RE: LinuxWorld Show...where's the beef?

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Quoting John Posada <JPosada -at- isogon -dot- com>:

> 
> Bruce...I did a complete lap around the outside before I went into the
> middle. Not great pickins. And as far as openoffice.org...cool...the
> success of Linux is based on how there is an application that already
> looks like an existing application.

> 
> Whoopee.


If you think that OpenOffice.org is solely an MS Office clone, look again. 
True, there are parts of it that look like MS Office, and even a part that 
looks Acrobat. And I'll agree that copying other interfaces isn't 
OpenOffice.org's proudest moment.

However, functionally, OpenOffice.org is far in advance of MS Office. It's 
stabler, and has working versions of tools that have been broken in MS Office 
for almost a decade. Its apps interact more smoothly than the ones in MS 
Office, and it introduces styles into all of them, too. It's also a decent 
intermediate DTP.

It's strange that someone who was complaining so loudly the other week about MS 
Word should hastily reject the strongest alternative.

> 
> RE this "why sell when things are free" stuff...Oracle was there. I
> didn't go into the booth, a rather large booth...I don't need Oracle
> right now, but I'd assume they don't give their database away for free.

Oracle partly sells prestige. More importantly, it also sells expertise and 
cross-platform compatability - something quite differently to a purely Linux-
based application. Nor, I suspect, is Larry Ellison blind to the fact that if 
Linux becomes popular, his arch-rival at Microsoft is undermined.

 
> Stop thinking small-time. I couldn't care about a web browser clone, or
> a Word-replacement clone...I already have them. 

Yes, but without much of the functionality. Calling them clones may be a good 
way to dismiss them, but it ignores the fact that the innovations in these 
areas are coming from free software.

Nor are these small time. These are the apps on which business is run on a 
daily basis.


I mean
> APPLICATIONS...off the top of my head...big-time development tools,
> content management tools (Documentum?),  enterprise authoring tools
> (i.e., Arbortext), Rational Rose-UML-type tools, business process
> modeling (i.e., CA AllFusion ERwin).

For content management, try Zope. As for development tools, there's an 
embarassment of riches. The other categories aren't ones I'm familiar with, but 
I could probably find them if I tried.

> 
> Something stuck me...right now, MS is doing a big cost-of-ownership
> advert campaign on how a Windows server environment is cheaper than
> Linux. Yet, MS had a rather large booth...and it was PACKED..more than
> any other. 

John: it's a curiosity. People want to know why Microsoft has the chutzpah to 
be there. It's not out of admiration or envy.

It was like...I dunno...that Linux is still fighting a
> Windows inferiority complex..."we're better than them, but we cannot do
> anything unless it's to compete with them (Hey! We have a word processor
> that looks like Word!), but don't ask us to do stuff on our own. 

Apparently, Linux can't win as far as you're concerned. First, you claim that 
it doesn't have the desktop apps. When some are mentioned, you then say that 
you didn't mean those apps, or that those apps aren't enough. The goal posts 
keep moving.

John, would anything satisfy you that Linux is a platform for doing regular 
work on? Because I really have to wonder.

 
> I stopped at the Andros booth...Andros is a GUI Linux. I went up to the
> guy and said "Talk to me." The first thing he does is launch a program
> that resembled MS Paint...not Illustrator...but Paint...with the comment
> "We run any application that runs on Windows. I asked him what about
> Adobe products. The only one was Illustrator...no, not FM, no, not ID,
> no, not PM, no, not anything that's used in big efforts. 

I'm not sure whether you're talking about native applications or Windows 
emulation here, but it doesn't really matter. You're not only making 
generalizations based on a single incidence, but on a very obscure one. There's 
far too much going on for anyone to be completely aware of everything in free 
software, but I am reasonably well-enough informed that I probably would have 
heard of Andros if it was innovative or being used in large numbers. Yet this 
is the first that I've heard of the project.

It's too bad you didn't stop at the Oracle booth, or maybe the IBM or HP 
booths. Then you might have seen how Linux is being used commercially.



-- 
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177