"Pickering, John (NORBORD)" wrote:
>
> donna wrote ...
>
> >...and i would be nervous about committing my livelihood to
> >any proprietary solution at this point.         - d
>
> And the alternative would be ????
>
> HP's proprietary Unix?
> Sun's proprietary Unix?
> IBM's proprietary Unix?
> Red Hat's proprietary Linux?
> Some roll-your-own Long's version of something else?
>
> It's ALL proprietary.

Sorry, but that's silly and it's not fair to Donna besides!

Your freed from both the hardware angle and the operating system
license angle.  That is unique to the open source community of
systems that run on common hardware, compared to the others you
list.

Linux has a much better track record than Unix for cross platform
portability and it is free for the cost of downloading and a
license that gives you the source code and protects you from a
vendor playing proprietary games.

Unix provided a taste of a cross platform environment with
similar architecture, and provided competiton between hardware
vendors compared to MPE, VMS, OS/400, and all the rest of the Mini
world.  This upset the operating systems apple cart in the 1990s.

Linux now takes a major step further ahead by a more common core
of functionality, but more important is the source code license.
BSD also has a generous source code license.

Running on commodity hardware is the other major change.  Linux
runs on nearly anything, but the most common hardware may be bought
from many vendors.  You can mix and match parts from different
vendors and your not violating any license and it even works (most of
the time).  This is one of Windows' advantages over the others
(and the credit goes to IBM, not Microsoft).

Why do you think Microsoft spends so much effort bashing Linux and
the open source approach?

Richard
--
Richard L Gambrell, Senior Information Technology Consultant and
Director of Computing Systems and Networks
Information Technology Division, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
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