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?