[CLUE-Talk] "red hat - the new redmond?" comment from mainstream online media

[Matt Gushee]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2002 at 12:44:34PM -0600, David Anselmi wrote:
> 
> One of the big savings to be had with Open Source is longer IT 
> lifecycles, it seems.  I run the same version of Debian on an Alpha 233, 
> a 486, a PII, and an Athlon 1.2GHz.  I don't run some things (KDE) on 
> slower machines, but what I ran on them 5 years ago I can still run on 
> them (in the latest versions).  I haven't figured out why this is yet or 
> whether it is really significant, but it seems to be.

Is it Open Source, or is it Linux? It seems to me that one reason for
the longevity of Linux applications has to be that the fundamental
architecture of Linux systems has changed very little. In my 5 1/2 years
using Linux, probably the most important changes I've observed are:

  a.out executables eliminated in favor of ELF
  transition from libc5 to glibc
  XFree86 4.0
  the gradual introduction of journaling filesystems

All of which is pretty minor compared to, say, the difference between 
Windows 3.1 and Windows XP.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/