“…By chance, I ended up having lunch with speakers from the
Linux Pavilion, in particular John Maddox “Mad Dog” Hall, who next
to Linus Torvalds is probably the best known Linux advocate and
spokesman. We got to wondering about the future of proprietary Unix
such as SCO in the face of open source competition from Linux. You
may guess Mad Dog’s conclusions. I haven’t thought about all this
enough to have that firm of a conclusion, but it’s interesting to
speculate.”
“…Now, consider Linux and the proprietary Unix suppliers
like SCO. Today’s news was that a two-node bundle and operating
system is $7,799. UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters supports up to 12
nodes. For your $7,799 you get 10 user licenses; it’s $50 per user
for each additional user.”
“This is all very reasonable under present pricing models,
but how long before Linux and open source begin to eat this from
the inside? I don’t know, but I think the 3-D modeling world
history may be relevant. Something more than 25 percent of all the
servers in the United States now operate with one or another
version of Linux. This isn’t likely to shrink.”