It takea lot of money and time to stay ahead of the curve on a distro.

It appears to me that Linux did not get the support of the business
community because the revenue model is hard to sell. You cannot make
it with free downloads as attractive as they are, and 40 dollar 4 disk
sets. Support contracts as nice as they were worked out in practice but
also scare the bejeesus out of people at 25 dollars for 15 minutes.
Given that people anticipate about 300 questions a year and 15 all
niters to fix problems, the cost begins to mount to infinity in their minds.

I admit one thing, when Slack had email support, it was slick and their
people on the phone were great. Even complex upgrading problems became
almost understandable. I always thought there should have been docs
like this. I had Yggdrasil support at one time too, and it was good,
but again I finally balked at what seemed like too many problems to
get apps up to speed. It was just a great big Linux problem at the time.
No office apps of any sophistication. Applixware was the best of a bad
bunch and that was a bad fix in many real world ways.

Offhand I would say a distro would need 4 help people of extremely good
skills with people and distros, and about 6 programmers all full time.

That is 500K a year not counting office, and publishing/distro costs. At
1000 support contracts at 250 dollars a year and 5,000 box sets at
40 bucks and sundry dollars for various books, it is barely a business.
Nobody would underwrite for public issue unless the total market for a
supportable Linux desktop/server changed drastically. And I know a lot
of underwriters who would jump at it if there was money to be made.

The bottom line is that a distro to break this curse has to get vertical
market oriented, and stop tring to be distro generalist execpt to bacj
end to support their bread and butter. What vertical market is their
choice, but it has to be someting where people don't mind throwing 10K
at a server that does their work for them and they can train employeses
on. An app maker partnership appears to the the only way to do it.

There is more money in selling vertical market software to bulk cheese
sellers than there is in marketing linux. I am not kidding. I know some
people who print six figure/annum doing exactly that. I someone in the
surveying software business who saturated Canada for one million dollars
in one year with a $25K app written in about 100K lines of C++ that
mated with GPS routines and co-ords.

I am pretty sure that most Linux distros do not make a million per year.
IDG books makes more than that from Linux headscratchers thinking their
solution lies between printed pages of a book.

PV will be on the mend I would think for a few more months. Efficiency
may have suffered a bit and may suffer some more. I do not think
he has been 100% diagnosed yet. Doctors are tough. Like many programmers
they think they know it all. I would give him the summer til he is out
of the woods, and perhaps that is only if he gets proper help from a
physician who is willing to ride a few Zebras till he gets to the Korral.

EC<:-}


GP wrote:
> Do you remember this message when PV was sick and he said that if he
> ever was to recover. he'd reconsider the organisation of Slackware?
>
> So, what has changed?
>
> GP
>