Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:02:08 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, <jgrosch@mooseriver.com> Cc: "Joey Garcia" <bear@unix.homeip.net>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Anyone going to Comdex next week? Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20011112164807.0558bdd0@localhost> In-Reply-To: <009301c16b5c$91458460$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <4.3.2.7.2.20011111163454.042359d0@localhost>
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At 02:29 AM 11/12/2001, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: >Interesting you would say that. I think there's a serious point >there. At one time the industry was totally dependent on advances coming >from commercial software and hardware companies, if you had something new >and cool then the badge of admission was showing it at Comdex. It still is. Most open source is not innovative but rather copies -- and follows the trail blazed by -- commercial software. Now and then we see an innovation that's made open source from the get-go, but it is rare. Innovating is expensive, and people need (and deserve) to be rewarded for it. It would actually be very bad for the industry if innovations started as open source, since this would preclude funding for them. >Today, the existing hardware is so good that there's not the drive to >upgrade as soon as the new stuff is available, so that removes a lot of >the reason of attending these trade shows for hardware people. It's not that the hardware is "good;" it's that it is no longer the bottleneck. The big bottlenecks these days are Internet throughput and latency. >And, also today, GNU and Free software is more and more important, GNU, and the FSF's "Free" software (with a capital "F"), are destructive forces. They virtually never innovate. The purpose of the FSF is to prey on the industry by creating no-cost knockoffs of commercial products, preventing hard-working people from being justly rewarded for what they do. The BSDs do not share this destructive attitude. They give back. >and Windows and other commercial software is getting less important, Windows is still EXCEEDINGLY important (not that I like it, by the way). And other commercial software -- even more than Windows -- is vital. It's a tragedy that the FSF has had success in convincing companies to adopt utterly infeasible business plans centered around its business-destroying license. Then, when the companies inevitably fail, the FSF uses the license to scavenge the corpes, like hyenas, for code to appropriate into its hoard of software. >and the new cool things in software aren't being introduced by people like >Apple, Microsoft and IBM anymore. Instead they are being introduced by >user communities around FreeBSD and Linux. I strongly disagree. Again, most innovations in software do come from commercial software companies. FreeBSD and Linux are doing some minor innovation, but mostly they are refining what already exists. >It would be even more interesting to plot a graph of Comdex attendance and >overlay it with a graph of Linuxworld (or whatever the big Linux tradeshow is) >I wonder if there would be an inverse relationship there? No. LinuxWorld was hurt by the downturn in the market as well as the inevitable failure of companies foolish enough to base their businesses on GPLed code. Percentagewise, it had probably shrunk more than COMDEX before the 9-11 disaster (which has hurt COMDEX due to its proximity to the event). --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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