(Scott Adams has said this is his all time favorite Dilbert cartoon.)
Posted on 12/19/2017 10:51:15 AM PST by nickcarraway
It came to dominate because it is made of Unix.
Exactly. No matter how big a business you are, there is always room to go cheap.
Well, he’s probably stupid, and a liberal... because only half of that statement makes sense.
I LOVE that programmers are willing to write code for free and put it out on their own for the world to use, but most of what I’ve seen as ‘open source’ was built while someone else was paying their salary- and would not have been pleased to know about.
But usually these types are liberal dweebs, and so I question their intelligence, and then the intelligence of the code they write.
(Scott Adams has said this is his all time favorite Dilbert cartoon.)
No kidding.
Don’t give money to the guy who changed the whole world.
That bastard.
I don’t care how many employees you have in a country it does not make sense to give something of value away.
But of course, it could have been a behind the scenes “give it to us or else” sort of thing.
Me in that situation I would have said to China; Bye Bye; If we leave and tell people why, see I you can get anyone else to come build in your gulag of a country.
Eh? that's way more than was claimed. Again, many of those claims were made in the original suit, only to be defeated. I remember SCO claiming Streams was copied and instead it turned out Linux Streams was a loadable kernel module supplied by a third party - in other words not part of the Linux Kernel itself.
There was no conspiracy or treason involved in chinese use of Linux. It can be reasonably argued that everyone who used and contributed to cluster computers benefited equally from the result, and there would have much less benefit to the world overall without the open source component. Certainly proprietary supercomputer OS have fallen off the map. However proprietary and specialized compute engines are exceptionally able to capitalize on the standardized infrastructure, witness the growth of GPU clouds which are manifestly more capable of compute tasks than x86 cpu clusters.
Oh sure it does. IBM sells hardware and software support. Operating systems are economic compliments to both. One of the most basic business strategies is commoditizing your compliments. For example, Ford Motor Company would never have gotten off the ground if gasoline, oil, and rubber tires had not become relatively cheap. IBM was just trying to commoditize the OS. BTW that's what they were doing when they let Gates keep control of MSDos way back when. That didn't work out so well for them, but the Linux strategy has been a winner.
I've never been able to figure out just what Sun Microsystems thought they were doing when they indroduced Java. Java commoditizes the OS and the hardware, which were Sun's two main lines of business. From my perspective, Sun put themselves out of business.
Geek-Out Warning!!!
In school I played with BSD on Vax750s (CompSci dept,) and System III & System V on 3B2s and 3B20s (EE dept.) After I left school in late 1986, I went to work for a DB coding company, developing databases and applications for businesses and realtors, on Altos systems running Altos Xenix. The "hot" system back then was the Altos 2086 (80286 system, with 4MB RAM and 40MB hard drive. I was able to get a used Altos 586 for myself (10MHz 8086 w/ 1MB RAM, also running Altos Xenix) and upgraded the hard drive to a used 20MB for only another $1000.
In 1988 or 1989, I picked up an Everex Step 20-386, loaded up with 2 MB RAM, and I replaced the hard drive controller with a WD1006V-SR2 RLL 1:1 HDC and a Seagate ST-4096 (120MB) and Mitsubushi MR-535 (65MB!) And I loaded it up with this:
(not my image, but I still have memories of the pink, yellow, or blue activation key pages in the manuals!)
I remember setting up a 4MB system for a company, and a couple of their people needed Lotus 123, so we sold them SCOs VP/ix dos emulator, and they were able to run Lotus on their character terminals! Another company needed additional software, including database applications they'd been developing for MS Dos, so they bought SCO Professional, which included Lotus and FoxBase, as well as some office automation software, like email and word processing (remember, this was all done on character terminals!)
In the late 1980s, the "SCO Forums" were a blast, Doug and Larry Michaels really knew how to throw a party!
It was a really terrific OS, allowing small and even medium size companies to run their businesses on what today seems like stone-age hardware. Years later, there was a retailer that bought a DEC multiprocessor 486 system, using SCO Unix MPX, with 4 x 80486 processors, 64MB RAM, a DPT Caching SCSI HBA, 2GB HD storage, and 128 serial ports. They ran the PICK OS on top of SCO Unix, as well as the SCO office automation applications, with about 30 serial POS stations (each with its own muxed printer, at multiple locations, via leased lines and MultiTech StatMuxes,) 60 or so serial terminals, and 10 or so shared printers. And it was FAST!
Geek Out terminated.
Mark
Incorrect. Most large universities and companies require vendor support. Initial cost is a secondary concern.
Incorrect. Linux is POSIX-compliant, like Unix, but Linux is not Unix.
He was entertaining during that time, though.
Can you imagine what 25,000 Windows licenses would go for. Plus, if you’re simulating a nuke, “Blue Screen of Death” takes on a whole other meaning.
Gnu?
Wow. After all this time, you’re still pushing this crapfest.
Completely wrong. My main argument was and is still is 100% correct - that China would become the world's leading supercomputer state, based on free technology given to them by the US by way of Linux and open source software.
An argument that you agreed with me in private e-mail conversations, I might add. Surely you still have those messages, but I can forward them to you if needed.
And I've been here quite regularly ever since. I just focus more on national security issues, when the tech threads like this are more devoted to the advancement of tech itself than how it can and will be used against us.
I highly doubt that.
Here’s one of your messages, which you should still have unless you manually deleted it:
From ShadowAce | 02/09/2005 9:55:20 PM PST
No problem. For what it’s worth, I semi agree with you. However, I also see that the horse has left this barn, and also that Linux isn’t complicated enough that the Chinese couldn’t study the POSIX specs and build one themselves.
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