Software is FREE FOSS. GNU/Linux. Innovation inside. P.S> Once reason LiveCD's don't sell well is one can simply download the code right away. Therefore, what is the long term outlook for BluRay and other CD/DVD formats?

Talked to a guy who owns some trash trucks and said in NY there was a vendor who processed the oil and added additives so it ran in the trucks WITHOUT modification. Sold for $1.04/gallon and guy said he was saving $300/month PER TRUCK. NY state government shut them down. Said antitrust law makes it illegal to sell for less with like 4 cents below the established price. E.g. legally it is illegal to sell vegetable oil for less than diesel in the state of NY. I'm sure this is the same sort of nonsense going on in all states.

Folks, the road to freedom is exactly like this article. Home power production. The aristocrats will continue to make competition illegal. Just take a look at how handily electric power was killed. Hobbyists in the mid-1990's were making cars which could go twice what Ford and GM were able to make. Surprise. Guess a garage is better than a lab! Not to mention the millions to billions of subsidies the country spends on oil and oil-related infrastructure rather than spending such on electric (induction charging stations, power rails, etc).

Technology in this country is presently eliminated by large corporations and the government who works for them. Only by innovations and a concerted citizen adoption and cooperation can innovation be reborn in the USA. The vege-diesel is going to be a big problem for the lawmakers who work for the MNC's because the technology works. People are driving around in trucks powered by vegetable oil. And, yes, saving money. It's a fact.

The government, at least in NY State, has outlawed this. What does that mean? Like Cubans are we under a regime who wants us to stay in the 1900's? Is this like so many science fiction novels where individuals are not allowed to excel. Yes. It exactly is. Soon, perhaps, the personal use of innovative technologies will be made illegal - for the corporate good of course.

TimJowers http://www.serviza.com/ Fully Loaded Innovation. Power on and GO!

Well put! Funny to see how some people are stil thinking like its 1999. Loking through some state government bids recently I same up with a new one for the lawyers - willful negligence. Also for not-for-profit insurance companies who are legally bound to refund profits to the state insurance coffers and such. A very probably legal case can be made as anyone buying proprietary alternatives when Open Source is clearly available is potentially commiting willful negligence. I suspect once the lawyers start to understand a little more about technology they we'll see some surprising lawsuits. E.g. also the apparent current practice by the big 5 of not accepting emails (or treating as spam) from a domain with a dynamic IP. Spam labeling is one wide open lawsuit against the email houses.
Anyhoo, best of luck to Malaysia. One can hardly imagine a choice where proprietary would be better when an Open Source competitor is well established.
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ Fully Loaded Linux Computers. Everything's installed. Power on and GO!

We bundle Linux. We recommend Linux. Comparing a Linux computer to one running Windows is like comparing a Windows PC to a handheld. The number of apps and capabilities in Linux are just orders of magnitude superior. That's why we call ours a "Monster Computer" but are open to other terms. Or lowest costs is to geta disk for $99 or so and turn your PC into a Monster.
Open Source is the killer app. 100+ games are included with FC6. And in the dev space Linux obliterates 'dows. You just have to see how much you can do with Linux to really appreciate how it is light years ahead of Windows.
Cheers,
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Service Monster Computers. Linux. Open Source. Make it what you will.

SLAM? I only briefly read the paper but testng with "drivers" and "stubs" is covered in a 500 level SW Testing course in the university I attended. Rather than being an innovative research, this should have been present in the design from the beginning. Maybe they did it for their latest os iteration.

VMWare and Xen. Now that's innovation. Did you see the 120 or so VMWare images created for the challenge this summer? Now that was cool.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ Serviza Monster Open Soure Linux Computers and FOSS and GNU/Linux Training

I took the challenge and am looking at the m$ft research site... but its quite boring. I mean, researching education? Edubuntu isn't researching, its delivering.

Hardware development? So softie wants to get into hardware once the fact that equivalents for 80% of what they do can be downloaded for free on the web? Recall what Ballmer said in India a few weeks back about softie needing to move to services and support. Or is the "research" how to make new specs with ever-tighter licensing restrictions to ensure Open Source cannot use the next generation of hardware. I'm not joking. The new camera memory specs are basically only made to outlaw open source implementations.

I'm still waiting for 'softie to make good on their promise for a distributed OO system as documented in their 1994 DCOM paper. Where I come from if you make a promise you keep it. If you cannot then you never make the promise. Their lie killed Next but, like most of their promises, never was completed. I believe their research to be an absolute joke when I look at their products. Look at Exchange. Talk about productive Groupware? Where's the innovation? You mean email, meetings, and contacts are all they could think of/duplicate?

Here's a good one: http://research.microsoft.com/speech/
What? China? So Dragon consumer apps were all but killed and now softie's answer is someone in China will make their speech recognition work? The amazing thing is with their Billions upon Billions their products are no better than the Free and Open Source Software on the web. Simply amazing. A true testimony to what happens when a company focuses on killing innovation in the market rather than innovating themselves. They are an embarrassment to any computer scientist and what I wonder is how many Ph.D.'s spend more than one year there. They should be embarassed. But most everyone will side with money.
    Meanwhile the FOSS apps are catching up by leaps and bounds. In case you missed it, Linux server surpassed 'dows in feature/funtionality several years back, Linux desktop is now superior to the 'dows desktop, MySQL/Postgresql are as good/better than m$ft rdbms, and a horde of FOSS are closing in on most everything else 'softie sells. They may need to research how to make money in the new Software Paradigm... I guess their monkey-business with NOVL shows where their true research is - and that's not innovation!
Cheers,
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Fully Loaded Linux with Open Source equivalent to $261k in the 'softie space. Power on and GO! Make it what YOU will.

Bro, Concurrent programming? Are you joking? That's not research, that's history. The #1 problem with the tech industry is people who keep trying to re-invent the past. AJAX client-server wannabe's and such.

Plus, M$FT has zero reputation for standards. I spent almost a decade chasing their latest spec which they themselves never put in their own apps. Then I wised up. Been free of the 'dows virus for almost a year now and having a blast every day. No computer scientist or engineer worth their degree should get themselves locked into softie serfdom. Software is FREE! You should be too!

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ - Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Open Source. Make it what YOU will.

soliptic,

what version and distro of Linux are you talking about? The modern releases are at least equivalent to Windows in usability. In time loss, Windows sucks you dry hands down. Of course for the basic user OO and such is mostly the same on all but the lack of a decent memory manager in Windows will kill any office worker who tries to do more without moving into the multi-GB of RAM.

I do agree that moving to Linux from Windows is best with some additional learning. Today's distros are transparent with menus and GUI's but, as always, you can do 1000 times more when you drop dow to the command line. Heck, every version of Windows plays "find the control panel applets" and other such goofiness anyways; so having to move to another menu for Services in Linux will be no more learning effort than moving to another version of Windows. Maybe less as the Linux stuff is logically organized. Your argument may have been valid about Windows 2000 versus RedHat 7.3 or such a comparison.

I'll challenge you this. Sit a very inexperienced person in front on Linux and then Windows. Repeat for another such person in the other order. What will you find? Both are equally user hostile. The application-oriented OS designs and the very limited interfaces are quite non-normal for how humans interact with their world. Very little maturity exists in either user interface; but, that said, the newer Linux distros have all sorts of nifty UI features whereas innovation is basically dead in the Windows GUI space AFAICT - but I've been Windows-free for almost a year now. And never lookingb back. It should be called "Walls" rather than "Windows" as that's what I found when I tried to write complex code on 'dows. But on Linux I can pop open the source (with Open Source apps on Linux) and get busy.

Most of all, today's distributions come with $10,000USD to $261,000 worth of software when compared to the investment needed in 'dows to get the same functionality. That's serious money. The Softies are in Zombie land but the reaper will come to harvest them if for no other reason than they are wasting their companies would-be profits on needless purchases. When one says "Linux" one infers the whole of "Open Source" and I suspect about 80% of the apps sold by the top 5 SW companies have Free and Open Source equivalents. In many cases the Open Source apps are better simply because they conform to standards. Talk about wasting time: try integrating softie junkola with a mainframe or with LDAP or such. That kinda stuff is standard practice for Linux.

But, the number one reason to use Linux is not price. I will have to agree. It is Openness. Open software means no Walls - unlike the World of Windows and Walls.

Best,
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Power on and GO!

Jym Zavada demoed this at the LUG before last here. He got a DSL machine for about $300 and then migrated to another distro. One trick is to turn off inode read counters to minimize hits on the flash and give longer lifetime. His presentation info is at: http://www.trilug.org/?q=node/30

Looks like Intel wants to do the same. With the low cost of ARM and other processors, they are just trying to get in the market before it blossoms. Low cost, good power computing will be upon us at least by 2008. What I imagine is a PDA-like device that blootooth's to a large screen, DVD player burner, and other periphs/household electronics. You can carry the PDA and for the average user it will be fine for a laptop/PC. It'll have the 2in-3in screen but also can have a touchscreen (like Motion computing sorta) that one could carry with it.

Nice to see Intel and others promoting computing. Will certainly be a computer world in a few years. Not too long until everyone alive will have been born after the computers were invented.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ - Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Power. Power on and GO!

What's the pressure to which the sound will simply bounce off of a person? Probably alot. The advance from levitating fluff to ants probably had to greatly raise the dB. Maybe in quicksand or dirt something could move a human. Like with earthquakes. I'm utterly impressed by news articles and computer articles which have little to no scientific information. I guess the author doesn't really understand what is happening and the audience doesn't really care. Or maybe I totally missed something.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/

Yeah, that's what bugs me about getting my science from news articles. Any wavelength at high enough decibels is going to levitate stuff and more. Silly to write about a scientific experiment and have almost zero scientific info.
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Join the Open Source revolution. Easily and Quickly.

Whats wrong with Calc? I think Calc is really good but have done tons more with Excel. Heck, I worked on a team which coded a full DSS in Excel macro plus a bunch of Perl and KSH back in the day. :-) Uh, does Excel even support Excel macro language any more? Guess it went the way of OLE and all the other technologies MSFT told us developers to use but never used themselves.

I haven't used Exchange for a long time. In remote, distributed offices one can do alot better with Evolution (great spam filtering), dotproject, and a few other tools. Plus, Courier is quite easy to configure. Of course I also don't have a fax machine so the nifty features of Exchange just are no longer needed by me. The problem with trying to make an app an infrastructure is the resulting products are bloatware. When you get an 80 deep call stack for any web request in WebLogic, then it's time to hit the reset/relearn button. When your answering machine requires $10k worth of Exchange licenses then you need to hit the rethink/clueless button.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/bizbook/ "The Business Guide to Free Information Technology". Free book. Software is FREE!

Plus most email is still run through Sendmail and Postfix I'd wager.
Is HULA the same as Netware OpenExchange (SLOX) and its open source deriv?

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Serviza Monster Computers with Open Source Training Bundles

Not sure of your implication but I think you are saying Open Source is not mature. First, MySQL was not written by 19 year old kids. Secondly, Posgresql is in lineage older than Oracle of Microsoft's RDBMS. Thridly, most of the Internet runs on Apache and probably most of it runs on MySQL much more than any other RDBMS. Google on google adwords and MySQL. They did not have to revert to MysQL from Oracle because of problem in MySQL.

What I have always seen is some techie or psuedo-techie manager specs out Oracle or a Miscrosoft product. Then the company buys it. The techie is a specialist in something and has been to weeks of indoctrination training in Oracle or Softie so obviously will recommend whatever he/she thinks will give the importance, high pay, and longevity. The manager read a magazine once and went to a tradeshow and wants to pick the system that doesn't rock the boat.

Fortunately, the current generation of techies have used open source. But it takes alonog time to get rid of dead wood. I consulted in 2001 for a huge insurance company which still required 3270 screen scraping and input rather than opening up their mainframe to JDBC. Well, that inefficient process had worked in the 1960's when the now managers/execs started so they knew it and were comfortable with it. Most of all, they had insurance contracts for at least 1 entire state, maybe 1/4 of the nations military and poor, and such. They were set. Nobody is going to compete with them because the choices are political rather than practical. This is the present issue with Open Source. While mega-corps fall bechind theis opens a real opportunity for the SMB's to use the best technology and leap forward.

If you are still recommending Oracle or Microsoft's SQL Server or even db2 then you owe it to your client to get up to speed on MySQL, Postgresql, and other Open Source projects. Of course, if yor client is profitable because of politics or marketing and not because of core value, then you can recommend smoke signals if you want.

BTW, do you even have any clue what the Oracle contract requires WRT publishing benchmarks? Suffice to say, you can't unless they first approve. At least that was the deal back when they did they $1M BS challenge in 1999/2000. You're mention of a CIO with one brain cell is right. Any CIO still buying Oracle must be smoking dope. Plain and simple. (At least unless they have a large installed base of apps using non-standard SQL etc). That reminds me of a story one of the other consultants told about how they walked in on their CEO and he was smoking dope in his office... but that company only had a few $10-$20M J2EE projects it was doing for clients!

Have you ever studied set theory? Have you ever studied computer science? An RDBMS is a real software applciation. No amount of BS or FUD can remove the real engineering and science behind it. Fortunately, this science is well-understood and also mature.

In responce to your implication that an Open Source package is not supported and that it would take down an enterprise, I call "BS". Have you even placed a call to MySQL AB to talk to them about this? Of course Oracle is larger but that's because they are selling a 50 cent belt for $50. The era of globalization leverages mass manpower and Open Source does as well. Why fund $80M submarines and such rather than the ones actually doing the work? You'd do much better for yourself and the world to spend money with an Open Source company than with a proprietary one. At least from the practical viewpoint of future product development.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Serviza Monster Linux Computer with Open Source Training Bundles

I really like Postgresql too. It is just easy and works right. And, of course, is the oldest. I'm not sure of how Postgres compares to Mysql. Seen any good comparisons?

Having worked with all of them from the programmer's viewpoint I can definitely say none stands out as steller adn all offer the same feature set. I always hear people state Oracle has high performance but NEVER saw that to be true. What I saw alot of was having to hand-tune the indexes. Oracle's query optimizer must not work. Even in join queries unused fields have to be selected due to Oracle's non-working query optimizer. That said, it probably still performs better than SQL Server. Just about the same as db2 or postgres in my testing. Actually, for some things like inserts Oracle sucks. Of course Teradata could be much faster for complex queries but nwo one is largely talking about hardware - and that's the jist of it. Most of the ideas really are comparing Oracle on a quad server with 12GB RAM to something else on a PC. With today's PC's going toward Dual Core and 4 GB of RAM (that's what Serviza presently sells as a Linux desktop - http://www.serviza.com/ the argument is sorta becoming more clear.

Also, the failure of Oracle to provide even decent programmer tools is disgusting. In the Open Source world I have an arsenal of tools to work with Postgres and Mysql. Really, there is not legitimate reason to pay money for an RDBMS system. Set theory has been well-understood for decades and the major commercial RDBMS vendors are not innovating. In 15 years of software projects I've yet to see one that could not have been done with today's Mysql or Postgresql. But I've seens millions handed to Oracle over and over and tens of thousands handed to Microsoft. To me, Oracle is the premier example of selling the same thing as everyone else but charging 10 times as much. It's like buying a hotdog at the game - you're paying $5 for something that costs 50 cents. "The Million Dollar Pizza" book addresses this waste on a personal level but on a corporate level the exc.s are too busy scamming the company to worry about its long term health. Anyone buying Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle in 2007 ought to have their head examined and probably the investment docked from their paycheck. Of course momentum and other arguments apply and that's why companies still spend millions on Mainframes to do what a PDA of today could do.

My $.02,
TimJowers

This is the most ludicrous posting yet. 1,500 desktops at roughly $4000 USD each?
Here's a realistic brakdown of what this would cost in the USA:
1) Hardware: $1000 (let's get something really nice) (Could be as low a $400)
2) Setup the template system. 1 month. Say, $15,000 in manpower
3) Dup disks. $50/PC is the going rate for assembly and SW load.
4) First boot each PC (clearly this could be coded but lets add in this anyways). Have the library staff follow the directions and enter a computer name. I'd venture to say most library systems in the USA already have people who have used Linux or Unix at least. Not like this is the first time they are using a computer or something run by a CPU! Say $50/PC.
5) Shipping to site. $50.
Grand Total $1160 per PC. And I'm sure they used crappy hardware so it would be more like $560/PC. If they are paying any more then fire the idiot in purchasing and the idiot managing the project. If they are paying less, then give the genius in purchasing free movie coupons and the genius manager a bonus.

That's just common sense.
TimJowers, http://www.serviza.com/ Open Source Linux Computers and Training Bundles

But don't you know Microsoft has a patent on the "isnot" operator? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/19/14 26256&tid=155&tid=109

With the patent office working for Microsoft of course Novell figures it cannot win in court. The US Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/microsoft-2001.html) gave them carte blanche to run a monopoly and they plan to take full advantage. I heard within the last month from one of the largest computer resellers that they STILL are required to install Windows (or DOS) on EVERY PC they ship.

Clearly Microsoft operates above the law. The US law that is. I like to think they do not operate above the laws of society and progress. Their oppression of technological advance has held us back about 10 years and may just snap back in their face in 2007. Clearly Open Source is the leading software in many countries outside of the USA. The irony for Microsoft is I can download from Sourceforge Open Source softare that does 80% of anything they do and better yet is totally customizable.

I think it is clear to anyone that if Microsoft as much as raises one lawsuit against it will be counter-sued out of business. In fact, that could be the absolute best way to get technology progressing again. The money in Open Source may be in suing the monopoly. Talk about a taste of your own medicine. That said, Microsoft is no more than an IP thug in their recent move and, like any thug, will probably pick on the weakest first. They'll probably try to shutdown strong but fledgling Open Source projects such as TinaPOS or L'ane POS and then work their way up to Linux. Once the courts set a precedent of allowing Microsoft to squash Open Source projects then they will try to do it with the larger projects. Given how they won in US vs. Microsoft one would not be surpirsed to see them get the courts to outlaw MySQL, Linux, and Apache - or at least outlaw useful features. Their current ability to manipulate the courts into absolutely ridiculous findings (e.g. Web Browers is part of an OS!) could lead to the USA being a non-played in the coming Technological Singularity. I guess like Manufacturing in the Wal-Martification of America, Microsoft will have us be a purchaser only in the coming future of technology. They cannot simply fire people ni Seattle and invest Billions in India but will have to outlaw progress here to stop Open Source. In the end, they will of course fail.

Microosft's investment in NOVL reminds me of their investment in APPL a few years back. With their investment in Novell they hedge their bets and could sell SUSE once the gig is up and the general public realizes Windows is inferior to Linux and Microsoft products are inferior to their Open Source competitors. I expected them to start selling Linux in 2007 but this move was not well-orchestrated IMO. It leaves anyone with any sense avoiding NOVL and certainly any business with any desire to survive would never partner with Microsoft. But alot of businesses sell to WMT and lose money. I even know that a major ATM vendor pays WMT (loses money) to maintain their ATMs. Worshiping at the feet of the wealthy will never give you a better life.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : Serviza Monster Linux Computers and Open Source Training Bundles

I think that is clear too. At the very least Thailand could have accepted the laptops and sold them to buy books. Military governments in the past have accepted food supplies for their starving people and sold or otherwise disposed of them improperly. Better yet, requireed Wikipedia on the lpatops and forget the books. Looks like Thailand is headed to be the next North Korea. Idiots at the helm.

TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ - Serviza Monster Linux Computers and Open Source Training Bundles

hmmm... $10k on SW per year? Duh, buy Linux once and get more capabilities than you're paying for now.

    Linux HW vendors high priced? DSL sells a ~$300 nanoitx. Lots of others sell in the sub-$500 range. The high price you are paying for a 'doze pc is the Microsoft tax although you may not realize how it works. My understanding is soft gives DELL, HP, D&H, SystemMax (Tiger Direct), Frye's and such very deep discounts on the OS ($10 was quoted here on slashdot by someone else). Thus they'd effectively lock in their $300 profit per CD simply on their arrangement with soft. The arrangement I've been told as recently as two weeks ago is still that every laptop and every PC that leaves must have doze or dos (workstations are different). In fact, a head-to-head comparison on 4G, AMD 3800++, 1TB, geForce video systems shows Linux vendors near the low end of the cost on only hardware and a small fraction of the cost once any software (antivirus, office suite, etc) is added in to the package. E.g. DELL starts off leading the dozers in low cost versus Gateway, HPQ, et al but quickly vaults up as they nail the customer on SW upgrades. In contrast, Linux vendors like Serviza offer complete GPL business suites at what would be valued in the $10's of thousands for Windows comparables. That trend will only continue. The Bundle will kill 'soft as we know it. That's why they are buying into NOVL. They're not stupid.

The real benefit of releasing Vista is eliminating the secondary market on Windows XP licenses. Like many others I have a stack of Widnows licenses here I am not using and would like to sell on EBay if I had the time. The fiar market price of an OS such as DOS is around $10-$15. That's what would happen to doze if they did not keep releasing new versions to keep the FUD factor up.

Cheers,
TimJowers
Serviza Monster Computers, http://www.serviza.com/ We Make Open Source Rock out of the Box.

Softie isn't worried about licensing but just trying to ride this one out. Clearly the Open Source world has moved to compatibility while the softie world is like you say: nightmares of integration. So many venders and even so many non-integrated products from Microsoft. Not sure if you've visited the php-mysql world lately but is it simple, clear, and works. Something people used to claim about 'soft. But the real problem is bundling. Soft is getting wiped away with their own trick. Why buy apps 1,2,3,5,...20 when you can just get RedHat, SUSE, or Fedora Core and, BAM, you've got alot install, configured, and working. Buy an Open Source computer and you'll have it all ready to go. You'll still be months behind in trying to get this work on a Microsoft-based platform. Not to mention the hari-kari that is Oracle and J2EE. On the flip side, you can buy an Open Source computer and have a J2EE server already setup and running and also a complete dev suite. The bundle will kill soft and they know it. Buying into NOVL just shows they actually can follow the market. Sure they're going to try to get as much as they can out of the winds of momentum but within a few years they'll move to the speedboats as well. While Windows may have little future in the bundled world, Office surely doesn't! how ironic is that as Bundling is what made Office! Does Word 07 even support export to PDF or the Open Document Format? 6B cash cow and cannot even meet the needs of the average office worker! That tells you they are putting their money in Linux rather than their existing product set. They see the future as clearly as everyone else and the future (and present actually) is Open Source.
TimJowers
http://www.serviza.com/ : We Make Open Source Rock out of the Box!

I had to comment as Slashdot is depressing. The entire front page is Vista articels. Who cares? With so much opportunity and excitedment in the Open Source world this reminds me of people talking about Motorola CPUs in the early 1990's. There is just simply so much opportunity in the FLOSS world one is overwhelmed. Jump in and pick one and go with it. Retarded limitations such as the "1 HW" thing are just one simple example of how MSFT has lost it. Hell, they suckered me with their Cairo promise. What liars!!! The ability to block copy NT back in the day was one allure of it. Now, we have so much more with Linux that who cares. And Linux is only a small percentage of what FLOSS has to offer. At Serviza (Serviza Monster Computer) we are just trying to simplify the purchase procedure so businesses can add a new capablity to their network with simply buying the products. The next big hurdle for the computer industry is to graduate from the PC era - both M$FT and PC hardware specs. We are topping out the norm with 4G RAM, 1 TB disk, etc but clearly the future of the computer industry is not in the PC spec. And that also means flexible HW configs. Something M$FT shows they have not foreseen.