boomberg bloopers

[Dave J Woolley]

> From:	Brian Behlendorf [SMTP:brian at collab.net]
> 
> Heh, I wish they had included the part where I said if MS really said that
> Open Source was a threat to "innovation" and inellectual property, then MS
> 
[DJW:]  I can't get at the Red Hat response, probably because
of typical broken non-Javascript support on a popup++, however,
whilst my view is that Open Source and its precursors have
been the main source of innovation in terms of technical features,
there is a case that Linux, as marketed by Red Hat is basically
trying to emulate Windows too much because its market is a market
that doesn't really believe in Open Source, but wants to
get something that behaves like Windows either cheaper, or avoiding
Microsoft for semi-political reasons.

What commercial software tends to be good at is dumbing down 
technical stuff for a mass audience, and I don't think that that
audience can take a lot of innovation in function or user interface
behaviour and will have no apprecation of innovations in how the
user interface is implemented.

I think that the real area of innovation with Linux is embedded systems,
like TiVo, which the man in the street, and many software developers, 
don't realise to be Linux.  Whilst you might be able to license NT 
on special terms for such a device, you would probably have to
demonstrate a huge market before you would get any committment to such
terms.

++ The link is to an empty fragment name on the same page, which usually
indicates a popup done with onclick but a dummy href, rather than 
javascript:.  The correct way is with onclick with an href that references
the page that will be popped up; the onclick needs to return false.
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