{"id":1713,"date":"2004-11-16T14:11:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-16T14:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2017-09-19T14:52:12","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T19:52:12","slug":"1713","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/16\/1713\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspective in the Geek World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dale Franks at Q and O sees that Sun is just giving Solaris away<\/a> these days, and he rightfully sneers:<\/p>\n

Solaris isn\u2019t some mystically wonderful operating system chock full of Sun\u2019s proprietary goodness. It\u2019s just freakin\u2019 UNIX for cripe\u2019s sake. They\u2019ve been giving away a free UNIX-based operating system for years, anyway. It\u2019s called Linux, and despite all its hype, it\u2019s still where it was five years ago: restricted to the hard-core, geek community. Ask 10 average computer users what Linux is, and 9 of \u2019em will tell you it\u2019s the blanket-toting Great Pumpkin kid from Peanuts. In fact, if Sun is giving away Solaris, I suspect it\u2019s far more likely that they\u2019re doing so because Linux is eating into their user base, and there\u2019s a whole UNIX-based open source community that\u2019s starting to eat their lunch.<\/p>\n

Microsoft, on the other hand, owns the desktop. Look, the desktop OS is about as perfect an example of a natural monopoly that you can find. If you have a business–and this is more true the larger the business is–you can\u2019t have twelve different operating systems running concurrently. If you do, your corporate IT division has to puff up like a tick just to support all the different configuration, software, and hardware tics that will result. So will your training section, because every time a typist\/clerk has to move from the UNIX\/StarOffice system to Windows\/Office 200X system, you\u2019ve gotta put them through a whole new training cycle to learn all the new stuff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve linked to Dale Franks’ posts before because he’s a geek with perspective. Software’s but a tool, and its silly factions of technology partisans make as much sense as contractors continuing to argue Bosch versus Black and Decker. Who, outside of those partisans and some salespeople, cares?<\/p>\n

Perhaps I’ve stumbled upon the secret of open-source addiction amongst the geek community–not only do the developers get to write it, but they get to sell it, too, but they’re not very good salespeople.<\/p>\n

Or maybe that’s not an insight after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dale Franks at Q and O sees that Sun is just giving Solaris away these days, and he rightfully sneers: Solaris isn\u2019t some mystically wonderful operating system chock full of Sun\u2019s proprietary goodness. It\u2019s just freakin\u2019 UNIX for cripe\u2019s sake. They\u2019ve been giving away a free UNIX-based operating system for years, anyway. It\u2019s called Linux, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16920,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions\/16920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}