Mandrake 8.1 - The Sweetest Thing

[W. Wayne Liauh]

Calm down, Rusty. Calm down.

To make my comment short, I am not the kind of dumb lawyer that you 
think all lawyers are. I have a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and was a 
professor of chemical engineering before I became, and subsequently 
retired from, a research specialist and corporate patent lawyer at 
Exxon. Before I became a lawyer (in Texas and Hawaii), my speciality was 
about the computer simulation of complicated 3-D fluid mechanics coupled 
with mass transfer for non-Newtonian polymer solutions. I began working 
with computers probably before you started school (or even were born), 
although most of our emphasis were on JCL and Fortran/Pascal programming 
on DEC/IBM machines running VMS/UNIX. While retired, I still serve as a 
legal counsel to the national applied research laboratories ("ITRI") of 
Taiwan, which has an annual R&D budget of over $500M and has served as 
the primary incubator for many of the high-tech power houses there. 
Several of my former clients (though I still do very limited work for 
them), including Winbond and Siemmens, are multi-billion corporations. 
As to my knowledge on Linux, one of the projects that I am working with 
one of my clients is on GNOME informatics research, which involves a 
cluster of P3 machines (hope to switch to Athlons soon) running on a 
special version of Linux which contains our own patches. I have been 
trying to keep a low profile in this group, but, unfortunately, my low 
profile led you to think that I am an "uneducated" idiot.

My legal docket prevented me from personally actively getting involved 
in Linux (I believe that's the reason you think I am an idiot). However, 
I have worked with a number of Linux start-up companies. Most of them 
are astute enough to change their business model and, thank God, are 
doing well enough to weather the economic earth quake. As to whether I 
should be called a troll spreading FUD against Linux, I probably have 
mentioned this before but will mention it again: I am heavily invested 
in the Linux big 4 (RedHat, Caldera, VA, and IBM). To most of my 
friends, I am a Linux zealot. While I am not able to personally 
contribute to the Linux development, a couple of year ago, I hired a 
part-time employee (who was a member of luau, btw) to try to ease the 
route for law offices to adopt Linux. Unfortunately, that effort 
produced no results. I have also financed a project that ported Corel 
Linux into Chinese. That project was a great success, but there are no 
users.

I am not going to waste my time to tell you which business model should 
be best for Linux. As a matter of fact, I am not interested in spending 
any time here at all. I know this is very unfair to a number of the 
old-timers who have so selfishly devoted so much of their time, fund, 
and effort (e.g., Ron Willis) to promote an alternative to Windows. 
However, what you have said about me, even though I am old enough not to 
be bothered, manifests an intolerant, militant, and, above all, 
extremist, attitude that can be commonly found in the so-called Linux 
community.

A couple of years ago, I was discussing with my client Winbond to see 
whether we should develop software-modem chipsets for Linux. 
Technologically and financially, they are one of the few companies in 
the world that can do that and the impact can be quite beneficial, both 
for them and for Linux (their Linmodems will be substantially cheaper 
that those by Lucent). However, it was exactly this intolerant and 
militant attitude that is often the trademark of the Linux community 
that we decided not to pursue it (because they can never be allowed to 
open their source code!).

In this instance, it is actually much more serious because you are not 
attacking an abstract and/or distant entity but a person with a real 
flash and blood within a reaching distance. Such an extremist attitude 
really scares me. There are several well respected and devoted members 
in luau, and I could have, and indeed, should have just quietly walked 
away. However, such an extremist attitude gives me no choice but to 
expressly denounce my association, if any, with this group. With this 
posting, I am also removing my e-mail address from the luau list.

Dusty wrote:

>Wayne,
>
>  You have a very twisted and pessimistic outlook on open source.  Why do you continue to use products that do not meet your needs (ie have no office suites, vector graphics applications, or financial applications), have a poor business model, and are doomed to fail!?!?
>
>At first I assumed you were an uneducated windows bigot who was curious, but then you mentioned that you were technical editor of the "WordPerfect for Linux Bible" (I think that was the book).  So I now assume you should be knowledgeable about Linux, but you continue to show an incredible ignorance and a negative outlook on everything open source.  Being a lawyer (with all the speak of the bar and law offices, I assume you are a lawyer?) you should be more than capable of doing research and learning that open source existed well before it had financial support of shareholders and will continue to exist long after the share holders realize, open source is not here so they can drive a Ferrari and control other people.  
>
>Are you trying to use FUD to herd us back to the pen with the rest of the MS sheep?  It won't work!!!!!
>
>
>Dusty
>
>
>
>>We have to be realistic.  Red Hat is able to survive because it still 
>>has a lot of cash (several hundred million dollars, from selling its 
>>stocks when the share price was in the double digits).  RH reported a 
>>gross revenue of about 15 million dollars at the last Q (a substantial 
>>drop from the same Q last year) , and a loss of a very trivial number 
>>(about a couple hundred $K).
>>
>>I am all for free software and open software, but I am also realistic. 
>> It is very expense-consuming to market a software (even it is free), to 
>>pay the supporting staff (QA and adm, etc), and, most importantly, to 
>>develop software that may not interest the volunteer developers (e.g., 
>>business desktop application).
>>
>
>So I asked my accountant, do I get an agriculture 
>exemption for my server farm?
>
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