[Info-vax] OT: Elephants Can't Dance

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <49c6e956$0$90268$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
> 	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> In article <13946$49c28a06$cef8af62$15275 at teksavvy.com-free>,
>>> 	"John Smith \(not the one @ HP\)" <a at nonymous.com> writes:
>>>> "Neil Rieck" <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> wrote in message 
>>>> news:1f81536c-a5cb-4e39-8512-41e882d591db at d19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
>>>>
>>>> According to this link:
>>>> http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/open-source-biology.html (look
>>>> for the yellow text), the amount of money made on Linux is well into
>>>> the multiple billions. 
>>> For who?
>> For companies selling the HW it runs on (IBM, HP, Dell).
> 
> That's not money made by Linux.  If they didn't have Linux they would
> have bought the hardware to run something else.

True. But they did sell them with Linux.

SUN also has sold 1 SPARC box for X $ and 1 Solaris license for
0 $ - I don't think they consider that not making money on
Solaris.

Hardware needs an OS.

>> For companies selling support on Linux (Redhat, Novell, IBM, HP).
> 
> They could have made monety selling support for any OS.  So that really
> isn't a selling point for Linux either.

I don't see the point.

If we follow your logic then HP is not making money on VMS, because
they could have been selling them HP-UX. And they are not making
money on HP-UX because they could have been selling them VMS.

They could have made money selling support for any OS, but they
did sell support for Linux.

>> For companies selling commercial software to run on Linux (Oracle,
>> IBM, Redhat).
> 
> What commercial software only runs on Linux?

Oracle DB, DB2, Sybase ASE, WebSphere AS, Oracle AS, BEA WebLogic (that
is really Oracle now), Oracle ERP (whatever they call it now), SAP etc..

I would say most of actively developed software.

 >                                               WHat would have kept it
> from running on any other Unix-like OS?

Most likely nothing.

It also run on Windows.

But the customer preferred Linux.

> None of the supposed millions tied to Linux are in any way specifically
> tied to Linux.  They were there all along.  Linux just does a better job
> of hyping things so more people know its name.

It is a very tiny part of IT expenditure that is dependent on a
specific OS.

The customers just chose to spend their money on stuff where the OS
is Linux.

And it is not millions. It is billions.

And actual revenue is not hype.

Arne