[ Thanks to JT
for this link. ]
“I came home from Comdex to find my rebel.com Linux server
continued to work the whole time I was gone. I use it for
communications, and it’s a jewel. It never complains and never
crashes, now that I have it working. I saw the rebel.com people at
the Linux Exposition, of course. I also saw the Corel
implementation of Linux and their alpha copy of the Corel Office
Suite for Linux. Corel got burned trying to do an office suite in
Java — no one has yet done anything that complex in Java — but
the Corel Suite for Linux looks very real, real enough that we gave
it best software: it’s going to make a really big impact on this
business. You can buy a system that does all your office
productivity work and outputs files readable by Microsoft Office –
but your system won’t have a line of Microsoft code running on it.
There are people who will jump at the chance to get that. It’s also
very fast, and Linux looks more stable all the time.”
“Over in the Linux Exposition we saw Penguin Computing
www.penguincomputing.com boxes; these are honking great systems
with multiple processors and perhaps ought to have been in
contention for best hardware. The company advertises its boxes as
“The World’s Most Reliable Linux Systems,” and while I can’t
confirm I have no strong reason to doubt it either. It’s good iron,
and if you intend to run a business on Linux you need to look into
Penguin Systems. I’d attach a picture, but I don’t seem to have any
good ones.”
“The important thing is the excitement at the Linux booths.
There were a number of them this year. Linux has come of age.
Of course Unix has been of age for a long time and never did become
anything but a guru-friendly system and a full employment act for
Unix wizards, despite annual promises of user-friendly shells.
Linux on the other hand started with a certain degree of
user-friendliness and goes on from there, so perhaps it will
succeed where Unix (and Multix) didn’t.”
[ Scroll down about half way through the article to find the
Linux content. lt-ed. ]