Re: flexfax: Mail to Fax

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> IMHO the sooner you accept that the various flavours of Linux have collectively
> drawn amateurs into the world of *NIX the better . . . this concept of a
> "traditional Unix system manager" is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and we 

The problem is that Red Hat are trying to do this on the cheap; providing
end user support is probably one of the main costs for Microsoft++, almost
certainly many times their development costs, but Red Hat are relying
on people used to giving support on a peer basis, where one bit of support
is paid for by support from others in the future (enlightened self
interest), to provide support for people who are net consumers of support.

In theory it is possible to create a freeware competitor to Microsoft, but
to do so, you will need to have lots of people donating large amounts of
time (probably many times the time that went into the initial development
of the software) in making it supportable in the mass market and supporting
it.  Hylafax is nowhere near supportable in that market.  I am not convinced
that a cashless economy can ever really extend to mass market software
support.

++ More generally, the main thing that people like Microsoft do is to
dumb down software and make it self supporting.  That tends to be 
a commercial operation, whereas people will do the initial creation
just for the reward of creating the product.