Even the smartest people have a hard time making money off a product that isn't finished. Although Nautilus did have a 1.0 version a little while ago, it still hasn't been released as part of the stable distribution of gnome. I still don't really consider it very mature yet. That sort of thing takes more time than anonymous cowards seem to realise, I guess.
Perhaps their business plan would have killed them if the economy hadn't. But in the end that point is moot.
Something has been seriously screwy with the moderation these last couple weeks.
Personally, I think that jabber has a lot of potential as a business. They are basically the only open instant messaging protocol available. The ietf is thinking about creating a different open protocol but it will be at most a subset of jabber functionality and easilly reproduceable as a jabber transport. And anyways who knows when they are going to finish it?
Imunified.org also is talking about creating a standard. But all of those people use central servers and have add based revenue. I think when they are talking about a standard they only mean a standard that members of imunified can use and not an open standard.
Thus, if you are looking for a open im protocol with servers and clients that are already written then jabber is the only serious option currently available.
This is what jabber has to sell.
What the parent post said is true too. There are tons of applications for jabber besides just teenage girls chatting.
In the end though making money is far more complicated than just having something to sell. I have seen several grocery stores and resteraunts go out of business in this town. And everyone has to eat right?
7 million could go a long way, or you could spend it all in a year.
When he says: "Gee, what a surprise." He meant that he was honestly surprised at Mundie's insights into the situation and how well he understood open source. I must confess that I also was impressed by Mundie's forthright honesty and hometown goodness.
"I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton?" This could be interpretted as childish sarcasm, I guess, but I wouldn't. Instead Linus is wonderring about whether Mundie has heard of Isaac Newton. I mean what if he hadn't? It seems like almost everyone has heard of Isaac Newton these days but what if they didn't learn about those kind of things in MicroSoft? That would be pretty darn wierd if you ask me.
"I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less." This is a reference to that one show on SciFi where the guy talks to dead people. Personally, I never got into that show. The idea of talking to dead people gives me creeps. I'd rather listen to Mundie over some dead physics guy. Heck! Most live physics guys scare me. More than anything though, I'd prefer to watch the show where the chick has a bar code on her neck and kicks butt! She's hotter than Mundie and Newton put together!
On the other hand I'm a little bit confused by your comment: "Please, set aside for a moment the fact that Linus is god and M$ is the devil." Obviously, Linus is not the supreme deity are you being metaphorical? I'm almost tempted to accuse you of using sarcasm yourself, but I know that you are too wise and mature.
--error27
ps...
(I've had the same slashdot sig since I started reading. I'm too lazy and not witty enough to find/think of a new one)
It's like what Alan Cox was saying about baked beans.
No one ones the rights to baked beans.
In fact I would say that, if open source programmers rejected proprietary food substances like coke and snickers and only ate healthful, public domain foods like baked beans then we'd be a lot better off.
When I program I spend a lot of time trying to write in such a way that other programmers can understand me. Or even if I don't think other programmers will ever read what I write I write so that I will be able to understand the program later on.
People sometimes put some kind of a line between writing comments and writing code. To me there isn't that big of a line.
Sometimes, if I take a program I have writen and take out all the comments then it's not usefull anymore. I might as well have compiled it once and deleted the source code.
Take a C program and look at the whitespace. None of that is there for the compiler; it's there to help humans understand and read what is going on.
Today I saw a tshirt that said, "Real programmers only need 26 variables: a, b, b,... z" The tshirt is funny because it's not true. Good programmer choose their variable names so that people can easily understand what they are.
Sometimes source code is the easiest way to understand something. I've never read his books but they say that Donald Knuth created his own programming language to talk about the algorythms in one of his books. I'm not sure if he even wrote a compiler for it. If he didn't then none of the source code in his book was even usefull in any way except as a communications device.
Source Code is seldom beautifull in the same way as a Van Goghe painting which makes you cry. But it is primarilly comunicative. It's not necarilly even usefull except when compiled.
>>I admit I created user accounts on/. before but I lost them because I had to change jobs so many times in the last year.
You get fired a lot and so you create two new logins (ingenuity7 and Suse_Rulez) just to troll me? I should feel honored I guess.
>>Kernel Traffic was Zack Brown's project before he joined LinuxCare.
I never said that it wasn't. I just said that I am gratefull to them for hosting it.
>>I guess you don't know anyone who worked for LinuxCare. If you did, you would know how they screwed the community. They were always a pretend company.
LinuxCare is not a "pretend company". So far they haven't been too successful but they were never fake. You haven't told me yet what LinuxCare did that you think "screwed the community". I hear that when they laid off some of their employees people were upset because they shut off their email. That is a hassle but I hardly call it "screwing the community".
I don't normally respond to trolls like you. But aparently someone thought your first post was "Interesting" and when it was actually lies.
Yeah. It says on the Linuxgram web page that Maureen is aggresive. So aggresive she never get invited to any press conferences any more. I know that if I was Suse I wouldn't let her come to any press conferences.
What do you mean that LinuxCare screwed a lot of people in the Linux Community? I don't remember reading anything about that. I was never impressed with their business plan but I always liked it when they used to host kernel traffic. Zack Brown still does it even though he doesn't work for them any more which is tremendously cool of him. And they have those boot CD's that people said were cool. But other than that I don't remember anyone getting screwed by them.
TurboLinux does have some proprietary software... I have never used it. They seem like an alright company. I heard good reviews about some of their software.
Also congratulations on having such a high user id. I notice that it is just a couple higher than the other Suse_guy who also replied to my original post. Both of them were created today aparently. Just to respond to my post. Forgive me for suspecting that you are not telling the full truth about why you two would feel strongly enough to create new logins just to respond to my post. I know that probably the one reason I would do something like that is if I worked for LinuxGram. If you don't work for LinuxGram then please forgive me for thinking something bad about you. Hanging around slashdot has made me into a conspiracy theorest I guess.
Yes... I'm sure he said that "Linux as a business is not working out". I've noticed now that Suse is now gone back to the strategies it had before they switched to doing mostly Linux stuff.
Wait a minute... All Suse has ever done is Linux. And all Suse does is Linux.
That alone would have told me that that article was crap.
But for other people who were still confused Volker said that the author deliberately took what he said out of context.
He felt that Maureen was lying, and I feel that Maureen is a liar. She never apologised/retracted/explained herself and she's lost my trust...
I have not read this slashdot article and I don't plan to. As far as I'm concerned Maureen O'Gara is lying scum and I have no reason to read anything she writes.
>>You don't host that sort of thing on tiny intel boxes running Linux or NT/2K. This will take big servers, and big bandwitdth. That stuff is NOT cheap.
Perhaps something huge like microsoft.com or altavista.com or google.com or hotmail.com or amazon.com? Big servers like that?
Oh wait... I guess all those websites use w2k or linux.
The RIAA/MPAA is going to have to go after individual users to succeed in stopping peer to peer file sharing.
What they shouldn't do is try to stop technology. People should have a right to create whatever software they wish.
It was good that they stopped Napster because Napster was not a technology but a coporate entity.
In the end I think there are far more people sharing files than there are record execs. Trying to stop individual users will make people hate them and hate the laws that stop them from doing what they want. This makes me think that MPAA/RIAA will not succeed and that makes me happy.
This should answer some questions people had and also explain how this is different from the "why don't audit everything instead" type posts.
Re:Didn't fail in the market place.
on
Indrema No More
·
· Score: 2
No. That isn't really what I meant. Mostly I was just trying to say that I admired the way they believed they could do it, even though from square one everyone said that if they didn't have a billion dollars to spend in initial production and another billion to spend in advertising then they couldn't suceed.
But they were sort of going to market it as a computer. The thing could play MP3's and movies and you could surf the internet with it.
What I liked about the hardware, that I thought could be applied to other comptuers was the modularity. Unlike, most consoles theirs was upgrade-able. You just unsnap the CPU/motherboard, pull it out, insert a new one and snap it closed. With computer you have to unscrew the cover of the case, unscrew a bunch of other stuff on the inside, muck around, screw everything back in. It's a pain and it's fairly easy to break something or shock it with static electricity.
They had some other fairly cool ideas too.
Didn't fail in the market place.
on
Indrema No More
·
· Score: 3
I read so many comments that act as if Indrema failed because of the competition. But that's not true.
Indrema didn't have any competition because it never reached the market.
The reason Indrema failed is because it couldn't raise any funding to get started.
Sure, if Indrema had produced a finished product, it may well have still failed. But that never happenned and so we'll never know. Just because investors don't like the idea doesn't mean it's not a good one. Remember these are the same morons who bought Internet Grocery stock last year.
Actually... I doubt that if I had money I would invest in Indrema. But I still think they're pretty cool. They dreamed big. Some of their ideas about where computers were going were pretty inciteful. Imagine computers so easy to use your grandmother could upgrade the hard drive or add ram. It will be another 7 years before we start seeing that kind of half decent design in ordinary PC's.
I remember that they wrote an X server designed for TV screens. Not exactly a "complete" X server but a minimalisitic X server. I'm fairly sure that they had other stuff they programmed themselves, but that's the only thing I can remember off the top of my head.
Obviously since a "combustion engine" works by combustion and combusting something at the wrong time can be harmfull then any type of fuel used in one of these should be considered unsafe.
Gasolene combusts more easily than hydrogen making it more likely to start combusting at the wrong time.
So gasolene is not only dangerous as you said, it is more dangerous than hydrogen.
Cyclists are more safe from stuff randomly combusting around them. But in my experience, people driving cars don't notice cyclists as much as they do trucks. And then you have the wacko's who like to try scare cyclists by driving their beat up pickup truck as close to the cyclist as they can and then honking the horn.
>>So if they decide next week that they can make more money on Irix than Linux, Linux is gone.
That's sort of the point.
A business exists to make money.
In a 5 years Linux will be far more capable than it is now. Capable enough to compete with IRIX in many features. SGI could try compete or they could use Linux to cut developement costs. It looks like SGI is choosing the sensible alternative.
>>I have no doubt SGI can add those things to Linux, IRIX does (almost) all of that allready.
From what I understand the problem with IRIX is that it's tied to the mips architecture where Linux has already been ported to the Itanium. (I think it's still called Itanium but maybe the name has changed).
Long term, SGI seems to be talking about moving to Intel and Linux. (5-10 years from now). It's cheaper to work that way, and they have to change to stay competative...
Tabloids are doing so well because the coporate owned media covers up a lot of the important news.
Did CNN report when a baby was found recently who had survived the sinking of the Titanic? No. Because they are owned by AOL.
AOL doesn't want you to know this kind of stuff. They just want you to be a conformist sheep and to use their 300 hours of free online service. Stupid copoorate punks.
>>The real fix, of course, is to find operating systems vendors liable for selling systems which allow attackers to use OS vulnerabilities to take over a system and use it to attack a third party.
Oddly enough, this is one of the things that DMCA does. Except it can only be used against Linux and not windows because Linux is downloaded while windows has comes with a CD and thus has a shrink wrapped license.
And of course it ignores the fact that most security problems are due to careless administration not because of the vendor. Admins don't keep up to date with security patches. In the case of DDoS the maintainers are often regular PC owners who don't update their software. I know so many people that use old insecure version of netscape it's not even funny.
<offtopic>
This is why Microsoft should adopt.deb Windows update is good to an extent but it doesn't cover non-Microsoft software. With.deb Windows user could just add
deb-src ftp://windows.netscape.com unstable
to their sources.list file and update their files once a week. This would make computers much more secure over all.
Or maybe Microsoft service packs already have a lot of the same functionality and I'm just not aware of it.
</offtopic>
What linux must do is get better installers...
What linux must do is get better GUI...
What linux must bl is get better games...
What linux blah do is get better browser...
What linux must do is bla better word processors...
What linux blah do is get blahbl X...
What blahb must do is get better file managers...
Blah blnux blah do bl bla better standards...
What lblah blah do is get blahbl blah...
Blah blahb blah bl bl bla blah blah blah...
All of it true unfortunately... But desperately boring to listen to.
In the end though, it's really premature to say that Linux won't survive. Gnome 1.0 was released in March 99. That was two years ago only. (KDE was released earlier but QT at that time was not open source.) It wasn't until last year that Star Office was GPL and it's going to take a couple years for that to get integrated with the rest of Gnome. So a lot of what web-authors are continually whining about is really new technology that will mature in the next couple years.
Anyways... I don't want to talk about it anymore. If people don't want to use Linux on the desktop they don't have to. I think it will be a viable alternative to windows by 2003. I've been saying that since a year ago and so far my time line has been pretty good. Check out Linux in a couple years (and not with that same 200mhz machine your using now).
Slashdot Mirror
>>they're not making money
Even the smartest people have a hard time making money off a product that isn't finished. Although Nautilus did have a 1.0 version a little while ago, it still hasn't been released as part of the stable distribution of gnome. I still don't really consider it very mature yet. That sort of thing takes more time than anonymous cowards seem to realise, I guess.
Perhaps their business plan would have killed them if the economy hadn't. But in the end that point is moot.
It was because Signal11 had 300 (not an exact figure) karma and was trolling with impunity.
Words were spoken on irc. Signall11 threatenned to leave a bunch of times and then he did apparently. He posts to kuro5hin.org now mostly...
It was a sort of bizarre thing to watch.
Something has been seriously screwy with the moderation these last couple weeks.
Personally, I think that jabber has a lot of potential as a business. They are basically the only open instant messaging protocol available. The ietf is thinking about creating a different open protocol but it will be at most a subset of jabber functionality and easilly reproduceable as a jabber transport. And anyways who knows when they are going to finish it?
Imunified.org also is talking about creating a standard. But all of those people use central servers and have add based revenue. I think when they are talking about a standard they only mean a standard that members of imunified can use and not an open standard.
Thus, if you are looking for a open im protocol with servers and clients that are already written then jabber is the only serious option currently available.
This is what jabber has to sell.
What the parent post said is true too. There are tons of applications for jabber besides just teenage girls chatting.
In the end though making money is far more complicated than just having something to sell. I have seen several grocery stores and resteraunts go out of business in this town. And everyone has to eat right?
7 million could go a long way, or you could spend it all in a year.
While Linus can often be starcastic and a bastard (his word not mine)
but this time he was being sincere.
When he says: "Gee, what a surprise." He meant that he was honestly surprised at Mundie's insights into the situation and how well he understood open source. I must confess that I also was impressed by Mundie's forthright honesty and hometown goodness.
"I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton?" This could be interpretted as childish sarcasm, I guess, but I wouldn't. Instead Linus is wonderring about whether Mundie has heard of Isaac Newton. I mean what if he hadn't? It seems like almost everyone has heard of Isaac Newton these days but what if they didn't learn about those kind of things in MicroSoft? That would be pretty darn wierd if you ask me.
"I'd rather listen to Newton than to Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less." This is a reference to that one show on SciFi where the guy talks to dead people. Personally, I never got into that show. The idea of talking to dead people gives me creeps. I'd rather listen to Mundie over some dead physics guy. Heck! Most live physics guys scare me. More than anything though, I'd prefer to watch the show where the chick has a bar code on her neck and kicks butt! She's hotter than Mundie and Newton put together!
On the other hand I'm a little bit confused by your comment: "Please, set aside for a moment the fact that Linus is god and M$ is the devil." Obviously, Linus is not the supreme deity are you being metaphorical? I'm almost tempted to accuse you of using sarcasm yourself, but I know that you are too wise and mature.
--error27
ps...
(I've had the same slashdot sig since I started reading. I'm too lazy and not witty enough to find/think of a new one)
Discoveries often lead to products in the end.
It's like what Alan Cox was saying about baked beans.
No one ones the rights to baked beans.
In fact I would say that, if open source programmers rejected proprietary food substances like coke and snickers and only ate healthful, public domain foods like baked beans then we'd be a lot better off.
What do you slashdoties think?
When I program I spend a lot of time trying to write in such a way that other programmers can understand me. Or even if I don't think other programmers will ever read what I write I write so that I will be able to understand the program later on.
... z" The tshirt is funny because it's not true. Good programmer choose their variable names so that people can easily understand what they are.
People sometimes put some kind of a line between writing comments and writing code. To me there isn't that big of a line.
Sometimes, if I take a program I have writen and take out all the comments then it's not usefull anymore. I might as well have compiled it once and deleted the source code.
Take a C program and look at the whitespace. None of that is there for the compiler; it's there to help humans understand and read what is going on.
Today I saw a tshirt that said, "Real programmers only need 26 variables: a, b, b,
Sometimes source code is the easiest way to understand something. I've never read his books but they say that Donald Knuth created his own programming language to talk about the algorythms in one of his books. I'm not sure if he even wrote a compiler for it. If he didn't then none of the source code in his book was even usefull in any way except as a communications device.
Source Code is seldom beautifull in the same way as a Van Goghe painting which makes you cry. But it is primarilly comunicative. It's not necarilly even usefull except when compiled.
>>I admit I created user accounts on /. before but I lost them because I had to change jobs so many times in the last year.
You get fired a lot and so you create two new logins (ingenuity7 and Suse_Rulez) just to troll me? I should feel honored I guess.
>>Kernel Traffic was Zack Brown's project before he joined LinuxCare.
I never said that it wasn't. I just said that I am gratefull to them for hosting it.
>>I guess you don't know anyone who worked for LinuxCare. If you did, you would know how they screwed the community. They were always a pretend company.
LinuxCare is not a "pretend company". So far they haven't been too successful but they were never fake. You haven't told me yet what LinuxCare did that you think "screwed the community". I hear that when they laid off some of their employees people were upset because they shut off their email. That is a hassle but I hardly call it "screwing the community".
I don't normally respond to trolls like you. But aparently someone thought your first post was "Interesting" and when it was actually lies.
What do you mean that LinuxCare screwed a lot of people in the Linux Community? I don't remember reading anything about that. I was never impressed with their business plan but I always liked it when they used to host kernel traffic. Zack Brown still does it even though he doesn't work for them any more which is tremendously cool of him. And they have those boot CD's that people said were cool. But other than that I don't remember anyone getting screwed by them.
TurboLinux does have some proprietary software... I have never used it. They seem like an alright company. I heard good reviews about some of their software.
Also congratulations on having such a high user id. I notice that it is just a couple higher than the other Suse_guy who also replied to my original post. Both of them were created today aparently. Just to respond to my post. Forgive me for suspecting that you are not telling the full truth about why you two would feel strongly enough to create new logins just to respond to my post. I know that probably the one reason I would do something like that is if I worked for LinuxGram. If you don't work for LinuxGram then please forgive me for thinking something bad about you. Hanging around slashdot has made me into a conspiracy theorest I guess.
Wait a minute... All Suse has ever done is Linux. And all Suse does is Linux.
That alone would have told me that that article was crap.
But for other people who were still confused Volker said that the author deliberately took what he said out of context.
He felt that Maureen was lying, and I feel that Maureen is a liar. She never apologised/retracted/explained herself and she's lost my trust...
Maureen O'Gara lost all creditability with me when she wrote the article about her interview with the Suse guy.
c -range=on&advquery=Maureen+O%27Gara&andorbox=OFF&a dvquery2=
It was completely lies...
Since then it has been removed from linuxgram but you can still see parts of it and other maureen o'gara articles on linuxtoday.com
http://linuxtoday.com/search.php3?negate=&news_sr
I have not read this slashdot article and I don't plan to. As far as I'm concerned Maureen O'Gara is lying scum and I have no reason to read anything she writes.
Yes. Because the people who write RFC's joke around in such non-professional way means that RFC's can be ignored with no loss.
Especially RFC's about routers. Those can be ignored and your router will still work with all future network protocols.
Or perhaps, while one or two RFC's are meant to be funny, the other RFC's are not. RFC's are often the accepted standard though not always.
That may be very hard to understand at first but I think it's true none the less.
>>You don't host that sort of thing on tiny intel boxes running Linux or NT/2K. This will take big servers, and big bandwitdth. That stuff is NOT cheap.
Perhaps something huge like microsoft.com or altavista.com or google.com or hotmail.com or amazon.com? Big servers like that?
Oh wait... I guess all those websites use w2k or linux.
The RIAA/MPAA is going to have to go after individual users to succeed in stopping peer to peer file sharing.
What they shouldn't do is try to stop technology. People should have a right to create whatever software they wish.
It was good that they stopped Napster because Napster was not a technology but a coporate entity.
In the end I think there are far more people sharing files than there are record execs. Trying to stop individual users will make people hate them and hate the laws that stop them from doing what they want. This makes me think that MPAA/RIAA will not succeed and that makes me happy.
The security-module proposal is completely orthoganal to the talk about auditing.
Auditing can help.
Security models can help. For example with SELinux you never have to worry about having a root exploit. Never.
Both are important.
I can't believe someone hasn't posted this yet.
d ule/2001-April/000005.html
It's a fairly informative email that describes what the modules would do and what the reasons behind it are.
http://mail.wirex.com/pipermail/linux-security-mo
This should answer some questions people had and also explain how this is different from the "why don't audit everything instead" type posts.
No. That isn't really what I meant. Mostly I was just trying to say that I admired the way they believed they could do it, even though from square one everyone said that if they didn't have a billion dollars to spend in initial production and another billion to spend in advertising then they couldn't suceed.
But they were sort of going to market it as a computer. The thing could play MP3's and movies and you could surf the internet with it.
What I liked about the hardware, that I thought could be applied to other comptuers was the modularity. Unlike, most consoles theirs was upgrade-able. You just unsnap the CPU/motherboard, pull it out, insert a new one and snap it closed. With computer you have to unscrew the cover of the case, unscrew a bunch of other stuff on the inside, muck around, screw everything back in. It's a pain and it's fairly easy to break something or shock it with static electricity.
They had some other fairly cool ideas too.
I read so many comments that act as if Indrema failed because of the competition. But that's not true.
Indrema didn't have any competition because it never reached the market.
The reason Indrema failed is because it couldn't raise any funding to get started.
Sure, if Indrema had produced a finished product, it may well have still failed. But that never happenned and so we'll never know. Just because investors don't like the idea doesn't mean it's not a good one. Remember these are the same morons who bought Internet Grocery stock last year.
Actually... I doubt that if I had money I would invest in Indrema. But I still think they're pretty cool. They dreamed big. Some of their ideas about where computers were going were pretty inciteful. Imagine computers so easy to use your grandmother could upgrade the hard drive or add ram. It will be another 7 years before we start seeing that kind of half decent design in ordinary PC's.
I remember that they wrote an X server designed for TV screens. Not exactly a "complete" X server but a minimalisitic X server. I'm fairly sure that they had other stuff they programmed themselves, but that's the only thing I can remember off the top of my head.
First of all computers are cool and so animation is cool.
But secondly and most importantly at least we know Leonardo di Caprio isn't going to play the lead character.
Obviously since a "combustion engine" works by combustion and combusting something at the wrong time can be harmfull then any type of fuel used in one of these should be considered unsafe.
Gasolene combusts more easily than hydrogen making it more likely to start combusting at the wrong time.
So gasolene is not only dangerous as you said, it is more dangerous than hydrogen.
Cyclists are more safe from stuff randomly combusting around them. But in my experience, people driving cars don't notice cyclists as much as they do trucks. And then you have the wacko's who like to try scare cyclists by driving their beat up pickup truck as close to the cyclist as they can and then honking the horn.
Hope this helps.
>>So if they decide next week that they can make more money on Irix than Linux, Linux is gone.
That's sort of the point.
A business exists to make money.
In a 5 years Linux will be far more capable than it is now. Capable enough to compete with IRIX in many features. SGI could try compete or they could use Linux to cut developement costs. It looks like SGI is choosing the sensible alternative.
>>I have no doubt SGI can add those things to Linux, IRIX does (almost) all of that allready.
From what I understand the problem with IRIX is that it's tied to the mips architecture where Linux has already been ported to the Itanium. (I think it's still called Itanium but maybe the name has changed).
Long term, SGI seems to be talking about moving to Intel and Linux. (5-10 years from now). It's cheaper to work that way, and they have to change to stay competative...
Tabloids are doing so well because the coporate owned media covers up a lot of the important news.
Did CNN report when a baby was found recently who had survived the sinking of the Titanic? No. Because they are owned by AOL.
AOL doesn't want you to know this kind of stuff. They just want you to be a conformist sheep and to use their 300 hours of free online service. Stupid copoorate punks.
>>The real fix, of course, is to find operating systems vendors liable for selling systems which allow attackers to use OS vulnerabilities to take over a system and use it to attack a third party.
.deb Windows update is good to an extent but it doesn't cover non-Microsoft software. With .deb Windows user could just add
Oddly enough, this is one of the things that DMCA does. Except it can only be used against Linux and not windows because Linux is downloaded while windows has comes with a CD and thus has a shrink wrapped license.
And of course it ignores the fact that most security problems are due to careless administration not because of the vendor. Admins don't keep up to date with security patches. In the case of DDoS the maintainers are often regular PC owners who don't update their software. I know so many people that use old insecure version of netscape it's not even funny.
<offtopic>
This is why Microsoft should adopt
deb-src ftp://windows.netscape.com unstable
to their sources.list file and update their files once a week. This would make computers much more secure over all.
Or maybe Microsoft service packs already have a lot of the same functionality and I'm just not aware of it.
</offtopic>
What linux must do is get better installers...
What linux must do is get better GUI...
What linux must bl is get better games...
What linux blah do is get better browser...
What linux must do is bla better word processors...
What linux blah do is get blahbl X...
What blahb must do is get better file managers...
Blah blnux blah do bl bla better standards...
What lblah blah do is get blahbl blah...
Blah blahb blah bl bl bla blah blah blah...
All of it true unfortunately... But desperately boring to listen to.
In the end though, it's really premature to say that Linux won't survive. Gnome 1.0 was released in March 99. That was two years ago only. (KDE was released earlier but QT at that time was not open source.) It wasn't until last year that Star Office was GPL and it's going to take a couple years for that to get integrated with the rest of Gnome. So a lot of what web-authors are continually whining about is really new technology that will mature in the next couple years.
Anyways... I don't want to talk about it anymore. If people don't want to use Linux on the desktop they don't have to. I think it will be a viable alternative to windows by 2003. I've been saying that since a year ago and so far my time line has been pretty good. Check out Linux in a couple years (and not with that same 200mhz machine your using now).