> doesn't this say something about the Philippines? > > Malaysia: Its open source from now on > http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2004/7/16/technology/8461653&sec=technology
Practically speaking (and more and more, technically as well), I feel Windows is superior to Linux on more points than the other way around. The only major factor for which Linux cannot possibly be overtaken on is price but even then the very real possibility of Linux having a higher TCO in many scenarios is concern for business entities who might wish to adopt it. SCO's threat of a lawsuit, while generally scoffed at by many, is certainly still cause for concern for multinational companies who would not want to expose themselves to undue risk.
Thus this is why I feel that, with things the way they are, the only entities with enough influence (read: political power) and resources to really make a dent in Microsoft's snowballing dominance are governments.
I'm sure just about everyone on this list is also aware of China, Japan, and Korea's initiatives, announced last year, to develop their own OS on top of Linux: http://www.inq7.net/inf/2003/sep/05/inf_29-1.htm
The reason they and Malaysia are doing this is not because Linux is necessarily better, but because they do not want a foreign company from achieving a stranglehold on a resource as strategic and fundamental to the future as IT and Linux is the one best hope for achieving such a goal.
Now that the hubris-laden assertions about Open Source as being an invincibly superior software development model (ESR's abstruse and fanciful pseudo-economic theses) have been all but crushed(*), we are starting to realize that governments who would rather not see a US company dominate and control the future of their countries' software infrastructure are going to have to proactively support Linux and other open-source development for it to be able to compete with the goliath that is Microsoft.
[* When it comes to display servers - a very fundamental technology - even a relatively small company like Apple was able to, in a few short years, come up with a technology that is way ahead of anything the open-source movement has come up with so far (though the people over at freedesktop.org are working valiantly to overcome that) for Linux]
By proactive, I mean that government policies are going to have to be somewhat biased towards Linux - in the name of national interests - even if MS technologies are initially proven to be superior and cheaper.
Governments will have to fund research in open source technologies to speed up their maturity vis-a-vis Microsoft ones. Governments' procurement standards will also need to have a preference towards Linux-based technologies and if, in the remote chance that SCO wins their case in the US and succeeds in making Linux illegal for use over there, they will have to rearchitect their IPR laws to prevent the same scenario from being enforced in their own countries. Even now, governments should be making statements that take a position on how this SCO lawsuit will affect Linux usage by companies based in their own countries.
It really looks as if MS' dominance is snowballing and my strong impression right now is that an empty faith that the Open Source Religion (as brought to you by apostles ESR, RMS, et al) can triumph on its own virtues (i.e. without economic and political help from governments) is not going to stop that.
Otoh, the caveat is that knowing how incredibly inefficient and clueless governments can be at managing projects... any such initiatives are going to have to enlist the help of the private sector and cannot be an exclusively governmental task.
Communism and Anarchism are political failures in the real world. It looks like, despite an initial burst of deceptive success, analogous concepts are going to fail just as miserably for the world of software development. It's still money that makes the world go round. ;-)
[... just throwing a bone for y'all out there to chew on ...]
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