Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

Rick Tomaschuk rickl-ZACYGPecefkm4kRHVhTciCwD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Fri Dec 9 04:00:30 UTC 2005


Replies below. Cheers!
On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 22:39 -0500, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Hi Rick,
> 

> 1) Since you're talking Apple, you seem to be talking about the desktop. 
> Please keep in mind that Linux has only really been usable by non-geeks 
> on the desktop for a few years. It's only now, with post-version-1 
> releases of Firefox, OpenOffice and Thunderbird, that the open source 
> desktop has been really suitable for non-technical users. What's 
> happened in the last 10 years is that Linux has indeed been building a 
> reputation for stability, cost effectiveness and reliability, but that's 
> been mainly on the back end. Major vendors such as Red Hat and 
> pre-Novell SuSE produced Linux desktops more as a courtesy and a tool to 
> sell servers rather than competitive products in their own right.

My issue doesn't rest solely with Linux. I was setting up FreeBSD
servers before Linux began to evolve. Word Perfect 5.0 on DOS was
fantastic. Along come MS (like a disease) and sweeps everyone into the
hype that GUI is better. It could have been but it wasn't a mature
product. Quite frankly it was garbage (Win 3.0, 3.1, NT 3.51, 4.0) and I
took a break from the industry so I wouldn't have to install it anymore.
Tough to look a customer in the eye and sell him/her garbage...and the
the hell of having to support it afterwords.


> 2) "The market" is not just North America, which is probably the slowest 
> region on earth to be adopting open source. The fight is toughest here 
> because our region is the one that exports most of the world's 
> proprietary systems software. Other areas of the world import their 
> operating systems, providing significant macro-economic and 
> self-sufficiency incentive to consider open source. The Munich win came 
> in large part because the city government thought they were buying a 
> homegrown OS (oops!).

I live and work in Canada and the US. I'm not really that interested in
the rest of the world, Jupiter, Mars or Pluto either. May not be
politically correct but continent hopping is not my bag.

> You wouldn't share the same views of invisibility in big chunks of 
> Europe, Asia and South America. Countries like China, Bulgaria, Malaysia 
> and Brazil are using Linux to create domestic systems software 
> infrastructures, open source is practically becoming a matter of public 
> policy.
Glad to hear it.

> The trend is changing here too, but this is the enemy's home turf; the 
> battles will be bloodier because there's more at stake. Witness the 
> filthy politics at play simply because the government of Massachusetts 
> wants to enforce open standards for documents. This crap simply wouldn't 
> be tolerated in most other countries today; indeed, the arrogance of the 
> proprietary vendors at play in Mass would work strongly against them in 
> most other countries.

> 4) Personally, I think the Linux "brand" (which is really a more generic 
> term encompassing a lot of non-Linux-kernel applications) is doing just 
> fine, given its youth and maturity in both technical and business areas. 
> Linux desktops have quietly surpassed Apple as the number 2 desktop 
> worldwide, despite their lack of commercial application support. But 
> some people just can't do without their Photoshop (or Quake, or Quicken, 
> etc) and that will continue to be problematic so long as Wine continues 
> to track a moving target.
> 
- Evan

Points well taken. Keep up the good work Evan.
Regards,
Rick Tomaschuk



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