RBW1 wrote:
Heh, interesting take...
The good news...
History is NOT over!
http://tinyurl.com/3kkma
RBW
After reading this article, the word that keeps coming to my mind is
balderdash. Even if one accepts, as the reason for Linux's lack of
widespread acceptance, the author's premise that it was the Linus
Torvalds as single-handed open-source god myth, which I was never aware
of, even during the height of the .com bubble when such rhetoric got
positively ethereal, I have yet to have any of my customers to whom I
have managed to get to try open source solutions base the decision to
try it on political correctness or the history of Linus Torvalds. They
choose to try it, or not, based on how well it demonstrates an ability
to meet their needs at reasonable cost(one of those needs, at least
initially, being interoperability with Windows). It is the fact that
open source products(Linux or otherwise) can deliver on those fronts
that is fueling wider acceptance of Linux. The author does finally get
around to this in the article, but the idea that Linux needs to be
politically correct, or that some myth about how Torvalds created it
needs to be abandoned, in order to succeed strikes me as ludicrous. In
my experience, if there is any perception that has changed about Linux,
it's that linus is so hard to use that you have to be a dyed-in-the-wool
computer nerd, programmer, or IT expert to be able to use it. I think
the big "social tipping point" is that people are finally realizing that
Unix/Linux is not hard. It's just not Windows. That coupled with the
seeping awareness of what it is possible to do for little or no cost in
the way of desktop publishing(Scribus), groupware(Novell edirectory,
group-office, egroupware), Databases(MySQL), video
conferencing/streaming(H323 server/gnomeeting, Open LDAP, ffmpeg, VLC),
photo editing/graphics(Gimp, Blender, POV-Ray) and the more mundane
office stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, and
presentations(OpenOffice.org, StarOffice) is tipping the balance. That's
just my opinion, and I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
Robert Donovan
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