Re: Help to Promote Linux!

In article <34B18FC3.3FECCB15@datad.com>, Mikey wrote: >... > >We are trying to get a couple of companies to port their products to >Linux. >... > >we can go to large multinational vendors and say see, here's who is >willing to look your product over. >Without it, we will just be a bastard child standing on the outside >looking in, watching Billy Boy >take over the world. On the outside of what? >(Ok so maybe I'm being a little melodramtic.) > >When my freind and I went to talk with some of the companies, their >marketing/sales droids, >wanted to know who was using linux and how many of them would want to >buy >their product. Holding my toungue I thought, none if you continue to >have that attitude. Are you sure your concern is to get some companies to port their products to Linux? I'm surprised that you and your friend care enough to be visiting companies on that account. >Yet, over the months, more and more people have expressed and interest >in Linux. The problem >is that the demographics are still needed. > >We feel that there is ample momentum, and that we will have a better >chance at success if we >can establish our market data as quickly as possible. (Read: We have a >window of opportunity >which is rapidly closing. If we don't act soon, we would lose our one >real chance of >success.) Who is "we"? Many people are anxious to see software for other OSs ported to Linux. If you really have not choice but to use that software and you want to run it on a decent OS, that is understandable, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to "us", if you are referring to Linux and its users in general. There are already ongoing surveys of Linux user and installation numbers, and the distribution vendors have their own registration numbers. But we know that it's much bigger than the figures that have been published, and every one of the companies you spoke to knows it. Surely we are not going to be so gullible as not to realise that? Bill Gates is millions of dollars poorer on account of Linux (think of all the Apache servers, to go no further). Do you think he is such a disorganised fool that he loses millions and doesn't know the cause? If Gates knows it, don't the smaller fry? There is an attitude of mind in many commercial operators that makes free software unmentionable. Lives are dedicated to marketing, that is, growing the size of the market in dollar terms. To people driven by that attitude, Linux is anathema. It is something to be destroyed. It is not a thing that it is respectable to consider or discuss. This attitude is not going to be voluntarily disclosed to you as you and your friend make your stange way among them. This is not something to lament, and I think the air of crisis that your post conveys is mistaken. If major companies with dominant products stay out of Linux an opportunity is created for others to create software which will fill the gap in functionality. Ultimately they, not "we", will be the losers. To concern yourself excessively with existing commercial software is to live in the past. Linux people do not need to be troubled about what others did in the past. We have a good OS, a tremendous development platform, and we are free to look at what the future is going to require. All IMHO.