Thursday, September 19, 2002

Benevolence in Open Source To think that 'Open Source' is a benevolent act that programmers are endowing the planet with, is one of the biggest gimmick in the computer industry. Linus Torvalds is a millionare with his Red Hat stock options and Red Hat is a publicly traded company that has signed a mega-deal with IBM. By the way - decades before Linux there was - XINU (Doug Comer), BSD Unix (UC Berkeley - early '80s) and Bell Labs Unix (with source available for $11 on a magnetic tape for the Dec PDP-11 in the late '70s). Linux is repackaged and bundled with a marketing gimmick. There is no benevolence in 'Open Source', get over it - it's a business like any other. So, what remains is stock price - RHAT $5.22 and MSFT $47.75 (as of 09/18/02) and that's the bottom line. 7:01:02 AM