Subject: Would you pay for commercial software for Linux?

From: [email-masked] (Carl Parrish)
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 09:02:31 -0700

Lets see. I buy a distribution of Red Hat ever year. I purchased about 6 
games. I just got The wine emulator for quicktime. I just dont' think 
more people are selling on Linux the right way. We *know* that most 
linux boxes are servers. So why is it that most of the software trying 
to sell to linux are for the desktop? I'd image that Active State is 
able to make money because a lot of programmers use Linux. If I was 
goign to try to sell software on Linux it would be to those two markets. 
Programmers and System Admins. In a few years there will be enough 
desktop uesers (and it'll be easy enough to make) to justify making 
software to buy for linux. In the mean time there are other motives. 
Like Sun needing a office suite to work on Solaris. And I'm sure IBM 
will come out with more software that runs on Linux so that they can 
sell more linux boxes. (though really most of that will be to the two 
markets I mentions). Plus as it gets easier and easier to make cross 
platform code. I'd expect more people will. (Kylix, Mozilla, .Net, and 
Java should all make it easier for a company to decided to code for Linux).

So why do most of them fail? Most ventures just fail that's the way it 
works.
Carl P.

foodog wrote:

> Jiva DeVoe wrote:
> 
>>To settle a dispute with someone:
>>
>>Would you pay for commercial software for Linux?  Ie: Say, games,
>>productivity applications, etc?