Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Forbes on IBM and Linux -- 3:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

While it's clear that the authors of this article doesn't know the history or culture of the open source movement that well, they do offer an interesting look at IBM's involvement in Linux. I'm not sure if IBM's goal is to crush Microsoft, but it definitely doesn't hurt if they can make money on hardware without paying Microsoft too. Anything that makes MS nervous and/or (somewhat) honest is a good thing for everyone in the long run. Thanks Linux Today.

The authors reveal their ignorance of OSS by referring to the pre-IBM programmers of Linux as "hippie hackers". Anyone who has ever seen or heard of Linux Torvalds would never describe him as a hippie. RMS, yes, but that's a different story. They also make it sound like MySQL came into existence to steal market share from IBM. They also refer to JBoss as being a competing web server without even mentioning Apache. Oh well, still worth the read.

I feel that Linux's first big impact in the desktop arena will be on the ultra-low-end market. When a box can be made for a few hundred bucks, the ~$90 MS tax looks like a very painful hit. It's painful anyway but the percentages look worse this way. Most people use these boxes to surf the Web, read email, and maybe type the occasional letter. It's certainly no harder to do those things in KDE or Gnome than it is to do them in Windows.

News for 05/25/2004

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