[ubuntu-uk] Sir Alan Sugar: "it's too late" for Linux

[James Mansion]

alan c wrote:
> can be made easily. The foss rising tide will mean this may not be 
> with computing. 
>   
Should there be any such 'rising tide', and it become entirely clear 
that there is no money to
be made in software R&D (only in supporting 'innovation ... elsewhere') 
then where is
the investment money going to come from?  Do you really want software to 
be controlled
by the hardware vendors again?

I can remember when we all had sparcstations on our desks, and there 
were Open Systems.
Open Wallet Systems, we used to call them. I bought a licence for Sun 
C++.  It came with
a really crap GUI builder from Imperial and not much else.  Shortly 
afterwards, a new version
came out, but I wasn't entitled to it without paying the full support 
wack.  For slightly less
money, I got MSDN Universal, with updates all year, several development 
tools, databases,
office systems, operating systems, and a lot more documentation.

Microsoft earned their market share.  They might have screwed me over on 
OS/2 and
Windows Libraries for OS/2 and all the rest, but you can't really blame 
them for IBM's
failure to 'fess up that you didn't need a PS/2 and Compaq's failure to 
market it *at all*.
I don't.

James