Proprietary software--banned in Boston? (News.com) [LWN.net]

Proprietary software--banned in Boston? (News.com)

Posted Sep 30, 2003 22:24 UTC (Tue) by guinan (subscriber, #4644)
Parent article: Proprietary software--banned in Boston? (News.com)

I remember in 1998 when Linux really started to become popular,
a lot of people asked "how do I make money on this?", and the
answer was "by selling services around Linux".

And many people went into business to do just that, and
many failed because there just wasn't enough of a market.

I think the services model is sound one, it was just a little
ahead of its time. Like, about 5 years. Now its 2003, and
here we (potentially) have government contracts mandating
Linux. This could be a good time for services businesses.
Even IBM's table scraps could keep a lot of small companies
very busy.

-Jamie (who lives in MA and has a 1-person .com operation ;) )

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Proprietary software--banned in Boston? (News.com)

Posted Oct 1, 2003 2:34 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

I hope we'll never see government contracts mandating Linux or any other operating system. The government can set conditions, like compatibility with existing hardware or openness of the code or low TCO. Whether you can do it with Linux or NetBSD or even with Windows - it should not matter as long as the generic conditions are justified.

I also hope that money spent on buying nad supporting buggy software will be spent elsewhere. Software doesn't need to be expensive.