Jack Stein wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 JS> Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

 RJT> That's one of the reasons I'm getting into Linux here...   :-) 

 JS> I think thats a good move, but since IBM is buying into RedHat, 
 JS> I expect them to (try) and find a way to keep it from hurting 
 JS> MS, just as they insured OS/2 would not kill WIN.  This is pure 
 JS> paranoia I know, but it's _my_ paranoia, and based on 
 JS> substantial historical data.

 RJT> They may just try,  but I don't think they'll succeed.

 JS> I hope you're right, but, I have serious reservations.  The 
 JS> power of MS, IBM, INTEL and ZIFF-DAVIS cannot easily be 
 JS> under-rated.

"The power" that those folks may hold,  such as it is,  is a matter of
economics,  and of doing things within some fairly narrowly defined commercial 
channels -- the home and smaller-end business market for M$,  the medium and
larger business market for IBM,  etc.  That's why OS/2 isn't being agressively 
marketed by IBM,  it crosses that boundary.  The whole philosophy behind Linux 
is outside that framework.

 JS> Who would ever guess that 25 years after the worlds greatest OS 
 JS> was presented to the world, 

You talking about unix here?

 JS> the world would be totally dominated by the likes of DOS/WIN,

The world?  The home pc market,  maybe.  Businesses and academia do tend to
run a lot of other stuff besides.

 JS> the worlds worst OS's for at least 15 years running?   It 
 JS> boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Not really.  There are a few factors that tend to account for some of this.
For one,  unix was originally a very proprietary product,  owned by Bell Labs, 
and licensed to a small number of vendors.  I don't know just when that
changed,  but it did.  A variant written for smaller machines called Minix
(also written as a teaching tool) came about,  and growing out of that is how
Linux got started.  It came along,  requires only a 386sx and 4M of ram,  and
proceeded to gain converts,  to the point where a couple of formerly
commercial versions (SCO?) are now available for free if you're a student or
other noncommercial user.

I think it's just starting to gain momentum.  And since I've started paying a
bunch of attention to it the traffic in that echo has grown from moderately
busy to about twice the volume of this one!  While,  sad to see,  the tone of
OS/2 echos in general is starting to remind me of that of CP/M users after
ms-dos had been around a year or two.  Not that I'm ready to dump it,  but...

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