EFs Mountain of Shit!

Really? Which companies, *exactly*? And how, *precisely* were they killed off by the GPL?

some GPL, others Common Public License or IBM Public License.

It's not the GPL that's killing Microsoft; it's the products that are arising from the collaborative spirit applied on the scale of the internet.

All the GPL does is keep MS from harvesting the result, like they did with Kerebos.

Bobby Bryant Austin, Texas

Most of these are not applications, but OS improvements and tools to help them sell more hardware, such as file systems, device drivers, Compilers, Java tools,etc...

Where is the Open Source Notes, or Websphere or other such applications?

Open source will kill Windows, and all other commercial operating systems. Do you like that statement better?

I think there will always be commercial software; the more tedious/niche the software is, the longer commercial software will hang around (where is the open source air traffic control system? we'll probably never see it.). Mundane software, such as Windows, OTOH, will be killed off by open source sooner or later.

No, but I accept it as your opinion

I don't know about that. What's more popular? The Ford Taurus? Or the Bradley Kit Car? Lots of people take comfort in the 'mass market' 'black box' thing that they don't have to mess with, or mess with very little. Because of the Linux developers hacker ethic, I think they will always make it more 'hands on' than most end users will want.

Yes, you can run any number of simplification tools on top of it, but unless the guts are invisible to the end-user, they'll balk.

Poor marketing and community participation. When they did try to turn the boat around, it was too late. Also, they lacked the managerial skills to create alliances with hardware companies, and develop a consulting wing of the company, that could be used to win tenders let out buy local business and government. Oh, btw, why didn't Redhat or any other Linux distro. bid for the UK's e-government concept?

Entering a market already highly competitive. They were going to go up against the likes of Sony and Nintendo who had already a well established marketing dominance. Sega has already died. Microsoft alone will lose 2 billion on the x-box with in the first 5 - 7 years. Idrema was simply a stupid management decision.

Before its time. It was offering services that, in the Wintel world, are still another 5 years away. HOWEVER, what they should have done was to be bought out by either Redhat or another major distro. and offer the Eazel services ontop of their own, thus reducing service delivery costs.

<snype>

Matthew Gardiner

You'll end up with a single-function box going down that route, which will kill the PC far more surely than any amount of GPLed code.

The PC has gained huge popularity because of its multi-functional nature, not because of one OS or another.

The playstation (for example) is far better placed than the PC to offer single-functional use. There's also a linux version for it.

Also, dedicated devices will fill other niches. Processing power gets less expensive all the time. How long before a digital camera has its own picture manipulation capability built-in, you just need to attach it to a network with an X-terminal to run the built-in software and a CUPs print server to print your results, or maybe NFS to copy the pix to separate storage.

There seems to be no future for an OS is the solution company in this model.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Storm suffered from anything remotely related to the GPL. They failed at the same time as hundreds of dot.com companies. I suspect that these companies may be trying to tap a market which is simply not yet large enough to support all of them.

Indrema, afairc were not doing anything with the GPL anyway.

Ie., innovative!

Indeed. Their business model was not strong enough for the current environment.

The interesting thing is that although the names were given, the precise relationship of their business failure and the GPL was somehow, completely and utterly, missing.

Something like half of Microsoft's profits come from applications, and there is not even a hint of any GPL'ed office suite coming anywhere near Office.

I haven't tried KOffice, yet, so perhaps they will be the one. I've certainly been impressed with Konqueror, which is infinitely better than Mozilla. Since the KDE people succeeded in making a good browser...an area where every other open source effort other than Lynx has failed miserably, perhaps they will also succeede in the office suite area.

To sum all up, GPL != business failures.

Matthew Gardiner