Re: Bill Gates

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pigdog.org)
Mon, 06 Oct 1997 11:13:45 -0700


Geoff Smith <geoffs@unixg.ubc.ca> writes:
> Sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant go public with
> shares. Businesses tend to take a company more seriously when they
> can look them up on the stock market and get their annual business
> report.

Linux doesn't correspond to any one firm, unlike e. g. Windows
NT. There are a number of different firms supporting,
distributing, and developing for Linux: most of them are
private, but I believe a few of them (Caldera?) are public.

> I'm not sure what you mean by this. Java is not an OS, it's a
> programming language, a lot like C.

No, unlike C, Java defines a virtual machine layer which
interposes itself between the running Java program and the
underlying hardware/native-OS. For many intents and purposes,
this virtual machine layer may be treated as an OS. It goes
much much further than C's standard library.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@idiom.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd