On Wednesday 14 March 2007 14:56, Doug McGarrett wrote: > ... > > I really don't have anything useful to the list to add, but perhaps > useful to Novell and the developers: I agree 100% with the previous > writer. If Linux is ever to have a significant proportion of the > market, it must be at least as big as the Mac market to survive, and > it _must be user-friendly_ or it will be as dead as CPM and DOS.
I hear this again and again, but it's absurd. There is far more to computing that home and office desktops. CPM and DOS were never used to run large e-commerce and other Internet services. There was nothing compelling enough about them to keep them going and they had too many deficits to continue in the face of rapidly advancing technology and requirements. That is not true of Linux and will not be true for the foreseeable future. Linux will not die for the simple reason that it is absolutely essential to the likes of Google, Amazon and many, many others. I don't really have any idea (nor do I care) what it would take to make Linux displace Windows or give it a comparable share of users to Mac OS X. I don't need anything from Linux that it does not already have in order to make it invaluable to me in my day-to-day work. Nor does the continued existence of Windows really harm me. It sometimes makes my work a little harder, but it's just one among many sources of such challenges. We probably should not want any one operating system, be it proprietary, open-source or a hybrid, to displace all others. Monopolies and monocultures have bad consequences by their inherent nature. You claim that Linux's continued existence is contingent upon it satisfying the needs of non-technical users of computers. That's not true, nor will Windows disappear any time soon, and that's true regardless of how brilliantly Linux advances. Because Windows will continue to be a predominant OS for a very long time, I think computing professionals should pressure Windows to get its technological act together (especially regarding security). And institutional and government users, not to mention law-enforcement agencies, should be pressuring (or litigating) Microsoft to do business in a more honorable fashion. Were it not for all those easily compromised Windows boxes out there, the security and privacy landscape today would be a lot more benign. Then we could all just choose the platform that suits us and / or our customers best and let legitimate market forces play their role in driving the advancement of information technology. (And by the way, by "getting Windows' security act together" I do _not_ mean their so-called "Trusted Computing Initiative.") > --doug Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
