____/ Rick on Thursday 13 March 2008 03:20 : \____
> On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:58:43 +0000, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> ____/ Rick on Wednesday 12 March 2008 22:13 : \____
>>
>>
>>> <http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2110>
>>>
>>> [quote]
>>> David Liu, founder of ThinkGOS, whose Linux powers the Everex “Linux
>>> PC” which Wal-Mart has dropped from its stores, told ZDNet the move was
>>> expected, a function of the price point, and that the box is doing fine
>>> online.
>>>
>>> ”Making monThinkGOS logoey from a $199 PC is very difficult. The
>>> margins are very small. The margin on a $399 PC is three times that –
>>> you have to sell three times as many units. It doesn’t add up.”
>>>
>>> “GOS PCs in general have done really well. The in-store sales were less
>>> than 10% of the total sales of the PC anyway. [/quote]
>>
>> Linux haters blew this thing out of proportion. One person in Propeller
>> submitted the same story (from different sites) no less than 7 times. In
>> other words, he or she duped just to magnify the (inaccurate) message
>> and a lot of the media did this too. Whether this was orchestrated or
>> not is another question.
>>
>> The media ought to give just as much attention to the dozens of Linux
>> PCs (desktops and laptops) that have appeared in the past month or so.
>
> They should. They don't.
The way it works, journalists are being pushed stuff from PR agencies of
companies with products. In the case of Free software, there are rarely such
companies and PR agents. Those which exist (e.g. Canonical) focus on
development more than on marketing.
All in all, this means that Linux will grow regardless of how much coverage you
find in the press. The same goes for analysts who conduct studies only to
apply the methods provided by the funding source, e.g. count only boxes
delivered with an O/S preinstalled from vendors X, Y and Z. It's set up so
that either way, the funding source wins and the report produced concurs with
the flawed hypothesis, proved by deliberately broken methods. The same type of
misleading practise is sadly being pushed into academia too, due to
privatisation and commercialisation, e.g. in French universities.
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | GPL - Global Programmer's Law
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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