Welcome to the second issue of Linux Magazine. I’m impressed we’ve made it
this far :). Seriously, though, I want to thank everyone who bought or subscribed
to LM in the past month or so. We received lots of e-mail from people who
shared their suggestions and wished us well. We will incorporate many suggestions
into future issues of the magazine.
Rockets Taking Off: LinuxWorld Expo 1999 in San Jose,
CA.
Welcome to the second issue of Linux Magazine. I’m impressed we’ve made it
this far :). Seriously, though, I want to thank everyone who bought or subscribed
to LM in the past month or so. We received lots of e-mail from people who
shared their suggestions and wished us well. We will incorporate many suggestions
into future issues of the magazine.
Meanwhile, it’s been an unbelievable month for Linux. By the time you read
this, it will probably seem like a distant memory, but LinuxWorld Expo was only a
month ago at the time of this writing. If you weren’t there, I can summarize the
whole thing for you; it felt like being swept up by a Hurricane. The energy,
excitement and attendance of 10,000 people was incredible.
The month that has followed has seen no loss of momentum. Everybody seems to
be climbing on the Linux bandwagon, or at least onto the Open Source bandwagon.
Just recently, Dell Computer announced that they had acquired an equity position
in Red Hat Software. It certainly shocked me to hear that one of the world’s
biggest Windows boosters was actually taking an ownership position in a Linux
firm. About a week before that, Apple Computer announced that they would make
parts of their MacOS ‘X’ “Open Source”, and in doing so evoked the ire of the
Open Source community. There is some issue as to whether or not what Apple is
doing actually qualifies as “Open Source”.
The Apple Computer announcement made a lot of us take a good look at what’s
going on in the software industry today. It seems like a lot of commercial
entities are hoping to garner the benefits of the media attention Open Source
Software (OSS) has received, but they don’t really understand the philosophy
behind the OSS movement. In what may be the ultimate proof of this, rumor has it
that Microsoft has considered making parts of Windows 2000 Open Source. Would
they dare?…Hmmm….
The past few weeks have not been without their rough spots, however. In what
may have been the most disheartening announcement of the past few months, on April
1st we learned that Jamie Zawinski was leaving Netscape and the Mozilla Project.
His Website at http://www.jwz.com/gruntle/nomo.html gives all the details, and
Larry Augustin shares his thoughts on the matter in this month’s “In The
Trenches” column.
I’m sorry that Jamie is leaving, and I’m sorry that Netscape so badly
mismanaged what was an excellent opportunity to become a market leader and a real
trail blazer. But the setbacks at Mozilla.org and the fallout from the Apple
Computer announcement don’t make me doubt the prospects of Linux or OSS in
general. When I look around me, all I see are rockets taking off and heading for
the stars.
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