Bashing MS 'Like Kicking a Puppy,' Says Jim Zemlin 648
Posted
by
timothy
from the audacity-of-hope dept.
from the audacity-of-hope dept.
jbrodkin writes "Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims. 'I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore,' Zemlin said. 'They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy.' From Android and the Amazon Kindle to embedded devices, consumer electronics and the world's largest websites and supercomputers, 'Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop,' Zemlin argues as Linux approaches its 20th anniversary."
The will to be free (Score:5, Interesting)
You can say that Linux has won when it hasn't beaten Microsoft in the market that makes it Microsoft. The only thing that Linux has won really in the desktop market is its right to exist. We fought long and hard to try to keep the desktop an open environment and competition going. I'm not talking about Linux vs. Windows really though, I'm talking about Open Source vs. Proprietary. But as long as salesmen breath, the battle to keep formats open will wage on. The new battle is how to deal with things like app stores.
Re:Idiotic Statement (Score:5, Interesting)
The desktop is a device mainly used by the general public to run a web browser and the Windows cannot even do that well. Once that user fires up a browser his world is dominated by linux and he does not even know it.
Re:Not only that (Score:4, Interesting)
Not holding my breath. It's not that I don't have faith in the samba folks, but rather I accept that the company that BUILT the desktop might have the drop on server implementations necessary to manage said desktop.
Having a cause is nice, but then after you've fought for a couple years shoehorning your "kinda" products in to production, complete with their own unique and troublesome glitches, you begin to understand that the "Evil Software Company" may actually know a thing or two about their own desktop software. You stop wanting to fight problems for hours on end. You simply expect things to "just work", and to keep "just work"ing until something changes.
See, in IT administration, when you grow up you figure out that IT is less about tinkering with fun bits of tech, and more about making each dollar spent on IT return value to the company.
Now get off my lawn.
Linux beat Sun SGI SCO etc not so much Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
But MS is still really big in the server market. Yes, Linux is big in webserver market. However that isn't the only server market out there. Where MS is really big server (and desktop) wise is enterprise servers.
Linux really beat the traditional unix vendors (Sun, SGI, SCO, etc) not so much Microsoft. Both Linux and Microsoft went after the traditional unix vendor's market and as you point out both got their piece of the pie. Its natural that Linux did well given that the market was already unix based. What is more remarkable is that Microsoft has been as successful as it is, when fighting on unix home turf Linux had the advantage.
Re:The will to be free (Score:4, Interesting)