Re: ``Nothing like a monopoly to get investors to cheer youon''

[Charles Behney <charlesaugust@theriver.com>]

What effect will Mac OS X and Gateway Amiga Lazarus OS have, with POSIX/Linux
and BSD available as extensions? Is there a shift towards protecting the public
protocols from the 'extend and embrace' attack? It appears that the next killer
apps could be Windows killers, and the Halloween documents are a battle plan for
subverting the open standards, as a response.

Ironically, the study of herbal medicines is retarded because no one company can
patent a natural plant's extracts, and no patents can be derived.

Jini/javatone is another threat being answered with a Wintone clone. I see lots
of storm clouds for MS, but I read today that the Windows 2000 will have
patented file servers that will not be reverse engineered by the OSS community.
The threat of a legal trap by MS could be the beginning of their battle to
control and de-commoditize protocols through the courts. Ironic and sad, but not
without some hope. I never thought the details of their dirty error messages
would become front page news, so there could be more surprises to come. Have you
had any requests for your program that displays the 3.1 error message from
investigators or other journalists?

CAB

Brett Glass wrote:

> At 10:27 PM 11/7/98 -0500, Charles Behney wrote:
>
> >Wall Street loves a Sure Thing. How can you make Linux a darling of stock
> >analysts?
>
> I don't know. However, Linux may (inadvertently) make Microsoft MORE
> of a darling of stock analysts. Why? Because Linux will prevent any new
> commercial operating system -- such as BeOS -- from being able to compete
> with Microsoft's offerings. Linux will compete with them for developer
> mindshare, for sales, and for capital. The result: Microsoft's position
> as the ONLY viable commercial option will -- perversely -- be strengthened.
> Linux will kill off potential competition for it.
>
> --Brett