Re: Viability of Linux companies (Was Re: A Linux Today story has been mailed to you!)

[Arun Sharma <arun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 09:21:24AM +0530, Kingsly John wrote:
>  |If you're saying that you're happy doing Linux consulting, good for
>  |you. But if you're saying that's a great model to encourage innovation
>  in |software, supporting families of good software engineers,  I
>  think the |numbers are very telling.

> Where are the numbers ?? how many people in this world are supported
> by M$FT ??

Several times more than ones supported by Linux or any GPL'ed software.
INFY recently signed a co-marketing deal with MSFT to sell their business
apps. Why did they do that ?

> How many closed source shrink wrapped products were
> manufactured in india ??

I've always advocated that Indians should switch to that business.
Oracle employs 43000 people and earns $7.6 billion, more than the
earnings of the whole Indian software industry. What is it they can
do that Indian software engineers can't do ?

> and what percentage of software exports did
> they consititute ?  And then you will see for yourself that even if
> the whole world switched to opensource you won't find any noticable
> differnce except the worlds richest man will be worth many billions
> less due to a dramatic crash in the value of his companies stocks.

>  |Bottomline: open source is a good idea, works well in a lot of places.
> Closed source is an idea which shouldn't be used in a LOT of places!

The moment you get into the "should" business, religion comes in. I
prefer to stick to the "can" or "will it ?" business.

Closed source != shrink wrapped software. The industry is complex enough
that such simplification doesn't work any more. The key is intellectual
property, competitive advantage. That's what leads to margins. Oracle
or MS might not make much money selling licenses. But it's the proprietary
knowledge, technology and image that lets them eat the topline revenue.

If your win2k box isn't working, will you call MSFT or INFY ?

> (Whenever I click the dropdown menu on IE5.5 on my windoze machine it
> exchanges data on the net for 10-20 secs ... I am sure that's a really
> cool feature!)

But yet, it's simply the best browser available. I use it everyday.
	
	-Arun