From: mokros@chekov.UU.NET (Ivo Mokros)
Subject: Re: IS UNIX DEAD? (long)
Organization: Nothern Telecom, Ottawa, Canada
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 00:18:41 GMT

In article <BxG6q9.LLI@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> papresco@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu (Paul Prescod) writes:

[ stuff deleted ]
>>
>>Support and handholding comes free on the net.  I'm seeing a number of
>>places in trade magazines that offer support for Linux and BSD:
>>installation, troubleshooting, consulting, and so on.  So you get the
>>OS for free and pay a small fee for support.  Competitive, at least.
>
>Huh?  What net?  I've never heard of the net?  I just want to get a computer
>to run my carpentry business on, and this guy tells  me to get a modem
>and a TCP/IP connection?  Huh?  Whadda ya mean?
>
History repeats itself.  I remember people aguing that nobody could possibly need
more than 64K in their computers.  When computers were first invented, noone could
conceive of any application other than calculating trajectories of projectiles.
Only a few years ago, who would have thought that a carpentry business would need
a computer at all?

Networking is the next logical step in computing, and the capenter who informs
him/herself on the net (in trades.carpentry.how.to.make.more.money perhaps?)
will be further ahead than the status quo oriented competion.

>And where am I supposed to GET this free OS with no access to the net in
>the first place?  And how much is this "small fee" for support?  $300?
>$400? $500?  and how long is it for?
>
>Users get a "nice warm feeling" from BUYING things in a store.  

Because of bullying by large corporations like MicroSoft who can't stand the
fact that someone would write software without trying to become rich doing it.
If your friends still want that "warm fuzzy", they can send money to the author,
or just throw it in the river if they want.

>
>I dont' know how many times I've told people, "Yes, Telix/Telemate/4dos/pkzip
>is shareware, but it's actually GOOD." and they look at me with an "Who are
>you kidding" look.  If nobody makes a profit from it, nobody has to improve
>it.  Worse, if nobody's survival depends on it, it never has to be upgraded.

These people are wrong.  There are gigabytes of free software on the net, and
the users update and improve the code all the time.  

My $0.02:

Unix if firmly entrenched in the technical and large database markets.  There is NO
WAY that Windows NT or OS/2 can make any inroads into this market.  According to the
December 91 issue of UNIX WORLD, the top 5 Unix hardware vendors (Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, AT&T)
sold 11.79 billion dollars worth of Unix systems.  This is not a dead segment of the
computing market.  The company for which I work has over 9000 unix workstations and servers
installed, and growing.  The same is true of other large corporations.  There is no question
that UNIX IS NOT DEAD.  The question is whether it can become the OS of choice on the 
desktop.  I hope that Roel Pieper (sp?) can market Unix well enough to compete with Windows NT.
I installed SVR4 on my 486, and found the installation only marginally more difficult than
installing DOS5 and Windows 3.1.  I don't believe that NT will be any easier to install
that Unix.  If users still find this too difficult, they can buy the system preinstalled.

------------------
Ivo Mokros
mokros@bnr.ca
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions