On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 09:27:20AM -0500, David Meyer wrote:
> Good Morning All,
>
> I certainly don't wish to fan the flames, but this discussion has made
> me believe all over again that the one thing that will keep Linux from
> getting where it needs to be in the desktop market is the fighting back
> and forth about distributions, etc.
>
That's the least of Linux' worries. The #1 biggest reason for the dearth
of Linux desktops and servers compared to Microsoft is the fact that
Linux is not pre-installed on PCs (some, but very few). Do people
planning to buy a PC want it with an OS or without one (and they have to
install it themselves)? Do they want to wipe the OS they have and put a
different one on? Why should they do all that? Word works for them, IE
works for them. All this Microsoft antitrust stuff and anti-Microsoft
rhetoric doesn't really have anything to do with them.
I'm talking about home and home office users here. Driving a wedge
between those people and their Windows OS is an extremely hard thing
to do. Some of those people still run Windows 3.11, of all things. If it
works, don't fix it, they believe. And you can't really argue with that.
And all these disputes like KDE vs GNOME, vi vs emacs, are all
irrelevant to them. They wouldn't know a KDE if it walked up and slapped
them. Again, they just want it to work.
The business world is a different animal. But again, I don't believe
community bickering has anything to do with Linux acceptance. When IBM
installs a Red Hat server in a Wall Street brokerage, I doubt anyone
ponders the significance of whether they really should be using SuSE
instead. Much of the impetus for Linux in corporations comes from a)
geeks, and b) press buzz. That's what makes the CIOs even entertain the
idea. Then they get into TCO and support. Red Hat's cleaning up,
partially because they have a strong support organization for those
corporate types. If SuSE, Mandrake or Debian could do that, they'd be
cleaning up too.
Jim Wildman's breakdown of company types is probably accurate, and
illustrates the difference between Linux acceptance across the business
spectrum.
But this petty bickering about any number of things in our community is
really a private matter, not something the world at large is aware of or
cares about. An example is the kernel mailing list. Any large
development project will likely have the same breadth and volume of
arguing. The difference is that ours is in public. At Microsoft, those
guys are either across the cubicle from each other, or the arguing
happens on Microsoft internal email channels. But what's "public" to us
isn't readily visible to rest of the world. How many moms and CPAs go
out to Google to try to find out what's been said on any of the Linux
lists that get archived on the internet? Precious few, I'll bet. The
only reason anyone knows about it at all is because the press highlights
it from time to time.
I never heard of a family that didn't argue amongst themselves at one
time or another.
Paul
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