🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C0Lt7D.Jy2@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk> joe@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk (Joe Sharkey) writes:
>Further, I can walk into *any* bookshop and buy books about WP/123/Corel
>et al.  I can contact *any* "training/educational" firm for help.
>GNU?  *Now*, I cannot.

Yes, you can.  You should be able to buy a book on Perl at bookstores,
and you can buy the GNU EMACS books from the FSF (I *think* there might
be a book on emacs published by O'Reilly & Associates, but I'm not sure,
so I won't say more than that :)).

>   - Cygnus: too expensive for day-to-day Oleo support (just a guess...)

Cygnus sold support for gcc under Solaris2 for $2k initially ($3k afterwards);
that was the same price as the sunsoft license for, what, one to five
users?

>Again:  What use is Linux to someone who just wants to run spreadsheets
>        or Word Processing?
>        I say: "None - there's no support."

There is currently not a market for it without support.  BSDI is trying
for that area, as well, and is, I gather, having problems (admittedly,
the lawsuit is part of it).

If there is a large-enough market for it, then Cygnus, or some other
set of people, would probably be quite happy to support a free OS.  However,
getting into the OS business is *hard*:  most workstations come with
their own OS, and SCO and USL have the x86 market tied up pretty well.
It's not *impossible*, but it's very hard to do it without an established
base.  (Watch how NeXT does in the PC market, for example, even though
they *do* have an established base of sorts.)