Awesome video on the eventual victory of Linux

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Its a brilliant marketing video on youtube produced by some redhat people. It draws on imagery outlining the stages of conflict leading to victory.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXDsRoc6MGo[/youtube]

This is one of my favorite videos too. I'm a Ubuntu user and proud of it.

Even with the rise of Ubuntu, GNU/Linux market share is less than 1% and still pretty much limited to geeks.

When Linux is a serious competitor even to Apple, then we can move past the "laughing at you" stage. Yes, Linux is technically superior to Windows and to Mac OS X. But that alone does not necessarily mean it will grow to dominate the OS market.

Its gained a ton since I started using it.

And dont discount the game console boxes using linux either. Except for xbox, they favour openGL.

Honestly, I don't want Linux to grow to dominate the OS market. Any one system dominating the market is bad, because too many people will share the same security vulnerabilities (and no, Linux is not automatically indestructible simply because MS didn't write it). Any "victory" of Linux (in terms of replacing Windows) would be a loss, because it would become a giant target. I would rather have a slew of different operating systems in use, none having much more market share than Mac OS X does now, and a lot of emphasis on cross-platform development and compatibility. So Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, Windows, and we'd need a few other upstarts to come in and help divide up the OS market into small enough chunks that everyone is safe. And everything I just listed other than Windows is some flavor of *nix, so they will share vulnerabilities.

In any case, the computers of 20 years from now will probably not even be recognizable to us today. It's entirely conceivable that by then Microsoft will have ceased to exist, and Linux could very well have vanished as well. We have no idea in what new directions technology will advance, but I think analyzing any long-term trends in relation to what currently exists is a futile endeavor. I'm still young, and within my memory I have observed an astonishing transformation of computers that I don't think many people anticipated. The idea that everyone would own their own computer was ridiculous fairly recently- if your family owned one, even that was a luxury. I have at least four e-mail addresses of my own, in the past my family shared one. And 4 GB of RAM being fairly typical? I remember a family computer with a 1GB hard drive! Portable computers, laptops, were unknown. Today's heavy reliance on the web did not exist. Linux was the hobby of a Finnish computer geek, nothing more. The only accurate prediction that can seem to be made about the development of computers is that all predictions will be wrong.

Great Video, However in economic believe wouldn't using Free Software down the U.S Economy. Microsoft, Intel and other Software/ Hardware companies were the prime reasons for the economic boom of the 1990's. That and the .com bubble towards the end of the decade.

Or would it be the other way around and free software and open-standard will help corporate America as well as the average joe be more productive and communicate better.

Don't down me, I've been using many Debian and SuSe derivatives but this is just something I have to know.

I think have more than one viable competitor in the operating system market is a good thing, but too many can be a probelm. I can remember when I first got a computer in the early 1980s, a Commodore VIC-20. Back then we had Commodore, Atari, Apple, TI, Adam, Heath/Zenith CP/M systems, and of course DOS, and none were compatible with each other. The result was software had to be developed for multiple platforms, and that cost money. In some cases, developers would only develop for one or two and if you had one of the others, you'd be left out in the cold. Having a standard platform means resources can be put into producing better software period, and not having to worry about making it compatible with multiple systems in order to be able to sell it.

My opinion was if we had a few platforms, perhaps Windows, Linux, or maybe the old Amiga had survived, perhaps the competition would give MS or the others incentive to produce more stable better running systems. Another thing I think may hold Linux back from becoming more mainstream on desktops is money. To my knowlege, nobody has figured out how to make money selling desktop Linux of software for home user Linux. The profit motive does drive devleopment and without that there, not much will happen. The volunteers in the Linux community have done alot, but I think volunteerism can only go so far.

Does Linux have alot going for it? I honestly think it does. I've used it and found it does run better in many cases than Windows, and even when applications do crash, they don't take the whole OS down with it like Windows. The fact it's harder to infect linux with malware is something else it has going for it. It's not a bad operating system, but I think still has a way to go before it even has a shot at getting market share the way Windows has.

Just my opinion.