Great Comment from Slashdot
From SusoSight
| Number: | 1 |
| Date created: | 2001-07-10 22:00:00 |
| Previous Thought: | - |
| Next Thought: | Welcome to my mind |
| Voting results: | Yes: 2 |
"I'm shocked that people that high up in Microsoft and other "consultancy" firms completely miss what Linux is about. It's not ABOUT money. It never WAS about money, and frankly, redhat, VA Linux, and everything in between can go tits-up tomorrow and it won't make a lick of difference to me. I'm sure there'd be a lot of unhappy investors - but let me say it again, Linux is not about money.
Linus Torvalds did not write Linux because he wanted to be rich - although a nice side effect - he wrote it because he wanted to do something; he wanted an operating system that just sucked a little less than all of the other ones out there. That's the beauty of the GPL. That's why I give code away - It did what I wanted, and if someone thinks that it sucks less, then all the power to them!
I use Linux because it does what I want, and so do a lot of other people. Linux won't lose because a bunch of ill concieved business models go up in smoke - all that GPL'd code will be there, waiting for the next Linus Torvalds to hack on it and make it suck less. Those drivers weren't written by people who wanted money; they were written by people that just wanted their hardware to work. There's no rocket science in there - just a pile of time.
Unless Microsoft is proposing that they ban free development - free as in speech - then there's a segment of the market that they'll never, ever get - and that's the real Linux mainstream, the core of people that use it because it sucks less and makes their lives easier. Does anything else really matter? If you're happy with MS, fine. Enjoy. I'm not."
-- quoted from smanley@nyx.net's excellent comment posted on slashdot.org.