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The Near-Term Future Of Open Source Desktops

Posted by timothy on from the it's-a-comin' dept.

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."

2 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. The war will not be won in the US of A by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Where Windows is so heavily entrenched. It will be won (if it is won) in developing countries which currently have few computers. As computers get cheaper - It's only a matter of time before a machine capable of doing decent websurfing and whatnot hits US$50 - they will become more popular in poorer nations, and those people won't want to pay more for a windows license than they are paying for a computer.

    It would be great to get a serious effort to send "old" (meaning 200MHz and up) computers to third world countries, loaded with open source operating systems. Macs, PCs, whatever. The problem is that to send them all there would cost more than to just buy new ones from a local manufacturing plant :P Maybe we could load up a few shipping containers, weld 'em shut, and just drop them in the ocean. The countries where they wash up get the computers.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Re:The corner of the revolution ... by Hortensia+Patel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is this boiled-frog syndrome?

    Perversely, I think maybe we're getting so used to the gradual flow of success stories that we're losing sight of just how far Linux has come in the last few years. Five years ago, the notion that governments and corporations would be rolling out Linux desktop deployments numbering into five figures would have been comical to even the most rabid zealot. Now it's almost commonplace. The rate of acceptance has been phenomenal. Five years from now I'd certainly expect OSS OSes to make up more than 10% of worldwide installs, and at that point it's a done deal - the operating system will be a commodity, and the closed-source vendors will be either giving their OS away to support app or service revenue, or actually having to work for a living.