EVEN MOM CAN USE THE
 UNIX SYSTEM
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, April 16, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: Column

 Embargoed for SUNDAY release
 ( Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver
 Rocky Mountain News in Colorado.)

 Edition: 

 Computer wizards who exult in the power and elegance
 of the Unix operating system nonetheless agree it's
 probably not quite ready to take off in the consumer
 market.

 "You wouldn't want your mother using one of these
 machines to store her recipes," said one person who was
 attending a conference last month in San Jose devoted to
 Linux, a version of Unix that is gaining on Microsoft in
 the market for network software.

 My son Peter Seebach, now 26, started teaching himself
 Unix at age 8, so his notion of when a computer is
 "mom-ready" may be somewhat misaligned with reality.
 But when I told him I was thinking of replacing my 1992
 laptop, he said he'd set one up for me when I came for a
 visit. The operating system is NetBSD, one of the Unix
 clones.

 Guaranteed Windows-free.

 Most programmers are content to type commands to tell
 the machine what to do, and I'd be willing in principle to
 learn to do that, but Peter found and installed programs
 to make the screen display similar to the point-and-click
 interface on most PCs.

 My e-mail works just as it did before, only much faster.

 We downloaded a copy of Netscape, so I have an
 Internet browser.

 And Peter found a great word-processing program called
 LyX, based on Donald Knuth's typesetting program TeX,
 which I used years ago and greatly admire. TeX can print
 anything a full-power typesetter can, in case I ever need
 that, but it's completely unobtrusive if all I want to do is
 write plain text.

 And all of it is free.

 Standard economics doesn't have very good explanations
 for why people would give away valuable stuff, but
 software is different from other goods.

 It's expensive to create in the first place, but once it is
 finished, making extra copies costs essentially nothing.

 Companies can still sell software as if it were like shoes,
 and mostly that's what they do. But Linux and all the
 other providers of free software are demonstrating that's
 not the only business model that works.

 They distribute their programs in the form of open source
 code, which means that anyone who uses the program
 can modify and improve it. There are a great many
 programmers in the world, many of them inveterate
 tinkerers.

 "If I start using LyX," Peter said, "sooner or later there
 will be some feature I want, and I'll write it and send it to
 them. Everybody does that, that's how it's supposed to
 work.

 "And in five years, Microsoft will be saying, 'Word is a
 program with all the features of LyX.' "Granted that's
 hyperbole, but Microsoft isn't laughing.

 Last year a leaked company memo conceded "Linux and
 other open-source system advocates are making a
 progressively more credible argument that OSS software
 is at least as robust as, if not more than, commercial
 alternatives" and that it was a direct, short-term revenue
 threat to Microsoft.

 Maybe Linus Torvalds, who developed Linux, is happy
 with intangible rewards.

 "There's the gratification, the knowledge that you are
 doing something that people consider important. It makes
 you feel meaningful," he told the London Observer.

 But somebody has to think there's money to be made, or
 there wouldn't be so many big companies, including
 IBM, Oracle and Compaq, jumping into open source.
 The Wall Street Journal, last month, featured a group of
 programmers who call themselves the Puffins. They are
 working on adapting Linux to run on Hewlett-Packard
 computers - not for pay, directly, but with the company's
 support in the form of free hardware and cooperation
 from its technical staff.

 "With H-P helping us, a problem that could have taken a
 month to solve will take 30 seconds," said Christopher
 Beard.

 Of course, they were planning to do it anyway, mostly
 because no one had.

 "It's not totally altruistic," Beard said, noting that the
 group hopes to do for-profit consulting eventually.

 That makes sense. Software can be copied cheaply, but
 answering individual questions is inherently
 labor-intensive. So give away the software and sell the
 advice. Big companies are often uncomfortable buying
 hardware without technical support anyway.

 Other vendors build a specialized application on top of
 the open-source software, and that's a salable product as
 well. Corel has a version of WordPerfect, which is what
 I've used on my old laptop and if LyX turns out to have
 more horsepower than I need I might buy it.

 One reason Unix hasn't yet gone far in the personal
 computer market is that it hasn't had enough individual
 users to justify writing applications software for machines
 that use it for recipe programs, say. But without a library
 of readily available applications, people are reluctant to
 choose it for their operating system. And since not
 everyone wants to install his own operating system,
 either, Dell Computer has recently announced it will ship
 PCs with Linux.

 So even moms like me can join the Unix world.