On Jul 16, 10:40 am, "Moshe Goldfarb." <brick_n_st...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:31:52 -0700 (PDT), Rex Ballard wrote:
> > Many of the posters in this group have real jobs, and make money
> > SUPPORTING OSS.
Notice I didn't say they made their money exclusively by "writing"
OSS.
The fact is that coding is only about 5% of the cost of an
application, and only and less than 1% of it's total cost over the
life of the product. There are a lot of WinTrolls who seem to think
that Bill Gates spent 3 weeks writing Microsoft BASIC for the Altair,
9 months writing MS-DOS for IBM, and then sat back and collected
royalties until the company was making $60 billion/year, and that Bill
Gates is the richest man in the world because of his coding skills.
I call it the "Cornicopia Fantasy". A Cornicopia, or "horn of plenty"
is a mythological basket filled with fruit, vegetables, and grain,
that automatically replenishes itself when your take anything from it.
The fact is that Bill Gates became the richest man in the world
because he was a brilliant negotiator, knowing when to look weak and
humble, but he also had his father, one of the most brilliant legal
minds ever, writing the actual contracts and helping Bill minimize the
weasel clauses (the clauses that effectively make a contract
unenforceable by the other side, yet completely enforceable by the
writer.
Bill Gates also had a mother who was extremely well connected with
some of the most influential politicians, publishers, and bankers in
the United States to her very active role in numerous charity fund-
raisers. Giving Bill the lion's share of the stock was the best way
to completely avoid the inheritance tax.
His mother died, and even though the Gates foundation has given
millions to charities, he isn't intimately involved with the other
donors the way his mother was. The result is that he doesn't have the
influence she did. He could pay bribes through charities set up by
Jack Abrams and Carl Rove, but it didn't give him the kind of
influence he really wanted, the kind that doesn't spark up speculative
reportersr every time a politician does Microsoft a favor. It's not
the kind of publicity politicians want.
And Dad isn't the brilliant mind he used to be. If Gates didn't leave
Microsoft now, without dad's help, he might have ended up in federal
lock-up.
And Steve Ballmer was no slouch either. He had been the "vice" man
when Gates was at Harvard. He got the drugs, the girls, and was often
blown away at how Gates could be so unaffected. Ballmer once said
that Bill Gates was the only man he'd ever known who paid a stripper
to put her clothes ON. Ballmer credits Bill for saying that he wanted
business to become so addicted to Microsoft that they couldn't live
without it. He was said to have said this while they were working in
the Motel in Albequerque, a place where drug addiction was a regular
part of the scenery. Ballmer had learned from those dope dealers.
When he started marketing Microsoft's products, he sold them like a
dope dealer. "Here kid, the first one's free" (MSDN), but eventually,
the price gets to high, and then it's "Why don't you bring your
friends around and we can have a little party, just make sure they've
got the green". And then it's "You're a little behind, I'll let you
pay me off by doing me a little favor, I've got this friend who needs
a job, and you should hire him as your CIO". Seriously, the guy was
brilliant, never overplaying his hand, and always making sure that he
was making an offer that wouldn't, or couldn't, be refused.
Seems like the only ethical member of the triumvirate was Paul Allen.
When Microsoft started doing things he didn't think were ethical, he
started pulling out, and then he often invested in Microsoft's
competitors. He was an early investor in AOL, Yahoo, and Google, as
well as Transmeta (when Linus worked there), and he gave a much larger
percentage of his income to charity than Gates did. The irony is that
Paul Allen's investments have paid off more handsomely, but he invests
more invisibly.
But the actual guys who write code for Microsoft, don't make all that
much. They have to sign nondisclosure agreements even to get an
interview, every idea they have, even if Microsoft doesn't use it,
belongs to Microsoft, and they usually offer substantially less than
their current salary, along with stock Options which usually have a
strike price far higher than the stock price by the time they are
vested enough to exercise the options.
> No they don't.
> You better look again....
>
> You can start here with the largest hypocrite of them all:
>
> "At BT Global, our crown jewels are the services we supply to our
> customers. With jNetX we own the intellectual property for our services,
> allowing us to evolve the services as and when required."
But BT, if you are talking about British Telecom, is also a huge
supporter of UNIX and OSS even since the 1980s. At the same time,
they have value add such as software for high speed switching and
other industry specific applications which give them a competitive
advantage over other carriers.
This is true of most companies. An insurance company isn't going to
make $billions selling a more secure network file system (secure NFS),
so they give it to a company like Sun, who uses it to sell more
Solaris boxes. It exchange, maybe the get an unlimited user license
for a few of their bigger servers.
These days, many large corporations just hire consultants to do the
"innovation", and if it's done using Open Source, that's fine, because
all they wanted was a web site that made sure that orders were
fulfilled when the guy on the web browser clicked "buy now". If they
can get what they need from a guy who uses MySQL and PHP, that might
be enough to do the job for that function.
IBM doesn't make it's billions off of DB2, WebSphere, or Rational
software, it makes it's billions because they provide solutions that
will let a company process orders at the rate of $millions per hour,
and makes sure that nothing interrupts that flow. The clients don't
really care that much whether it's on a Z-900, a P-525, or a
BladeServer array. There are even times when the customer will ask us
to use Linux instead of Windows wherever possible, because they know
that IBM can support Linux more effectively. They might also ask us
to put more on the P-Series box, because they know that even if one of
the chips frys, or the power supply fan gets clogged, or much of
anything else fails, that the system will keep running long enough for
IBM to get the defective hardware replaced. Some of them even want
the Z-900 because if there really is a problem, and it has to be fixed
before morning, IBM will have the guy who can fix it on a corporate
jet leaving from Westchester to wherever he needs to be, if that's
what it takes. (In most cases, that's no longer necessary, but it is
possible).
The fact is that much of Rational, Lotus, and WebSphere IS OSS,
including Eclipse, Java, Struts, and even parts of J2EE. At the same
time, IBM has added the little extras, as plug-ins to provide assured
message delivery, even if somebody pulls the plug in the middle of the
transaction, load balancing across enough servers that the business
can grow as fast as it needs to, and security that not only keeps
would-be cyber-thieves from stealing the goodies, but it even helps
identify the cyber-thieves, and gets the law enforcement people the
information they need to prosecute them.
And IBM has partnered with Red Hat and SUSE, because, when their
software is running on a P-590, a Z-900, or even a Blade array, IBM
can call at 3:00 AM and whoever they need will get on-line and help
them solve the problem.
I've seen IBM eat 3-4 million in losses on a delivery, because there
was 100 million in annual support once the system delivered. And the
"Coding" was only about 2% of the delivery cost. The biggest cost
came when the customer began to realize he needed more than he thought
he did. The coding took a few days, but making sure the requirements
were solid, making sure the testing proved the solution was correct,
and making sure that the system would keep running even in the event
of a major disaster, that was the big money.
When the world trade center collapsed, IBM DR centers in several
cities had the DR systems online and ready to run by the time the
tower fell down. By noon, everything had been verified and the
premium customers were ready to trade. The SEC delayed the market
open because there were a few brokers who weren't ready, and they
didn't want a panic sell-off in the Stock exchange. But some of the
international exchanges were still open, or didn't close, and those
customers who needed the service were on-line before they lost a
fortune in delayed or lost trades.
Do you really think anybody cared whether some of those servers were
running Linux? Especially when they came up?
> Mark Kent
> Head of Technology Strategy
> Moshe Goldfarb
> Collector of soaps from around the globe.
> Please visit The Hall of Linux Idiots:http://linuxidiots.blogspot.com/
You're link is loaded with errors, from the spelling of names (Rexx is
a programming language, my real name is Rexford), to the things you
say I claim (all of which I have clarified in this newsgroup).
My link, which is hopelessly out of date, is
http://www.open4success.org
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