[luau] Thinktech Hawaii and Linux

[Craig]

 >It is very hard for seasoned businessmen and women
 >to trust something that is Open Source as
 >it is completely contrary to their way of thinking.

It is'nt really of course, it's the most natural thing possible in 
mercantilism and craftsmanship.  Here is why.  Software itself is not 
the end all.  It has to be at least installed.  And then at least 
configured.  Then used to produce real work.  Software is not really a 
product.  It's the toolset of computer engineering of all sorts.  Shrink 
wrapped software works on the idea that you be your own expert.  It's 
works because it's expensive to have a software engineer build you 
something like MS Word.  People be their own expert in that case.  But 
it's a more traditional thing with systems to have someone customize the 
tool to fit it to the particulars of the business at hand.  Someone that 
doesn't need anything from Word that isn't in Open Office is clearly now 
in the market to spend a few hundred dollars for some custom macros.  

What craft has not adopted some standard tools?  This is the real 
impetus for software to be free... it's not to give anyone anything for 
free, you are supposed to give the money to someone who will do 
something really usefull with it.  That might not be a software 
engineer, maybe it's an author getting paid to write something using 
Open Office.  But it might be a software engineer customizing Open 
Office for that successful author who naturally has a few dream-feature 
requests.

Software is the ultimate tool building craft.  The result is always a 
tool itself.  It's like a carpenter in the same situation would find 
that once he built a certain type of house he could just copy it. 
 Instead of a work product the house actually becomes another tool.  He 
can just pop it down anywhere, as a starting point.  He will have to 
adapt anything that was dependent on the original location, like the 
water and electric system hookups.  Over time you grow more adapters and 
make the houses more standard in respect.  This is all optimizing the 
amount of adjustments made to place a particular model at a location. 
 Open Source of all kinds is a system where programmers get to reuse not 
only the houses they've built, but the houses of thousands upon 
thousands of other programmers.  Truly a situation with a lot of 
engineering potential.  

We'll be able to provide this profitably because open source will be 
standard, and customizations someone wants for the first time will be 
9/10'ths of some subsequent customization.  Instead of companies dying 
and taking their products, our tools, with them, we know that awk will 
stay even if perl is better,  A person will be able to choose something 
better, if they  think it's better, but customers won't find their 
system no longer works with a new machine because only new versions of 
the OS are available on it (or at least far less often).

Basically I'm saying all IT workers split the billions a month that 
microsoft takes in from Windows and Office, with the users getting tools 
really customized to the way they do their business... businesses do 
have their own processes after all.  Each and every one does and it's 
why that business is surviving.  

Long winded for someone that usually lurks and watches, eh?  I was a 
little inspired by the other reply that talked about discovering unix 
through linux.  My first thought of  Unix was that it seemed crazy 
compared to VMS... but it came borglike and I learned to appreciate why. 
 Largely it was this linux-epitomized openness.  That and it's been 
reimplimented so many times people have it down pat and ironed out.  I 
truly believe that Unix is unstoppable, and I always have since I saw 
VMS consumed in the flames of Unix' installation tapes.  Linux is like a 
barage of flaming arrows  falling onto the small commodotity harware 
platform which  IBM managed to create by rushing out a PC with mostly 
stock parts.  I imagine a couple more decades and everything is a flavor 
of Unix, or a recognizeable Posix variant, at least.

But then, there /was/ that time I was wrong about everything.

cheers,
craig
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