anybody care to guess?

[Net Llama!]

Jay Nugent wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> On Tue, 28 May 2002, Net Llama! wrote:
> 
> 
>>Ahhh..so Caldera has finally thrown in the towel.
> 
> 
>    I don't think so.  I suspect that the 4 distibutions have *finally* 
> alligned their distros to meet the LSB specification and can now *share* 
> in the manpower cost of releasing package updates (since they should all 
> now be able to use the same packages interchangably).
> 
>    This should not sink Caldera, but strenghten it!

I doubt that.  Now, instead of having to compete against 4 entities, 
Redhat has to compete against one.  Redhat was already starting to show 
indications that it had its crosshairs on each of them individually. 
Now it has to track a single entity, and go in for the kill.  Less 
competition *never* helps the marketplace.

There is no way that a non-destructive upgrade path can be provided for 
each of these 4 company's "legacy" products to their new "super" distro. 
  Home users may not care too much, but enterprise users are going to 
sh!t bricks.

Furthermore, anyone who hated any of the 4, isn't going to want to try 
out a product that is released by them collectively.  If you are 
sickened by Redhat's methods, would you feel less sickened if Redhat 
started doing a "team release" with Mandrake?  If Debian's religious 
zealotry rubs you the wrong way, are you going to feel less offended if 
they start teaming up with Lycoris?

Additionally, this looks like an act of desperation.  They're all 
admitting that they didn't have the resources to survive on their own. 
Working together is going to compound their negative qualities.  IMO, 
what hurt all 4 of these companies wasn't the quality of their 
engineering departments, but everything else they did (of failed to do). 
  Being forced to reconsile alot of crappy internal & external practices 
is going to further strain each of them.

I could be wrong about all of this, but somehow i don't think I will be. 
  A year should be ample time to see if this is going to be beneficial 
to the quartet.  If they haven't gotten their act together by next June, 
they never will.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

   6:45pm  up 40 days,  1:36,  4 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.13, 0.14