Slashdot Mirror
Doug Michels & Ransom Love speak pre-Caldera Forum
A reader writes "Now that SCO Forum has been rebadged as Caldera Forum, I decided to duck out of it this year. But according to this interview, Ransom Love doesn't want to make too many changes. The same cannot be said for Linux and Unix though, where it looks like he's pretty much given up on Linux on the desktop except as a thin client with Tarantella. Coincidentally, there's an accompanying interview with Doug Michels, where he talks about life post-Unix. Seems like the two companies are pretty tight. " Update: 08/17 6:29 PM by M : Jason Perlow wrote in with his review of OpenUNIX 8.
Love never understood the OpenSource movement or the GPL, and probably never understood how to run a company either. It's amazing Caldera has been around for so long with the CEO consistently doing the Wrong Thing [tm].
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Let's drop the stupidity of the old PC client/server model. Although that model is much more sane with Unix, it still isn't very scalable or low-maintence.
A thin client, or hybrid thin-client approach is the answer in most corporate environments. We all saw what a city in FL is doing in terms of Linux on the desktop - served apps, much lighter weight clients. This is cost-effective and reliable.
For the home user, yes, Linux on the desktop is a great idea. But it can't be a replacement for Windows on the home desktop - that's throwing hard work at a bad idea. Instead, the focus should be on hiding the user from the complexities of application installation, etc. Windows fails at that. My dad has no idea how to install applications, or why he would want to. We can't be successful if Linux on the desktop is as hard as Windows on the desktop.
Of course, for tech-heads, Linux on the desktop is still viable. But we're not most people.
"But you sell a desktop version of Linux?
We believe we can save 20 to 30 percent with Linux on the desktop, but there's a difference between running Microsoft on the desktop and how we see customers running Linux. We people running Linux desktops managed by Volution, or running Windows on the desktop and accessing Linux through Tarantella.
But as the Internet becomes a more pervasive business model, Linux will become a thin client, or a customised client. We are moving away from monolithic clients to a desktop operating system that will be more customised to fit the business need.
The challenge of the desktop is evolving. The traditional monolithic desktop is not for Linux but the evolving thin client desktop is ideal for it. Something like 80 to 90 percent of personal time is now spent in the browser, and as the Internet becomes predominant use of desktop, applications will follow. As the desktop becomes the browser, you will see Linux become the predominant platform on devices that connect to the Internet. "
Users don't like thin clients, and first person
who says users like what you tell them to like
has never had a user.
It's nice to see that scodera is banging there
collective head agains't the same wall half the
industy is...and they are still convinced that the door that was sealed over when terminals
went away is there...and gonna open any day
now...
Guttermouth is a really good band.
Is it just me, or does the way Love (and others) calls a graphics terminal a "Thin Client" make you nauseous? First, the terminal doesn't have any real intelligence, so how can you call it a client? Second, do we really want to move back to the old time-sharing model, where you can't do anything without the approval of computer center (an ancient term we'll probably have to ressurect)? There's a reason we used to call them "The High Priests of a Low Cult."