Can someone tell me what this means?

Chuck Guzis wrote: Several of the people who have already responded have named valid reasons. We support a bunch of Tivoli and IBM software on AIX and Linux, and I worked with IBM a lot in the late 90's when they were ramping up their Linux presence, so I've gotten to hear a lot of vendors and developers discuss this. 1) The GPL scares a lot of vendors spitless. IBM had a *hard* time getting any Linux software out the door, including and especially kernel code, for many years. 90-120 days in development, 9-15 months in Legal getting signed off. IBM paid a lot of their developers for a lot of time spent on backdoor projects - stuff that was contributed and copyrighted under the individual's name. 2) Linux is, almost by definition, a rolling beta. It's a nightmare to get software certified and supportable on a current revision of any distribution, much less any large subset of the current major distributions. RedHat started breaking that barrier with RH Advanced Server and now RH Enterprise Linux, and SuSE/Novell have followed suit. The main selling feature of RHAS2.1 was that RedHat committed to 1 release per 18-24 months, and a stabilized kernel version within the release. That single feature sold them into an astounding number of datacenters and grabbed commitments from major ISVs withing weeks of its release. 3) Linux users and admins are the world's worst customers. I train them, I support them, I clean up their messes, and I am one, so I can say that with confidence. Accustomed to getting what they think they need for free, they're more prone to piracy than most. Very few have any formal training, so most have no clue how little they really know. And, since everything and the virtual dog is out there for hacking, including the OS itself, you have NO idea what they're actually running till you've done some expensive discovery. 4) This last will get me flamed, but it's a fact; Linux is a miserable excuse for a desktop OS, for all the above reasons. Its sole justification is that it beats hell out of Windows. I ran Linux as my desktop and mobile OS from 96 or 97 till 2003, but when I saw OS X run in 2003, I sold some other toys to buy a G4 and have never looked back. For end-user apps like Adobe-ware, Adobe is very correct in their assumption that almost anyone who needs their product, can afford it, *and* is willing to pay for it is very likely not running Linux. Yes, there are exceptions. No, they are not common, and no, the existence of commercial end-user applications will not change that. Doc