From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 95 21:38:27 PDT
To: "Christopher J. Shaulis" <cjs@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Netscape for Linux?
Message-ID: <199509240436.VAA28304@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:42 PM 9/23/95 -0400, you wrote:
>It seems to me that you folks are going out of your way to deny the
>fact that the Linux market exists. I think that its because you are
>embarassed that all these people with a $20 operating system are
>throwing money at you while all the folks with $10K operating systems
>aren't talking to you at all. 
>
>While you may WANT to have all your sales be for OSF/1 machines or
>solaris, but refusing to support Linux and ignoring the demand for
>your products by the Linux community just because you don't think it
>would sound as impressive, is actually quite childish and doesn't make
>any financial sense.

Foo.  Supporting applications in a professional way on Linux is _tough_;
everybody's got their own self-hacked copy that may have started out as
SlackOS 4.1.3 but has the TooManyNotes Sound Widget replacement and has the 
XBrokenX video driver instead of the original one that didn't work
on the TiltedSquareSneakyVideoCard and a way-cool new Obfuscated File System.
It's like supporting things on "Unix" was back when everybody had source and
a different flavor of M680x0 box.  You can't just ask "Have you changed the
AUTOEXEC.BAT since the machine came from the factory?" like Windoze app-vendors.
Netscape may not have ever been _compiled_ with the compiler version the
user has,
much less tested on that kernel version, and the user may or may not know
if their X Window System really is installed right or the TCP/IP connection 
works well and has working DNS support.

Sure, it's easy to charge money for shipping the stuff with a diskette and
a manual, but not doing so until they're ready to provide high-quality support
isn't childishness, it's ethics (well, and/or bad-reputation-avoidance.)
Now, I haven't checked whether they've trained all their people who answer
phone calls from the public to acknowledge that there is an unsupported
Linux version
for folks who don't mind dealing with unsupported software, or if they've
even got it on their Web site; the current version is there for ftp.
#---
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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