From: Mike A. Harris (mharrisredhat.com)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 01:21:06 CDT

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On Mon, 26 May 2003, Farkas Zsolt wrote:

>MH> Some people invest the financial resources in manpower skilled enough to
>MH> handle unsupported operating systems and develop their own code.
>
>I think this is the key to understand what's going on.
>
>A few emails ago someone told that redhat kills Linux/AXP
>but it is not true: the market kills it.

Exactly. Red Hat Linux for x86 is done simply because of
commodity of x86 hardware. The sheer volume of processors out
there provides a market to which the cost of developing the OS is
lost somewhere in the noise.

Developing an OS for any other CPU family however has real world
costs, which not only need to be paid for, but a reasonable
amount of profit made as well. We develop our OS to turn a
profit.

For non-x86 CPUs, the "create a distro, and hope enough people
purchase it and services for it to make a profit" approach is not
something we plan on doing, as it isn't a proven way to make
money.

>Redhat started to cut support for older systems (6.1, 6.2, etc)
>and stopped to develop AXP and S/390 on last december as a
>profile cleaning.

S390 development very much has not stopped. S390 and s390x are
core architectures in our buildsystem, and are continuously under
development.

>Any kind of development is a almost sigle question of revenue
>and profit, if it worths to develop go ahead, if not stop.

Precicely.

>From a few years from now (let's say 10) we all could say that
>yes, Alpha has it's historical role (like Commodore C-64 and
>others) in the computer industry. Of course, there will be
>running Alphas in 2013 but it will be mostly as a toy of fans
>rather than producting equipments. And there will be up to date
>operating systems (let's say non profit based like *BSD and
>Debian), and hope George and Stefan will be in business too
>(thanks for your work)

I love Alpha, and hope to still be using them in 2013 as well.
I suppose I'll be running Mike Harris Linux/Alpha on them by then
though. ;o)

--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat

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