Re: UserLinux with MySQL - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

jd@commandprompt.com ("Joshua D. Drake") writes:
>> If I run a business and find userlinux a good model of a linux
>> distribution and Qt to be a good development framework, cost of few
>> Qt licenses for my proprietory apps. would be rather negligible
>> investment. Besides that buys me portability to windows with
>> support as well. The cost goes even down then..

> Just FYI GTK2 works great with Windows...

Right.  And there's nobody charging extra fees to port to Windows.

>> Linux is all about choice. And Userlinux is taking away from it by
>> making one on behalf on business. I don't think it will sell any
>> big.
>
> I think you would be surprised, to us Linux is about choice -- the
> the "public" linux is about cheap. To the business world it is
> stability on the cheap.
>
> Also, I know few companies that are switching to Linux because it is
> better. They switch to Linux because of TCO.
>
> We may feel/know that it is better, but in the business world it is
> the pennies that matter... If they don't have to buy a license, they
> won't.

When doing "risk management," why would an enormous company like Sun
or HP or IBM be expected to tie their applications' availability to
the potential caprices of the policies of a comparatively tiny company
like TrollTech?

The TrollTech guys seem to be nice guys and all, but that doesn't
prevent bad things from happening.  I recall American Airlines putting
efforts into _actively_ migrating away from Borland Delphi, and their
reasoning was that Borland seemed "too risky."  Delphi aficionados
might disagree vigorously, but that _doesn't_ invalidate the AMR
reasoning.

The same is true for Kylix, only with greator strength, as it hasn't
got the merit (which Qt has) of portability to multiple flavours of
Unix.  And it isn't supported on any "supported" version of Red Hat
Linux anymore, which demonstrates that there truly is a significant
risk of it becoming unsupportable.

Similarly, only a complete fool would have entrusted their "office
software" requirements to Corel WP Office 2K; it only briefly
_grudgingly_ worked on certain Linux distributions that are _years_
out of date.  The non-availability of source guarantees that it'll
only work on those platforms that the vendor is prepared to spend
money supporting, and Corel's money all went away in that regard...

Similar reasoning lies behind NeXTStep and NeWS not "taking over the
world;" they were pretty nifty technologies, but NeXT was a pretty
tiny company (albeit one that arguably took over Apple :-)), and Unix
vendors were reluctant to give control over so much to them.  (They
instead went with Motif, which has just too much ugliness to it to
readily recount...  :-()
--
wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('cbbrowne','ntlug.org').
http://cbbrowne.com/info/finances.html
"Ah,  the 20th century, when the  flight from reason crash-landed into
the slaughterhouse."  --- James Ostrowski