[Rule-list] Red Hat No Longer Supports 486

[Marco Fioretti]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 22:32:00 at 10:32:00PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> 
> It sponsored the creation of GNOME and wasted the time and effort of a 
> legion of talented coders, splitting the Linux GUI world into two warring 
> factions, all because of differences over the license of Qt (now 
> ancient history) and C versus C++. An epic tragedy of the open source 
> world.
w.r.t this and other related statements in the original message: I
agree that legion of talented coders wasted a lot of time and effort
on both Gnome and KDE making a wonderful job of solving the wrong
problems, but this was already happening by itself. RH did make it
worst to foster its agenda, but just like any other commercial
company. From wherever I look at it, however,I keep seeing a lot of the
bloat happening before the distros. Conclusion:

RULE is a moving target: keeping RH useable on CPUS two generations
behind the last should always be possible and leave us with something
to play with. Using  *specific* CPUs (i386s) till they fall apart is
definitely worth doing, and in the long end I probably agree with your analysis
of Slackware.
RULE remains focused on RH: sub projects studying other distros are 
welcome, please submit pages to put online

> 
> It is not the biggest or smallest, easiest or hardest, fastest, slowest, 
> most friendly, least friendly, most useful, least useful; it does not 
> excel in any area.
Wrong: it excels in making OSS/Free SW acceptable to the corporate
world. There are still hundreds of the biggest companies around which
will swallow Linux only:

   if it comes in with a corporate level, ISO 9000 compatible
   service contract from somebody present on NASDAQ

   because they *have* to use some programs, and will only consider
   the least expensive platform that the vendor of that SW supports
   And I'm not talking of word processors: there are many EDA products
   with 8 digits prices which are only certified for RH Linux, and the
   same  was true, last time I checked, for Clearcase.

In other words, RH created an environment that made several SW
vendors, and their corporate customers, comfortable with moving to
Linux. I am the first to acknowledge that monopolies of any kind are
bad, and that what I just said is an excellent reason for RH to snob
lower end HW, but, regardless of RULE, RH *is* doing (for its own
profit, of course) something that is really necessary. At least for
now.

> > XML is primarily important only when document exchange is an issue. 
> 
> XML is vapourware. Document exchange means MS Word and RTF in the 
> computing world I inhabit.
>

I'm told that latest versions of Word use some XML format, is this
true? Apart from that, document format is not vapourware, it's much
more important than the OS: if everybody used any really open, non
proprietary document format, OS and applications used to read and
write it would become totally irrelevant. But we really digress
here...
 
 Ciao,
           Marco Fioretti


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