Is Linux a desktop operating system?

Paul M. Bucalo ubuntuser at pmbservices.com
Fri May 27 22:34:19 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 16:58 -0500, Greg Donald wrote:

> > but where they need to target is companies not
> > locked into the MS model yet. This is why developing countries are so
> > important to linux. US companies are going to be the hardest sell on
> > linux, but if we can get the rest of the world then the US may be
> > force to follow.
> 
> The US will be the last to follow I think.  Even if/when Redmond
> starts to decline it will be a long time before those deep pockets run
> dry.  I think they will eventually embrace Linux in some half-hearted
> way.  They must have realized they cannot win against opensource by
> now so from here on it's just grasping at straws.

I think both of you are being a little narrow-minded on the U.S. end. No
offense intended in saying this.

Red Hat *is* a diminutive model of M$ in that the enterprise product
they offer is really a product with cost-based service. Nothing's free.
Not really. Not anymore. Red Hat abandoned developing a 'free' distro
over a year ago. You can get the source code and compile your own and
come up with something like White Box Enterprise Linux (I use for my
server, and desktops in the past) - a RHEL clone. But, it ain't Red Hat!
Not really. Just *your* compilation of *their* commercial product, less
some proprietary stuff and labeling. 

With more smarts than I first gave them, they left us with the Fedora
project when they abandoned the free releases for RHEL. Now, we all can
test, brake, fix and re-design Fedora Core for free, and be privileged
in knowing that we are giving the best to RH sits to put into their
commercial offering for a price. Smart. Really smart. I could see M$
doing that as their offering for an open-source alternative.

Red Hat is still one of the largest providers of Linux world-wide, in
total in the U.S. I don't think Corporate U.S. is as slow to change as
you may think. It won't happen overnight, to be sure, but it is
happening. Let's not forget how *big* the U.S. is in both size and
population. Comparing other countries that have moved over to Linux at
the government level to the U.S. isn't a fair comparison, either. Heck,
Texas is larger than most countries in the world. There's a lot of
demographics to consider: millions of small, medium and large businesses
to convert over to a good thing. Patience is really a needed virtue when
waiting for the whole U.S. to eventually come to its senses. ;0) 

I'm reminded of an adage that I tell others when patience is minimal and
expectations too high:"How does one man eat a large elephant? One bite
at a time, of course!"

As for M$ backpedaling? That they are. Will M$ come up with it's own
version/flavor/whatever of Linux to compete? Of course. It's already
been implied. I suspect that M$ will jump in bed with RH for licensing a
'special' version just their own, and with some Win32 coding embedded to
make it run Win32 apps like you can't imagine. Who can better make this
happen than the internal personnel who have the key to the M$ code
vault? It's their code, they can bend, twist and malign it to their
heart's content. They have the ear of most all the hardware vendors. If
anyone can make a Windows version of Linux, they can. Not that this is
what we all want, of course, but it is inevitable that M$ will enter the
Linux playing field soon. That they won't enter it fairly is also
evident. :0/

Trust me.


Paul





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