Linux may lose its chance of competing with Microsoft after the 64bit revolution gets underway

[Evan Leibovitch]

Kush wrote:
>
> This is a sobering scenario.
>
It's a dumb scenario.

The fact exists that companies such as Red Hat and Novell and IBM and HP 
have long been able to make the licensing deals ESR advocates. And 
unlike volunteer FOSS developers, these companies have a shareholder 
duty to maximize market share, to compete and to differentiate 
themselves from the rest. And yet they have not implemented ESR's panic 
remedies, for IMO very good reason. Even lesser players such as Mandriva 
and Canonical have stayed away. Only Linspire has bothered to try these 
deals, but the result has hardly catapulted the company into leadership 
of the FOSS market -- arguably just the opposite.

Beating your adversary by becoming your adversary is rarely a victory 
worth winning. The emergence of open source as a mainstream development 
model is a substantial societal change, and these kind of things tend to 
move slowly (in some cases, literally waiting for the opposition to die 
off). Efforts to effect a small increase in speed, at the expense of 
fundamental principles, would be futile and potentially result more in 
damage than progress.

FOSS wasn't destroyed by Microsoft's move from NT to XP or 16 to 32 bit, 
and it won't be destroyed by the company's move from XP to Vista or 32 
to 62 bit. While ESR may need to be outrageous in order to attempt to 
re-establish some relevance for himself, that doesn't mean that the 
community needs to buy into his scaremongering.

- Evan
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