News Summary

• They visited Valve and threatened to do this by squeezing Steam out.”)games vs game hardware: VR: Valve’s Vive vs Facebook Oculus.Valve will be fine if Vive doesn’t win the VR market as long as no one else wins too—because no one makes money on computer games except… Steam.
• )art tools vs artists: media design tools like Autodesk’s AutoCAD/Maya vs FLOSS alternatives like Blender, the latter of which are supported by commercial users such as the animation studio Khara feeling the pain of licensing, or Facebook aiming at bigger things (its Metaverse).
• Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA.
• As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.
• Transmeta wants OSs to be a commodity.Headline: Sun and HP Pay Ximian To Hack on Gnome.Myth: Sun and HP are supporting free software because they like Bazaars, not Cathedrals.Reality: Sun and HP are hardware companies.
• It’s not a new idea to software developers.If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity.