The title of this post is actually not mine, but is an article found in MIT’s Technology Review this month.
While fitting the Standard Template for Linux articles, the article manages to emerge with a little more to offer than most normal (yawn) “Linux is winning/not winning” articles. For one, it has graphs. This may seem like a small thing, but I’ve found that it’s fairly rare for an article about the adoption of Linux to use many statistics at all to back up the premise. Usually, for the pro-Linux article, it is enough that Linux is free; and for the anti-Linux article, it is enough that it is too hard for my mom to use. Like it or not, these are the general criteria I’ve seen used to make or break a thesis about the future of Linux. Free versus Mom.
Reading the above, it would seem that “free” will win in the workplace, and “mom” will win at home. I’d say that this is the general conclusion that a lot of people have come to; but the thing is, as something gains wider acceptance in the workplace, it will migrate to the home. If people use Linux as a desktop at work, eventually they will start saying, You know, I could use one of these at home. This works pretty good.
Getting back to the MIT TR article, it’s a long-ish, insightful article, with a fair bit of actual data, and some reasonable prognostication. The author is not just another journalist who thinks that he should tackle the “linux angle” this month, but is Charles Ferguson, who founded Vermeer Technologies, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996. So, it isn’t as though he is a barely Linux-aware journalist, or a rabid Linux zealot, but someone who could actually have something interesting to say about the whole affair.
That’s nice, for a change.
