************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * July 1998 * * * ************************************* News and Comments I believe we are now in the initial stages of a major change in the computer industry: the move to free software. LINUX, Apache, Netscape Navigator, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Javasoft's Java Development Kit are examples of free software. This month's article is about the free software phenomenon. Let me know if you think I'm on target or off base. DB/C JX 1.0 and DB/C FS 2.0 are now available; DB/C DX 10.0 will be available by the end of 1998. We will be upgrading these products more frequently than we have in the past. When you purchase or upgrade to DB/C DX, DB/C JX, or DB/C FS, one year of support and software upgrades is included. 'Software upgrades' means all new versions of software, both major and minor releases. After the first year, you may purchase a yearly support/upgrade subscription for each of these DB/C products. This subscription allows you to receive all software upgrades. In other words, there will be no extra cost to upgrade to DB/C JX 2.0 when it becomes available - your JX support subscription is all that is required. If you haven't done so, be sure to check out our web site (www.swc.com) for full details about the new DB/C family of software. don.wills@swc.com ***************************************************************************** "Information wants to be free" The title of this article was one of the rallying cries of many early users of the Internet. When I first read this phrase, my reaction was that it was the motto of those that wanted to steal copyrighted digital material like text, audio and video (books, songs and movies). There is now a large community of people who do just that, although mostly for personal use, not commercial gain. But as I have used the Internet, I have come to realize that the phrase also means this: "Because duplication and distribution costs of digital information are essentially zero, there is great pressure on those that create and sell information to reduce its price. This pressure is created by small organizations and even individuals who create information, for whatever reason, without expecting to collect any money for the information." Translated to the software industry, this realization means that the price of software will decrease in the future, in some cases going to zero. This is the opposite of what many computer industry experts have been saying for years. Until now, the common wisdom was that hardware costs would decrease while software costs would increase in the future. There are a many reasons for producing free software. Here are three: 1. The software helps sell other non-free software. Adobe Acrobat is an example of this. For several years, Adobe sold both the producing and viewing software for their Portable Document Format (PDF) software. Sales were below Adobe's forecast. Worse, there were other formats for viewing documents portably that were gaining acceptance. Within 12 months after Adobe decided to offer the viewer software (Acrobat Reader) for free, most of the competing formats disappeared. Today most portable documents are stored in PDF format and Adobe still sells the software that produces PDF format files. 2. The software helps a company maintain control of an industry segment. Netscape Navigator is the prime example of this. Netscape controlled the web browser market segment from its inception. Microsoft was late to enter the market. When Netscape began to lose market share because Microsoft was bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating systems, Netscape cried foul, coercing the US government to sue Microsoft for antitrust violations. Recognizing that even if the government won after many years of litigation, it really wouldn't matter because Microsoft, not Netscape, would control many of the standards (like html and http) that are the basis of the web. So Netscape decided to give away Navigator for free. The strategy seems to be working. Although Netscape receives no revenue from Navigator, it is still the preeminent company in the web software industry. 3. A small group of people want to create software that is free. The most widely used http server software on the Internet is Apache. Apache was created by a small group of people who wanted to make sure that no one company controlled the http server software market. See www.apache.org for a complete history. LINUX is another free software product that falls into this category. LINUX is the result of the organizing and coordinating efforts of Linus Torvalds, who was a graduate student when he started the LINUX project. He started the project because he liked UNIX but didn't want to pay for it. LINUX is probably the most ambitious of all of the free software products. It is a completely free version of UNIX. It runs on many machines and chip architectures, including Intel x86, PowerPC, Compaq (DEC) Alpha and Sun Sparc. LINUX is a complete UNIX implementation. It was created by hundreds of programmers around the world. See www.linux.org for more information about the LINUX project. Like many others, I was initially very skeptical of LINUX. My first question was "Who would I go to when I ran into a problem?". Regardless of one's opinion of Microsoft or IBM or DEC, if their software was broken, you could always call them up to get help. But then several companies came along that offered LINUX support, including Red Hat (www.redhat.com) and Caldera (www.caldera.com). My next reaction was that, regardless of support, a large corporation (Microsoft or IBM) would be better able to build a robust and stable operating system than a group of volunteers. My first rebuttal of this premise was when we bought 2 new Compaq computers to support DB/C. The computers were identical. We installed LINUX on one without incident. When we attempted to install the latest release of OS/2 on the other computer, we found that the VGA chip in the Compaq was either not supported by OS/2 or that the driver was inoperable. With regard to stability, although I can't vouch for it from firsthand experience, I've read many good things about LINUX. But I can tell you that we need to reboot our Windows NT 4.0 machine that runs our web and email server software at least five or six times a month. I'm sure LINUX isn't any worse than that. My final objection to LINUX was that commercial software wasn't available for it. But earlier this year Informix announced that it would port its database software to LINUX. At that time, Oracle stated that it had no plans to port its products to LINUX. But in a major about face, on July 21st Oracle announced it would port its flagship product, Oracle 8, to LINUX. Netscape and Computer Associates have also made similar announcements. Most major software vendors, with the notable exception of Microsoft, are now supporting LINUX. What does all of this mean? I'm not sure. But to steal a line from Bob Dylan, "the times they are a changin'". ***************************************************************************** DB/C Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX and JX Language Fundamentals Date: September 1998 (tentative) Location: Oak Brook, Illinois Class: DB/C DX and JX Advanced Features Date: September 1998 (tentative) Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, contact Judi Tamkevic at: voice 630.572.0240 email dbc@swc.com ***************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you when it is produced, just send an email message to 'request@swc.com' and put the line 'subscribe dbcnews' in the body of the email message (omit the ' characters). The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent. 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