Two Opposed Views on Linux
December 6th, 2006 • General
I was going to write a lengthy response to this article—in which the author seems to think that Linux is in some sort of a war and that it has lost it—but I decided not to bore you with my zealousness and give you the knee-jerk reaction.
Author’s opinion strikes as plain odd. At first I thought the article was another humorous piece on how Linux is gaining grounds, but then it seemed that it was serious, and that the author really believes in the failure of Linux.
The arguments boil down to:
- WYSIWYG is superior to CLI, UNIX sucks, Windows rules.
- Linux has a UI war, and it’s lost it because the UI is a rip off.
- RedHat, Novell and Oracle are going to be bankrupt.
- ReactOS has a strong chance of replacing Linux.
- Eventually, everyone will switch from (the very UNIXy) Linux, to BSD, Hurd and Plan9. (Ironic, isn’t it?).
I’m assuming that when the author says Linux, he’s referring to Linux distributions, i.e. the collection of software based on Linux kernel, GNU tools and a desktop. In that case he might be right, we can’t argue that Linux is superior to, say, Mac OS X. But then again, that’s a subjective call.
Now I’m sure you know that Linux is NOT Windows, and it hasn’t been trying to copy it, not to the extent that many seem to assume. Most of the suggestions about Linux’s decline are either referring to revenues, or a certain company’s stocks. And the GPL’ization of huge projects like Java certainly has something to say about Free software.
What I think is, Linux cannot be easily defeated, mainly because it is backed by a “viral” license. Worst case scenario is cutting commercial support, and that certainly wouldn’t kill Linux. FreeBSD has survived major bumps, I think Linux can too.