Always-On has a three-part interview (Part 2 and Part 3) with “Ximian founders Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, now respectively VP of product development and CTO of Novell’s Ximian Services group, and Chris Stone, Novell vice chairman, for an update on Novell’s open-source strategy.” Excerpt:
AlwaysOn: There’s a big fuss over the fact that Microsoft is charging 400 bucks for Office 2003. Do you think that users might rebel against the 400 buckssame as they might rebel against superexpensive Sun boxes?
Friedman: Yes, I think we’re at the beginning of this right now. But the United States is the last place the migration will happenafter Europe, Asia, South Americain part because companies and governments are concerned about paying money to a U.S. monopoly. They’d rather keep the money local.
Another reason is that no one wants to pay for proprietary hardware anymore. x86 commodity hardware becomes hands-off in terms of price performance. So we don’t see people buying a lot of the Solaris workstations or SPI workstations anymore. They’re buying commodity hardware, and they’re running Linux on it. So that’s kind of the “gimme” market, the easy one.
