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Robin's Report From LWCE
For everyone who can't make it to New York, roblimo has posted impressions of LWCE's first day, in which he takes note of Start buttons, prods Dell about laptops factory loaded with Linux, and watches the Golden Penguin Bowl. I suppose he was also asking vendors some of your questions.
For the linux hobby person it may seem like a good things but for those in the know it is not. Big business come in and take over just like they do the Internet and the small hobby person lose all rights. Big business no care about the regular linux geek, they care only about the money.
This another reason why I make the big move to FreeBSD. This where the next big success come from as Apple already understand.
All the best,
--Achmed
Swaribabu Consulting Inc. -- We code so you don't have to
How correct is it to refer to federal criminals as "competition"? Would you refer to a drug dealer down the street as "competition" to your children's educators?
Let's not forget what Microsoft has done to a once-thriving and innovative industry...they destroyed it by violating federal law on repeated occasions. Stac, IBM, Novell, Sun...this was not "Competition"...this was hardcore felony behavior. Do a web search.
Linux only runs on a small fraction of PCs. Until about 30% of computers sold have zero Microsoft products running on them, then as far as I'm concerned, the damage will not have been undone.
This IBM dude certainly has a point. MS should not be at Linux shows, just like the local drug gansters shouldn't be at PTA meetings. The people at Linux shows are trying to correct a terrible wrong done to the market, not via the courts or the law, but via freedom. They deserve a chance.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
If you want a laptop that runs Linux, chances are you know how to install the OS yourself and have used it elsewhere. I can see two distribution possibilities:
- Include Linux drivers for all of the hardware and let the user install their own distro.
- Choose a distro (any distro) and preinstall the most commonly used options for what the average consumer uses that machine for. Include the full distro on a CD-ROM with all options so that everyone can install whatever they want. Those who want another distro can put the CD with their stash of AOL disks.
I prefer the first option. It's cheaper and less wasteful. But some people want to buy a computer and just have it run at first bootup. Those people would prefer the second option. Perhaps Dell could let consumers choose between the two. Trying to cater to everyone in such a diverse crowd is just impossible. People who want Linux generally know how to install/uninstall options (especially if something like RH 8 is used). And it's not too hard to just do a clean install.His second answer was that Dell's big problem with selling Linux laptops -- and desktops -- was that whichever distribution they chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one; that if they settled on Red Hat, they'd get calls for SuSE, you might say, and if they chose SuSE, they'd get screams about not offering Debian, and so on. All this more or less boiled down to Linux users not being able to make up their minds and all demand one distribution and set of software packages. When that happens, sure, Dell will talk about Linux, okay? If, that is, they see enough demand to make it worth their while.
Ok, how about selling hardware without an OS on it and letting the end users choose what they want to put on it? I think that the desire is more to obtain hardware without providing Microsoft money for an operating system we'll never use. Give me DOS, give me a blank disk. I don't care. Just don't require me to pay for Windows.
-- derby
Basically, linux users want two things when they buy a laptop: First, linux drivers for the hardware. Second, saving some cash by not paying for windows. The rest is irrelevant. Sure, throw in a CD of the latest linux version that the buyer wants to save them the download, whatever.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Stuff and nonsense. Fanaticism like this keeps Linux from being socially acceptable. Who'd want to be identified with people like this? It's like getting emotional about toasters.
By the way, three of the 4 companies you site as being destroyed by MS are still in business.
Yeah, MS has a near-monopoly on the PC desktop, and like every other successful business it behaves in its own best interests. But, if you're old enough to recall the late '70's and early '80's, you'll remember that prior to the wedding of the IBM PC architecture with that of DOS (which, by the way, has always been available from vendors other than MS), the PC desktop world was flooded with different and incompatible hardware and software standards. What ran on a Commodore didn't run on an Apple. What ran on an Apple wouldn't run on a Kaypro. Etc., etc. This wasn't an issue for the hobbyist market, but it was for the business market. That market wants to be able to buy compatible hardware and software from multiple vendors. Hence, their desire for standards (they don't care about the ssame standards that exercise develpers).and their problem with the multiplicity of Linux vendors. Standards tend to foster the growth of only a few big vendors. Microsoft's dominance was inevitable, even if they'd behaved themselvs.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
His second answer was that Dell's big problem with selling Linux laptops -- and desktops -- was that whichever distribution they chose, it seemed most customers wanted another one; that if they settled on Red Hat, they'd get calls for SuSE, you might say, and if they chose SuSE, they'd get screams about not offering Debian, and so on. All this more or less boiled down to Linux users not being able to make up their minds and all demand one distribution and set of software packages. When that happens, sure, Dell will talk about Linux, okay?
What a convenient excuse!! "We'd be glad to do Linux, just get all the nerds to agree on a single distro..."
Laptop manufacturers have always customized the OS to fit on their machines. If they can do this for an M$ OS, surely they ought to be able to do it on an Open Source OS. Sure they'd probably still choose RH, Suse or Debian as a starting point, but if they go ahead and "brand" it, they and their customers would have the best of both worlds: assurance that all the hardware was supported and a coherent scheme for managing it. They could also shrink the size of the distro by limiting drivers and features to those appropriate on the laptop.
It sure sounds doable to me!!
Is:
1. No Windows tax
2. A simple cheatsheet listing the kernel options needed to support the hardware.
Then I'll boot it with a Knoppix CD, grab a Gentoo stage2 tar over the network, and do a chroot build of the rest of Gentoo (whose booth was consistently the most active in its sector of the floor yesterday).
So all I really want is hardware completely supported by standard kernel options, and a list of which options it depends on. And that's all any Linux user should want. If you aren't going to customize the OS, maybe Losedose really is better for you....
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The marketing guy is absolutely correct, and I have another point about Linux, which is that more thought needs to be given to the naming of the distro's if Linux is to penetrate the coporate sector with any true degree of success.
As a professional consultant for a major Fortune 500 software company, I've recently gotten involved in the whole open source phenomenon as started by Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman with the release of the GNU/Linux operating system (or is it Linux? I'm not too sure on this point).
Anyway, after having compiled a report on the commercial viability of open source as an alternative to closed source in the e-commerce/b2b world, I've become quite interested in Linux myself, and thanks to a handy Corel Linux distribution, consider myself to be someway to becoming a "guru" as people here like to call themselves.
Anyway, my point is that Slackware, as a distribution, doesn't give out the professional image that Linux is trying to gain at the moment. On one hand, you've got respectable players like Red Hat, Corel and SCO pushing Linux's corporate image to new levels of respectibility, but on the other hand you've got a distribution named "Slackware", hardly the name your tech-savvy CTO wants to represent a core part of their enterprise solution.
The whole name seems to give the distribution a half-assed, "slack" even, image, surely not one that's in anybody's best interest, whether they be the average long-haired Linux sysadmin or a suited CTO looking for the next big thing. And this image taints all of Linux.
No, whilst Slackware may produce a decent distribution, they definitely need to think about a name change to ensure continued acceptance in the increasingly corporate-driven Linux market.
"Linux-related revenue" could just as easily be hardware running Linux or Linux support services, though. The reason that these revenues are occurring is that customers are seeing a short term switching expense that can reduce their long-term costs. In the long run I'm still not convinced that there's any significant money to be made in selling Linux the OS itself; the GPL and the Linux culture itself (among other things) has essentially commoditized everything that makes up the OS platform.
Not that this is a bad thing! This isn't your typical "no money in Linux" troll, and I'm in fact a huge Linux fan.
IMHO, it's good if you can't charge a lot for Linux; it means that the users of computer systems are spending less for them in general, leading to either improved profits or lower costs to their customers. Linux is good for those businesses, and it's good for those in Linux-related hardware and/or services businesses like IBM and Dell. Linux is good for programmers developing the 90% of software that's used in-house only; those developers now get a better platform to work on for cheap. But Linux may not be good for Linux-only (open source only?) businesses.
I think the historical record over the past three or four years bears me out on this. Wall Street is going to learn, or maybe has learned, to invest in companies that use Linux, and in companies that integrate something+Linux in order to make that something better, but not in companies that sell just Linux.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
You answer to the "too many distros!" excuse is to add another Dell branded distro?
I think Dell is right. They are in the business to sell a lot of PCs fast and cheap. They can't support 5 different distributions. The fact that they support one shows that the hardware is supported..so just use what you want.
My company, a BIG Wall Street firm, is currently testing LINUX to replace Solaris as our server OS.
This is a good thing. My company gets to save few bucks (they need to after paying all those fines last quarter), and we developers will get to keep a UNIX like environment.
It might not be such a good thing for Sun, as we're thinking about contingency for when/if they go out of business. It's also not too good for MSFT. Without LINUX, the suits at my co would have migrated everyone over to NT sever.
It's a good thing for the LINUX community... those of us who don't like the MS monopoly, and want to see 'mainstream' LINUX.
Anyway, what you say about 'big business coming in and taking over', is really LINUX vendors and service providers trying to make a sale TO big business.
This IS what we want to happen. Right? Microsoft losing market share has to start somewhere. This is that start.
Huh?