[wplug] Linux Adoption Stalls, Study Says

Chester R. Hosey Chester.Hosey at gianteagle.com
Thu Jun 9 17:04:33 EDT 2005


On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 23:50 -0400, Zachary Uram wrote:
> http://tinyurl.com/ab8hm
> 
> Thoughts? Rejoinder?
> 
> Zach

I suppose I'll take the bait.

The article may be right, I have no way of knowing.

If someone wants to really get GNU/Linux out there in everyone's faces
and on everyone's desktops, they're going to have to attack the
situation in the same way the GNU project has done -- modularly.

Red Hat is trying to provide an end-to-end Free application stack.
However, their approach makes it hard to imagine corporate America
phasing out Microsoft solutions for Red Hat's. If RH really wanted to
cast their nets wide they'd start developing drop-in replacements for
Windows technologies -- offer an installation option for Red Hat Desktop
for a Windows-network-node setting that uses Samba and Active Directory
for authentication, automatically mounts network shares, including a
symlink from (for example) /network/smbdc/users/joesmith to
~joesmith/Desktop/My\ Documents. Reverse-engineer the protocol to offer
a mail client that actually communicates with Exchange the same way
Outlook does.

Retarget Red Hat Directory Server to serve as a drop-in replacement for
Active Directory. Use the reverse-engineering to offer a mail server
that actually communicates with Outlook the same way Exchange does.

Basically make the whole setup modular, and work on replacing modules on
at a time the way GNU did to UNIX. UNIX is losing to Linux on the low
end where software licensing isn't insignificant compared to hardware
costs. GNU started developing replacements to modules and improved them
over time, and it's paying off in terms of acceptance (not that RMS
cares, but it's a nice benefit). If a vendor were to use the same
process to break Microsoft's offerings into components, develop
replacements, and refine them over time it would only be a matter of
time before adoption soared.

Eventually Red Hat will run out of UNIX installations to target, and
will stop growing. If they understand why GNU succeeded, they'll
eventually have to start doing the same to Windows.

Meanwhile, Novell's offerings will continue to be really neat, and
nobody will buy them because it's hard to consider Novell products
without locking yourself in to Novell's consulting.

Chet


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