[ILUG] Interesting article

[PJ Wall]

My own view on this is that I dont really care what other people use.  I 
use Open Source software myself whenever I can, and to be honest I view 
myself as an OSS advocate.  However, I am not an evangelical bore about 
the whole thing, and I'll only recommend OSS when it is appropriate and 
the better solution for that particular person or environment..

I see two opposing arguments here as follows:
1.  its better that OSS stays "by geeks, for geeks" and does not grow 
its current market share... OSS products like Firefox are in my opinion, 
genuinely better and more stable that comparable closed source 
proprietary equivalents.  However, the more popular these OS products 
become, the more people will be interested in seeking out security 
weaknesses.  Firefox is currently relitavely spyware and pop-up free, 
but this will change once it gains market share.
2.  its better that OSS gains market share... if a Linux desktop 
environment becomes more popular, it is likely that third party software 
will become available for Linux.  This is key in my opinion... simple 
software (like a driver for example) is not always readily available for 
Linux desktop.  For example, I was talking to a mid sized organisation 
yesterday who would love to migrate to Linux, but they cannot because a 
vital piece of software (used every day) is Windows only.

I suppose what I am saying is that I'm petty and greedy!!!  I want OSS 
to stay small and niche and have its geek value on the one hand, but I 
also want OSS to get bigger so that it cant be ignored by third party 
vendors anymore.



Rafael Muñoz Moreno-Davila wrote:

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>Hi all!
>
>I just saw this very interesting article on slashdot
>http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/27/1613252&from=rss
>What are your opinion of it?
>
>Cheers!
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