Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd)

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Forwarded message:

> Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 21:13:43 -0800
> Original-From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd)

> At 08:21 AM 2/6/98 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
> > Let's give the market another 5-10 years and see where Linux
> >stands. Right now the estimate is 6-10 million users world wide use it. Share
> >wise that isn't a lot. The reason that Linux garners so much press right now
> >is that it is in fact an exception when an organization uses the software
> >(eg NASA). The test will be whether it grows significantly over the long
> >run and not the 5 years that Linux has been a serious os.
> 
> Sharewise, that's not bad for a system that had 1 million users a 
> year or two ago, though of course it gains a lot of extra slack
> because it's quasi-free Unix on an affordable platform.

I agree.

> Getting that much desktop support without running MSOffice is
> impressive.

Is it? The vast majority of those users are non-commercial users. The number
of US users, currently estimated at 6M is *not* significantly different than
the number of home users of C64's and Amiga's (both machines had a very poor
commercial market penetration) and also had maximum market penetrations in
the 6M range. This consistency would seem to indicate to me that there
is a significant overlap in the home users and the Linux community and that
this community stays reasonably stable as a constant percentage of total
population and not the software alone. The question at this point is how
will this number change over the next 2 years or so. If we don't see a
significant rise in this percentage then I would suspect Linux will never
succeed in making a serious bid for MS parity. It is still a rare thing for
an employer to provide Linux as a the default os on a new-hires pc. How many
companies do you know that when a person comes in and configures their pc it
contains Linux by default? Not many. Further that percentage is *not*
increasing at any sort of significant rates. I would prophecy that you will
have to wait a long(!) time before you can expect your local grocery store
(HEB here uses Win95 and various Unix'es for back-office and check-out) or
bank to be using it as a de facto standard.

Also, considering that the folks who are making money on Linux are the
distributors. How have they faired over the last 4-5 years? If you go to your
1st year Linux Journals (only 12/yr. and the Feb. 98 is #46) and compare it
to your current issue how do the number of distributors fair? It turns out
there are only a few major distirbutors (Red Hat, Slackware, InfoMagic,
Walnut Creek, SuSE) and some of the early distributors have seen a
significant decrease in their market share (eg Ygddrasil). So even in the
Linux community we have seen a *decrease* in the *commercial* enterprises
who have succeeded? Why? Because users like to have the same distribution as
their friends so that they have some hope of resolving their problems. So
what you see (and this is from my 4+ years working with Linux user groups)
is that the majority of members of a given user group will have only 1 or 2
distributions and unless you have one of those most of them will be very
hesitant to work on it because of the ignorance factor of the special
features and changes of each distribution. The local Austin Linux Group
(alg-l@lists.io.com) for example is moving currently from Red Hat to SuSE
because of the superior, and propietary - I would add, X-windows and RPM
modifications they have made.



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