Re: Call from Info World

Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> > > It isn't?  The main product of Microsoft isn't a window manager, but
> > > Windows is one of their products ... IE is a seperate product, that is
> > > bundled with Windows, but, then again, Konqueror is a seperate product
> > > bundled with KDE ...
> >
> > Windows is an operating system and window manager.  For KDE, Unix is the
> > operating system.
>
> Windows only evolved to that point ... I can remember when Windows
> required a DOS install first ... like the rest of what is in Windows, DOS
> got "absorbed" as standard ... note that when you are in Windows, you can
> still get to the command.com prompt, and run "DOS" commands ...
>
> Doesn't RedHat have a "desktop edition" that auto-installs everything,
> including Window Manager, to "hide" the OS?  Actually, I think with their
> shift to Enterprise, that would be "didn't they have", but that is neither
> here nor there.  The point is that it would be very easy to create a
> distro that hid the OS from the end user, just like Windows ... throw
> Samba in on top of that, and you effectively have a Windows Server, no?

Yes, you do, but in the open source world, you need several open source
projects together to make something similar in functionality to Windows.
I am not saying that is wrong, and in fact it is often better, but you
can't make a clear parallel between KDE and Windows, or Samba and
Windows.  What you could do is to draw similarity between Windows and
Linux/KDE/Samba, but that is quite a mouthful for people to understand ---
it is 1 to 3, not one to 1 as it is with Oracle-PostgreSQL.  I don't
think Oracle add-ons and applications are the same level as saying the
window manager is an add-on to Windows --- you can't run Windows without
a window manager (or it isn't regularly done), while you can run Oracle
alone, and many do.

Of course, this is all from a marketing perspective, so it has to be
simple.  Saying KDE is like Windows just isn't accurate because KDE
isn't an operating system or file server.

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