“Imagine Larry Augustin explaining to Charlie Rose how Linux is
going to make money. It happened late last month. Rose has any
number of facial expressions and contortions that he goes through
when he interviews people. He wore many of them that night while
listening to the open source dogma. Larry was looking good. He
didn’t even flinch when questions arose about where Red Hat, his
nominal competitor, was going to make its money. It seems the focus
of money seems to be a distraction, but perhaps a blessing in
disguise — as if money could be disguised.”
“The column I wrote last month discussed how I thought
“LinuxVille” needed to burn some money and described
characteristics of Microsoft that seem to have been successful.
Fortunately, my flame_retardant_on () struct seems to have few
bugs….“
“Steve McIntyre, whose e-mail service blocks my replies to him,
had truck with my first point, which is that Microsoft
communicates. He wrote, “Yes, they do. To such an extent that
people eventually believe the trash they are sent. And it makes
life easy for journalists, if not the people that have to work with
this stuff.”