[TriLUG] Where is Linux today?

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Christopher L Merrill
<chris at webperformance.com> wrote:
> No software is free for us, since we have to spend time/resources to set it
> up and keep it running.  We pay someone else to do much of the maintenance
> of our Linux-based systems...and we think (hope) that the total cost is lower.
> Open or closed?  Free or commercial?  Neither matters much to us - only the
> bang for the buck (and time IS money).

Your logic is flawless and I can't fault you for it. I can only hope
that the various Open Source communities continue to provide good code
that meets your needs better than the non-Free alternatives, and
further that those communities are welcoming and friendly to you.

I just want to make clear that in no way in my emails have I been
trying to pass some kind of moral judgment on you, your business,
people who use Windows, etc. I happen to think Open Source is better
and that people should buy in, and I know what's right for /me/.

> Well, kinda.  There is a free product and our commercial product which
> has a very usable demo version freely available.  You can get a fair
> amount of work done with both the free version and the demo version.  Our
> license is the typical commercial license boilerplate crap.  We have
> considered opening our source, but we don't see there would be much benefit
> to it.  There is almost no activity in the open source projects in our market
> and it's obvious in the quality of the open-source competitors - they're all
> pretty bad.  In our market, there is demand for free software, but not
> open-source software (unless it's also free).

From my perspective that's sad, but again, understandable. Maybe the
landscape will change.

>> Did I answer your questions?
>
> yup.

Good, and I hope I haven't put you or others off too much with my ramblings.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
"Small acts of humanity amid the chaos of inhumanity provide hope. But
small acts are insufficient."
 -- Paul Rusesabagina