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The Near-Term Future Of Open Source Desktops
securitas writes "eWEEK has two related articles on the growth of open source software. The first article is about the growth of desktop Linux, featuring Lotus and the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) founder Mitch Kapor, who says (among other things) that call centers will be where the next wave of growth for desktop Linux happens and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years. He bases his statements on a report by Eazel and GNOME Foundation co-founder Bart Decrem entitled 'Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview' (PDF) mentioned last week. The second story is about open source software growth in the government sector where government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau have embraced OS software for projects like the State and County QuickFacts site. Based on Perl, Apache, MySQL and Linux, the site gets 200,000 page views a day."
In San Diego, a major whitebox vendor (Microtron 2000) offers Lindows as the 'default' OS (at no 'cost'). Many others including Fry's, Walmart offer a bare machine or free Linux/Lindows. Agreed your benchmark is a while away, but things are changing rather fast. Notice that MS no longer offers stock options - they are recognizing that free lunch days are over. They are also increasingly doing more of their development offshore - sign that they want to save money above all else. Don't be surprised if MS becomes a RCA, US Steel or Lucent 10 years from now.
And this is one of the prime targets for Sun's "Mad Hatter" Linux-on-"white box"-PC product due Any Day Now(tm) (or is it Real Soon Now(tm)?). All the goodness you need: RedHat 9, Gnome, StarOffice, Evolution, GAIM, etc.
Sun will maintain ownership of the hardware (5u|\| 0w|\|z J00 d00d!), and customers will pay a per-seat monthly/ quarterly/ whatever fee. Something breaks, field service will just yank the box and drop in a new one, run the kickstart script to build the machine to latest versions from a backend server. I think there was some talk of a "self sparing" option so that the company could keep a couple of "idle" boxes on the network to drop one in themselves if needed.
The latest thin clients (with no moving parts) are Linux based.
The ones I've been playing with are from neoware. Flash based OS and everything either X or Citrix off a central server. This is the sort of thing that call centres are actually using now, along with some fairly large industrial corps like Lockheed Martin (who I have to deal with).