From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 02:22:20 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd)
Message-ID: <199802081824.MAA14700@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd)
> Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 11:59:01 -0600 (CST)
> From: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)

> Jim Choate wrote:
> > succeed in making a serious bid for MS parity. It is still a rare thing for
> > an employer to provide Linux as a the default os on a new-hires pc. How many
> > companies do you know that when a person comes in and configures their pc it
> > contains Linux by default? Not many. Further that percentage is *not*S
> 
> This is true, but you have to keep it in the right perspective. The
> much more interesting question is a broader one: how widespread is GNU
> copyrighted freeware?

Outside of Linux applications? Very small. I have never worked for a company
nor dealt with a customer who as a matter of course used GNU software and was
in fact the accepted cannon of that companies computer use policies.
Students, individual hobbyist, and small companies (one of the reasons I
focus on SOHO in my consulting) are the marked exceptions. The reason these
folks can get away with it is their customers if they have any are concerned
about the end product and not the process. This isn't true of larger
companies who are as concerned with the process because of the impact of
budgets, quality control, purchasing, etc.

> One can configure a Sun workstation so that it looks, works and feels like
> a Linux system, runs things like elm, fvwm2, vim, GNU utilities,
> and so on.  I have seen a lot of such configurations, and in fact I do
> use one like that myself.

As I do, I have a ELC and a Tadpole 3XP that I use Linux on as well as
Solaris. I also have a IBM N40 RS/6000 laptop that I run AIX 3.x and PPC
Linux on. I've been waiting 2 years for the Linux68k to be ported to the
Sun 4/380 platform so I can get rid of BSD on that machine, and the /dev/fb
for the Tadpole on Linux SPARC has been in the wings about that long as well.
In the Austin area (1M pop.), I have yet to find a single other soul who as
a matter of course uses Linux on those platforms. At best I know of about a
dozen people who play with it and every case I am the one who got them the CD
and prompted their activity. My experience would indicate the interest and by
extension future is not there for these platforms except as a point of
esoteric interest. Believe me, I *wish* I had more people to talk to and work
with on these platforms. I can kill just about any discussion in a Linux
user group meeting by asking about SPARC or PPC versions, nobody
(figuratively) uses them and nobody is really interested in learning about 
them.

I know of only a couple of articles in the Linux Journal that has even
discussed SPARC Linux (and that would indicate a lot of folks don't use it)
and have never seen a PPC article.

> How many millions more of these do exist?

Very few. The total number of SPARC or PPC (not Mac mkLinux) is measured in
the 10's of thousands at best. Consider that out of all the Linux
distributors only a couple carry SPARC or PPC versions.


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