Re: os discuss (http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/7263.html)

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>The Press tends to treat Linux as if there is a "Linux Corporation", with
>industrial-type schedules. So when someone like Linus hints that something
>really new will be ready around Thanksgiving, the press interprets that as
>a commitment. After all, isn't Linus like "The Chairman of the Board", just
>like Roger Smith or GM?  When Linus and his merry kernel men feel there's
>nothing to release in that timeframe, the press makes a fuss. Again, how
>could GM not release a new model when they said they would?

I think this extends beyond the press and release dates.  People (joe user off the street) tend to think this way, simply because they are accustomed too.  This release-date issue is really just a small facet of all that the open-source model changes.  People comment to me that there are no applications for Linux, or their printer didn't come with drivers for Linux, etc...  Open Source has done a good job of promoting itself as a successful development model,  but done little to address the fact that it also represents a diffrent distribution model as well.  And it is a distribution model that is much more fine-grained than that used by commercial software,  as most open source packages make many low order-of-magnitude releases verses the Win9x to WinNT to WinY2k style leaps of commercial software.  Almost all of the functionality of 2.4.x was available for 2.2.x if you really wanted it,  you just had to get it in pieces.  I had NFSv3, reiserfs, USB, and LVM months before 2.4.!
x.  I've upgraded the abisuite package, and GNOME hasn't released it's next "holistic" updage yet.  I show "no-app" people freshmeat.net and usually there stunned,  tell people that the kernel or ghostscript actually already contain drivers for just-about-everything because most "diffrent" products are really the same (i.e Tulip based ethernet cards, PCL printers, etc... that sell under 9^4 brand names) and they're ready to pitch their &%(#^@)! driver disks.