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Re: gEDA-user: panel/case design

I think they each have their merits, and both have their place. 
I agree.

A lot 
of times, it takes a corporation with investment capital to produce a
product and get it half-way decent, even if it is broken when taken as
a whole.  Once it becomes a commodity item (or when people feel it
*should* be a commodity item) then open source takes over, and
provides additional development resources, albeit at the expense of
time.

The inverse is also true. You can have a project that is begining like opensource (as ex. Staroffice), and when a big company is taking over the project, the first things they are doing is to limit the nomber of languages you can use with it for free, and cuting down the interface, to supprim the html frame fonction that was outstanding in Staroffice.

Another exempel is Xen at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
taht is an outstanding open-source project.
They have begun at the univesity of Cambridge and with the time, many other peoples have joined the project. You can run an host OS in linux with only 1 or 2 % less speed with this software.
And not only that, but you can star an OS in an another machine on the network and use it like if it was runing on yours, switch this OS to a third machine without stopping it, and even more if you have a cluster.

The next step is to introduce this technology into the silicium, and Intel have allready a working processor (In practice a doubble procesor, a 2 in one) and IBM is working to assemble a machine with this technology. AMD is also working to manufacture a such processor.

A such technology can be a real problem for microsoft, because the license restrictions are doing at it is no devlopment to port windose on it.

Another big problem for microsoft is at the pcs are becoming so cheap, at soon or later (I believe soon), no one pc will use an OS that is not expoiting the machine but the customer's money.

Dominique Michel

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