Re: MJR on Linux/OSS

[Crispin Cowan <crispin () immunix com>]

Marcus J. Ranum wrote:

> Aside from ego-reasons, who needs 60 different versions
> of UNIX? Scott McNealy was right when he suggested, "all
> the wood behind one arrow" - I suspect that most UNIX
> users would be thrilled to death if there was just one darned
> UNIX again. I wouldn't care which. I can adapt O/S knowledge
> in a couple weeks. I just don't want to do it every week. :)
>  
Uhm ... two, please. I have had enough experience with OS monopolization 
from Redmond, thanks.

Fortunately, going down to one distro is unlikely to ever happen to the 
FOSS UNIXes. As soon as someone got a monopoly lock on Linux, they would 
start acting arrogant, people would start to hate them, and someone 
would feel motivated to fork. Some say this has already happened :)

I think there is a nice dynamic stabilization effect here. Business 
pressures tend to cause convergence; business only supports a very small 
number of distros, and wants that number to get smaller. But when that 
number gets too small, fragmentation happens and the number gets larger 
again.

If you go look for Linux distros, there are at least a hundred. But if 
you go look at what enterprises are using, you see a *much* smaller 
number. In my travels, I have encountered Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (once), 
and Slackware (once). Business is effectively defragmenting the Linux 
market quite nicely, thanks.

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.  http://immunix.com/~crispin/
CTO, Immunix          http://immunix.com


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