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Yesterday's Haifux meeting




well,

i must say that yesterday's Haifux's (HAIFa linUX club) meeting was
different then all that were before. oded's lecture brought up a lot of
arguing and controversy, and the meeting was quite noisy - in a good
manner (i.e. no one shed blood eventually :)   ). oded has raised a few
points regarding linux's strengthes and weeknesses, and i'd try to
summarize a few notions that came up (and some things of my own), and that
might help with guiding how to outspread the word to curious wanna-be
linux users, companies, etc. oded's lecture slides would go on the club's
web site (http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~orrd/linux-club/) soon.


1. companies in israel tend to use windows almost exclusively these days. 
    in the US, there is also a large market for companies who develope on
    and for unix systems. this naturally tends to help forming an easier
    transition to linux. this situation begins to change here, as a number
    of players are moving up into the linux market here as well (including
    linux support, integration services, complete projects developments,
    and startup companies basing their busyness on developing software for
    linux).

2. In the embedded market, where products are supposed to be cheap and
   sold by large numbers, having to pay royalties for an OS becomes a big
   problem, and here linux (especially RTlinux - www.rtlinux.com, not to
   be confused with zentropia's site - www.rt-linux.com).

3. linux starts to become a viable desktop system slowly, but still not
   for the companies secretary (ask mike about his experiment of switching
   his company's secretary's machine to a linux system, and what happened
   to him after one week ... ;)  ).

4. development environments in unix systems are many, and have different
   looks. some of us like them alot. the problem is that people that got
   used to visual studio would not (yet) find an equivalent system on
   linux. remember - this is not an argument about techical superiority,
   and trying to convince these people that 'xemacs is your ultimate IDE'
   won't lead most of them to conversion.

5. the drivers problem would be solved when companies see that linux has
   gained a big market share, making it profitable to release (and
   support) linux drivers for their hardware. it won't be solved by
   vulanteers writing drivers _on a scale as large as the windows market_.

6. in places where 'stoleware' is the rule, rather then the exception,
   linux's law-price does not pose a great factor.

7. availability and "freeness" of the source code is a good thing for a
   company that does its own internal development. however, it's still not
   sure what the bonus that it gives to the breadth of other companies. 
   my personal opinion is that "well, you could always hire someone else
   to maintain that source code if you want" is not a realy good
   reasoning, since most companies cannot afford to pay enough for real
   features development, and even if you find someone to do that, it'll
   take them time to learn the source code base, which makes the
   transition to a new maintainer a costly step.

8. as usual, for international markets, problem with internationalized
   software would still exist (you know, that hebrew thing.. arabic...)

   just to give you an idea of how effective this is: in japan, in
   the last year, it is estimated that the number of linux-based systems
   sold was slightly larger then the number of win98 systems. the reason
   is mostly due to the fact that there is a completely japanized linux
   system (turbo linux), while the number of japanized windows
   applications is not so large to make people prefer win98 over linux, as
   is the case with english software.


btw, regarding maddog's claim that HP hasn't decided yet, in last month's
dr. dobs, there is an announcement of a new NC (network computer) by HP,
running on a linux OS. 

hope everyone had fun in the meeting,
guy

"For world domination - press 1,
 or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy


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