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25 Years After DOS - Lessons for Linux?
E IS mC(Square) writes "Microsoft is planning to celebrate 25 years of DOS. An article at ReallyLinux discusses what lessons Linux can learn from the history of DOS. The article begins with 'What can the Linux world learn from Microsoft's past 25 years of unique experiences and domination?', and ends with 'Only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?'" From the article: "First, we must admit openly once and for all that the 'best solution' is not always the 'most used solution.' There are few who would be foolish enough to argue that back in 1981 PC-DOS was the best solution. There were obviously a number of choices. PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show."
Whoever has the most capital and the best marketability owns the market.
This topic has been covered millions of times. "It's not if, it's when Linux will..." and finish the quote with some audacious goal. If Linux can solve the problems, let it. If it can't, then fine. Do we really need to regurgitate this same idea over and over again?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
This is the attitude that is going to prevent that from ever happening. I wish the movers and shakers in the Linux world would decide to focus on a subset of the OS market, and do it well, instead of trying to do everything and losing focus of good engineering practices...
Have you ever heard...too many cooks spoiled the broth? Same is with Linux...with all the a##holes out their pimping linux to make some money by creating their unique distribution which causes binary incompatibilities and what not...i don't think Linux stands a chance...
Linux kernel is good but its the user experience that matters for wider adoption...
"Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show."
It was easy for DOS to "steal the show". The purchase of every PC basically required a license of this "cheap OS" by order of Mighty Microsoft. And of course that money went straight to them.
As a poster in the HP/Linux story wrote today, to this day some hardware vendors have contracts with MS that require them to sell a Windows license with every system, even if they're going to run Linux. Maybe THAT is what Microsoft is really celebrating. 25 years and going...
Novell 6 still runs on top of Dos. Can anyone explain to me why it is only now with Novell 7 that an operating system that was designed to operate in more than 640k of memory is being used?
. . .because the ad told you it was the best selling, don't you?
Come on, admit it. "Most used" isn't a criteria for Open Source development. MS has very, very little to teach OSS, because they are innately in different worlds. Stop with the "market think" already.
If, and when, Linux takes over as the most used OS it will be as a side effect. If it does not take over, well, then at least it's a better alternative freely available to anyone.
Mercedes doesn't feel any obligation to make Escort knockoffs just because more of them are sold, and they are market driven.
KFG
While I am sure that there are lessons to be learned from the history of DOS, I think that the biggest one that has shone itself since then is that it really doesn't matter. What I mean by that is that I do not believe that the future will hold as much singular dominance as it once did. What linux and other OSS projects have taught me is that there are other choices, other solutions for a particular problem. It may be OSS, it may be proprietary. It really doesn't matter. Also what I believe to be tantamount to that is that linux and the OSS community as a whole needs to learn is that users are not going to use difficult products. That is why the GUI came into existence. Most users shunned computers until they had a way of interacting with them that had some intuitiveness to it. Although I am a big linux and OSS supporter, I am constantly amazed at the horrible or non-existant documentation that comes with OSS. Don't even get me started about installation procedures and dependancies. What linux needs to learn if they want a larger market penetration is that no one, other than those willing to devote lots of time to learning how it all works at a low level will adopt it. Make it easy for the masses. Make things work without having to dig around the internet for libraries and other dependancies. Give good documentation - not geek speak.
My
Windows had rabid piracy, Mac didn't.
When distro makers license custom 3D drivers to go in their distributions as standard.
For example, ATI's 9800 driver installation process may suck (I still can't get them to work in any distro I've tried -- I am not a Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination), but if the distro makers want gamers and games developers to join them they're going to have to tackle this problem, even if it means coughing up cold hard cash.
William Gates was waiting in the wings, and he signed a deal to give IBM an operating system. Then, Gates bought PC-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it. PC-DOS was that clone.
The rest is history. Kildall faded into oblivion, and most people have no idea that he is, in fact, the original inventor of the PC operating system. Meanwhile, billions of people instantly recognize Bill Gates as the "inventor" of the PC operating system. Gates got both the profits and the undeserved fame. Kildall got nothing and drowned in his own bitterness. In the later years of his life, he drank himself into alcoholism and eventually died in a bar.
The greatest insult was, ultimately, assigning the name "William H. Gates" to the Stanford Computer Science building. It should have been called the "Kildall Memorial Building".
I have the utmost respect for the volunteers in the open-source movement. I know that they will give credit where credit is due.
Why must Linux conquer in the end? Microsoft has billions in the warchest, countless corporate alliances, patents, and whatnot. The Beta and VHS discussion was not really about price or technological superiority. It was more about market clout. Sony didn't have wide market support for its format, other companies joined Matsushita to produce VHS systems, which eventually leveled the prices.
Microsoft continues to dominate with its ties to big OEMs, and on volume sales that these OEMs deal with, Microsoft remains a pretty competitive option for providing support, brand recognition, etc. Plus it doesn't hurt companies and customers that nearly every app written has a version for M$.
People have been claiming Microsoft dead for years now, just like Apple should have been dead a few years ago. It isn't going to happen. If anything, Microsoft will figure out how to buy Linux and jigger with it.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Strange, Linux seems to be rock solid.
And it runs on everything from a wristwatch to a mainframe.
It seems as if they have the engineering practices under control.
As for focusing on "a subset", why?
Won't the stability needed for a server be a good feature in a workstation?
Won't the plethora of devices on a workstation give you more flexibility in choosing a server (ATA, SATA, SCSI, etc).
Won't the real-time features necessary for certain segments be nice with workstation audio playback?
There are a couple of very simple lessons to be learned about DOS that should be heard by everyone (I think):
LESSON: Easier may not be better, but more people buy it. Windows was easier for grandma to use than command line interfaces, and thus made DOS obsolete.
LESSON: A product that is targeted to hardware and to a userbase will get market share. DOS was a derivitave work aimed at the microcomputer of the day. This allowed the average company or person to buy that hardware and use it effectively. Its target users were anyone that wanted stand alone computing resources, free of mainframes.
LESSON: Control is not the answer, simplicity is. Because DOS could be installed by anyone on almost any compatible machine, buying it made sense, and money was spent for the version of DOS that had the features required for the job. For this very reason, Microsoft has garnered a long list of detractors.
For the *nix world, what should be learned is that if you want to do something right, make it simple and easy to use by anyone. Make it portable: that is to say, yourLinux should work on many or any hardware platform that would be used by your target userbase. If you are targeting people who want to build their HTPC then by all means, make your own version of Linux if you find benefit to this, otherwise, use some other stable distribution and package it with the software you need to give the end user a sleek and easy installation and maintenance of their HTPC system. If you feel the need to innovate, remember that simple is when you take a good idea and make it usable on any *nix distro, and compatible with other OSs. It is the ease of use that creates marketshare.
While *nix developers struggle with competing with entrenched software vendors, it is time to remember that to beat them you have to be better, not simply a good-enough alternative if you want to get grandma and aunt velda using your code.
Just some thoughts...
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Lesson for Linux: make a deal with the PC maker controlling the market that forces them to use Linux exclusively, but lets you sell Linux to anyone you want. On the condition that you become so necessary to that PC maker's "successor OS" (the one copying Apple's user-friendly OS) that you can destroy the project. Then copy Apple's OS yourself, and sell it to all the PC-making competitors you've enabled by selling to them, under the compatibility spec.
Then do everything you can to abuse your monopoly position in bundled OS, apps, development and content - too numerous to list here. Then, if a new OS, unburdened with decades of backwards-compatibility baggage and shortsighted design decisions, becomes so popular as to threaten your entire business model, not just your OS product, you can continue to win based on lock-in and political manipulations. Don't worry if you're found to legally abuse your monopoly; you'll be so important that no one can touch you, even the US government. Especially if you just do what all the other popular, important, and big-spending monopolies do: bribe^Wcontribute to important campaigns, and create a "millionaires" cult that fills people with dreams of cheating their own way to the top.
BTW, if you can manage to be supported in your early years by a couple of the country's top corporate lawyers, their son (your CEO) can even drop out of college, looking like everyman while his PR team keeps his trustfund quiet.
--
make install -not war
I remember reading something on /. about a year ago, regarding some linux conference .... anyways some guy from Suse said "Just because an OS holds 90% of the market doesn't mean it's superior. Remember 90% of all animals are insects."
I'm not sure if you can qualify insects as animals, but you get the picture.
Here's the pic from the article
Ultimately, nobody gives a damn what OS is running. Looking at the historical ups and downs of DOS in and of itself is a useless exercise in intellectual masturbation.
People buy computers because of applications, not operating systems. Although Microsoft has managed to turn the OS into the application, the best, most solid systems respect the separation of OS and application. The only thing worthy of analysis relative to all this is the fact that MS's bloating up of DOS with a GUI and bundled apps ended up delivering them market share. But ultimately nobody ever chose a PC based on the OS... never, ever. They may have chosen a PC/OS based on the applications available for the OS, but with the exception of just a few, most computer users don't care what's under the hood as long as it gets them from point A to point B.
That's the way it was, is, and always will be. This holds true for everything from cell phones to console gaming. The system with the most versatility and functionality will win out in the absence of any domineering marketing campaign (which has a tendency of nullifying objectivity).
1. DOS was stable.
2. Because DOS was stable, developers were more comfortable developing applications for it.
3. Because there were more applications available for DOS, it garnered market share.
#2 is the key to it all... Had the first IBM PC been more closed like the Macintosh, the whole industry may have evolved differently. Had the TRS-80 been easier to hack and upgrade, we'd all probably be using TRSDOS v900. Had Apple not decided to turn their backs on the great original idea of embracing third party development when they went the route of Mac/Lisa, we'd all probably be using Apples. It's all about the applications, and how those who develop systems pander to the widest array of appdev talent.
What's funny is what's happened to the software development industry. I'd bet even today, 10+ years after the demise of DOS as a viable platform, there are still more DOS apps than Windows apps. So MS's pie-in-the-sky-OS idea has hurt the industry as a whole by crippling independent software development. That's what we can learn from this whole mess.
You can't freaking run old Dos programs on windows anymore.
Au contraire, and I am constantly amazed at the plethora of 16-bit programs that continue to run on kernels as recent as Windows 2000 - which is a real testament to M$FT & Intel/AMD's devotion to backwards compatibility [and which is also the lesson that FOSS types should take away from this].
However, I hear that Win64/AMD64 does NOT support 16-bit binaries.
you sure about that? methinks you never owned a mac, or at least never were involved in 'the community'...
Never heard of Hotline I see.
For those who are not aware, the genesis of DOS began in deceipt and treachery.
...most people have no idea that he is, in fact, the original inventor of the PC operating system.
You list no such deceit or treachery. All you list is Gary Kildall giving IBM the brushoff. Give credit where credit is due, the fault for CPM/86's failure in the mass market needs to be given to Mr. Kildall.
Then, Gates bought PC-DOS from Seattle Computer Products.
Nothing treacherous or deceitful about that.
An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it.
Thank you, Darl MacBride. Was there a patent on CPM/86? No, there wasn't, so no ideas where "stolen", because no ideas were sold. The implementation for CPM/86 itself (copyright) was not copied, modified or distributed. Hence, no "stolen" operating system.
He created a clone of CPM/86, in EXACTLY the same way Linus Torvalds created a clone of Minix/Unix. Why is Tim the thief but not Linus? Oh that's right, in your Darl MacBride world, Linus "stole" Unix. Sigh.
Inventor? What a load of crap! Next you'll be telling me that AT&T/USL/Caldera/SCO were the orginal inventors of Linux!
The greatest insult was, ultimately, assigning the name "William H. Gates" to the Stanford Computer Science building.
It was William H. Gates who donated money to Stanford, not Gary Kildall. Which is why Gar Kildall doesn't have a Stanford campus building named after him. This is so bloody obvious that only a total moron would question it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Rent-seeking is a really old game so we should be unsurprized when old world cultures, much more specialized at this sort of thing, smell a nice free-from-risk annuity stream such as the one Gates has and, via the Boeing 747's of the world, and descend upon it like flies laying their eggs in shit.
The result is almost any aspect of that annuity stream will be sucked up and sent overseas (or captured via more robust ethnic nepotism of the older cultures as they rip through the naively individualistic cultures of the new world).
The lesson for Linux is that the government subsidizes rent-seekers so if it wants to benefit from such an annuity stream in such a way that it isn't simply captured by the most sociopathic culture out there -- it must do 2 things:
One opportunity to do this is to come up with a different business model for home computing based on the opportunity presented by broadband deployment.
The business model basically involves taking advantage of the fact that most people just want a single unified service where they don't have to worry about their computer/broadband connection so much. The opportunity here is to take something like a wireless mesh solution for Linux and deploy it via a good desktop, easily maintained Linux distro like Ubuntu. Then provide computer/broadband service modeled on an HMO (Information Service Maintanence Organization?) providing some minimal co-pay for service calls. The mesh can suck up bandwidth from virtually any source but the ISMO could provide a feed from the annuity stream.
Given the jobs crunch there are more than enough technologists out there who are under-employed who could use a subsistence, non-tradable service job.
Seastead this.
As it is this article is a factless, pointless rant about Microsoft. It doesn't answer the question it purports to ask ("What can the Linux world learn from Microsoft's past 25 years of unique experiences and domination?") at all. It does however spew every bit of geek lore that makes geeks feel all fuzzy inside knowing how 'superior' they are, regardless of the facts or relevance.
If it were posted on /., it would be modded right up to the stratosphere. As an example of Linux journalism - it's pretty sad.
I find it hard to take seriously any article which takes on capitalist bashing tendencies while at the same time offering zero evidence that PC-DOS was "as the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on" or that better alternatives for the IBM PC would have been available. People become wealthy through commerce, at which point they can divert a chosen sum of their own choosing to philanthropic ends. Whining that corporation X doesn't give as much of its shareholder's value away as you'd like is rather undemocratic, as I doubt you'd be a majority shareholder. I'd be very curious if anyone has evidence that backs up the 3 major shortcomings he asserts in PC-DOS though.
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Hnm...I worked at Digital Research for three summers while I was in high school and college. I don't think what you're saying really holds water. CP/M was a nice enough OS in some ways, but it was painfully primitive by modern standards. Rumor had it that Kildall wrote the original CP/M over a weekend on a handy machine he had access to at the Naval Postgraduate School. It was a very basic, bare-bones OS, and it was by no means a state-of-the-art OS compared to, say, Unix; but that's not surprising, because it had to run in a 64k address space.
I also don't think it's accurate to portray Gary Kildall as a naive engineer who didn't know business. Digital Research was quite a successful business by the standards of a time when "microcomputer" users were mostly hobbyists. The story about his being out flying his plane when IBM showed up for the meeting is memorable, but probably untrue. A more believable version that I've heard is that IBM wanted Kildall and his wife to sign NDA's, and they refused. That wasn't as crazy as it might seem today. IBM had never even entered the microcomputer market. In the world of microcomputers, DRI was the big, established, dominant company, and IBM was trying to break in.
Actually, TFA isn't referring to CP/M at all:
- Look I say this with caution but sincerity since I began using DOS around the same time I had used UNIX and its variants, VMS, Stratus VOS and others.
VMS and Unix were indeed much more sophisticated than PC-DOS (or CP/M), but, uh, you couldn't run them in a 64k address space. People had made various trimmed-down 8-bit versions of Unix (proprietary, of course), but they weren't as sophiaticated as real Unix.From the article:
- My only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?
Sorry, but this is really dopey. The historical stuff he's talking about isn't parallel to the modern situation at all. Some crucial differences:Find free books.
"Socially, the vacuum was created by greed.
...
A friend of mine told me he thinks that if Microsoft released just 10% of the roughly $2 BILLION in CASH (does not include other assets) to help curb diseases and help starvation, many people could be helped."
I was uneasy reading this OP/Ed piece. But once I got to the "social" problem, I stopped reading. So, what charitable organization has the one of the largest endowments in the world? That would be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has an endowment of roughly $29 billion. And what do they focus on? Global health problems like HIV/AIDS in Africa and education.
So only Microsoft should be held to this lofty standard of donating 10% of its cash to help the needy? Why not every company? Why shouldn't Ford donate 10% of its cash hoard (~$10 billion). What about Apple's $6 billion cash hoard? Or what about ordinary people? Why don't we require everyone to donate 10% of their savings account? Because Micro$oft is evil and should give back? As soon as I read this I knew this op/ed piece was a waste.
'Only question now is not if but when will Linux become the number one OS on earth?'"
Sorry but it is not going to happen. Linux needs to grow away from MS and stop comparing itself to it. The more I read about how Linux can compare to MS (let alone 25 years ago) just leads me to believe more and more that Linux will keep copying Windows until Microsoft goes out of business. What happens then?
If Linux is to come out on top it needs to be more innovative and less whiny about Microsoft. Seriously. The entire "whine" (TM) factor needs to go the way of the dodo. It is a great turnoff to those of us that are considering Linux but are reluctant to leave MS.
Aside from running specific apps that haven't been ported to Linux yet, name anything that Windows can do that Linux cannot.
Linux is quickly taking over the server market segment so SOMEONE has to like the Linux approach.
I'm typeing this on Ubuntu and Windows is behind on ease of use.
Surprise! Linux both technically better AND easier to use now.
Remember, it's easier to make a stable and secure platform easy to use than it is to make an unstable/insecure platform stable and secure, no matter how easy it is for the end user to use.
Linux will take the server market first.
Then it will take the corporate/government desktop.
Only then will it take the home user desktop (if such still exists then).
No, the IBM PC took over the market within 2 years, DOS hitched along for the ride.
The reason that the IBM PC took over the market was because it was the right computer (business oriented, super number crunching, fast hi-res text display), at the right time, from the right people.
The IBM PC would still have stormed the market if it was running CP/M.
MS-DOS played an insignificant role in the early success of the PC, if anything it hindered developers and owners of businesses already running on CP/M machines from moving to the PC until they were convinced that it was going to be a roaring success.
Everything you described is perfectly legit business.
Buying a company and its IP for a song is perfectly justifiable if that company can't sell its product. Having a good product and lacking the ability to sell it makes a company almost as worthless as having no product at all. Having technology or resources but not the capital or expertise to bring them to market is a very common problem with small companies in all industries.
Gates had the expertise necessary to market the product he fairly purchased. Having his company's name and logo on the product is completely reasonable.
What you miss is that Seattle Computing and Tim Patterson could never have sold their OS to IBM in a million years. Nor could they compete with Digital Research. What they had was worthless (to them).
The DOS deal did in fact keep SCP in business, and they eventually sold their stake in DOS back to MS for millions of dollars. Tim Patterson was an early MS employee and is probably worth tens of millions. None of these people are complaining, why are you?
Linux will not kill Windows.
Game consoles will kill Windows.
That's where the volume is, and where the bleeding edge tech is headed, because dollars from games drive graphics and cpu development.
In 10 years, SOME device decended from a game console (I won't try to predict which) will unseat the PC.
Why does it have to be Linux? Why Windows? I would bet good money that the "number one OS on Earth" will be neither of the two.
Unix and its early variants, around for about 30 years, are quickly losing share to Linux. DOS only had a 20-year shelf-life. Windows, around now in various forms for about 15 years, is probably going to give-way soon to another major evolution in OS. Linux, too, probably will go away to be replaced by something better. It's just a matter of time.
But to say that "Linux will become the number one OS on Earth" is a bit like a mother claiming her child is the best actress of all time, just undiscovered at the moment.
OSS zealots need to be less focused on smashing Microsoft and their self-claimed superiority, and more focused on solving the problems that are limiting their market-share.
Either that, or - as someone earlier stated - focus on a niche that Linux can properly serve and stick with that.
-David
Linux based OS's are only as powerful as the people using them. If you don't know what you are doing then its not going to do a whole lot for you.
Unfortunately for your example, customers have many, many definitions of "in their own interest".
One may, for example, assume a "smart" customer would choose a superior OS like... OS X. Or Linix. Or whatever.
However, they also consider other questions like... How much it is? Is it already installed so I don't have to mess with it? Do I have to relearn everything? While it run my existing software? Will it work on my computer? Is Half-Life 2 available for it? And so on.
Thus what you might consider to be a "stupid" choice may make sense to those who make it, because that choice best reflected their needs, their budget, their skill level, and/or their ability to change.
Sum up the majority of those decisions, and you have the dominant market force.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
There was/is plenty of piracy on the Mac.
I remember the 'don't copy that floppy' advertisement as being produced by Apple Computer.
I guess your right. Linux OS's just weren't meant to be run by computer illiterate people. I hope thats not the future of computer using world.
Let's see.... Apache is a fairly unique web server. The only thing that really compares is IIS, which is still entirely different except for the fact that they both talk HTTP. Apache has been ported, but it's better with Linux.
Firefox. Pop-up-blocking -- never done by MS, only by third-parties. Tabbed browsing -- I'm not sure if Mozilla invented this, but MS certainly didn't. Firefox is ported to Windows, but I like it better with Linux.
Also, Windows on Dos vs. X Windows on Linux suggests that you REALLY haven't dug under the hood a lot. I can actually do 90% of the things I need to do on this computer without a single instance of X running. I choose not to, because I like some of the graphical programs, but it's a hell of a lot different than "rebooting to DOS" on a Win98 box. For one, I can get back into X in less than 10 seconds; I'm lucky to get back into Win98 in less than 10 minutes.
Now, the kicker -- something Linux has, that's only been weakly imitated on other platforms and not at all widely used anywhere but Linux: virtual desktops/workspaces. Windows people buy multiple monitors; Linux people hit ctrl+alt+rightarrow. AFAIK, Nvidia implements this fairly weakly, and there's some strange-looking implementation on a Mac.
Oh, and let's not forget the nice little tweaks like middle-click to paste the hilight. Windows' copy-and-paste is much slower.
These are two things that I absolutely can't live without these days, but even once I got my parents on Linux, they haven't wrapped their minds around the concept -- or else they haven't found a good use for it yet. Not surprisingly, my 14-year-old brother is catching on much faster.
So, Linux is already really cool. For a feature like that to be really cool and also significantly impact market share, you have to already have people dual-booting. What we really need is to make Linux a good enough Windows replacement that one day, Dell will silently replace all copies of XP (or Longhorn, or whatever's next) on their new computers with a copy of Dell Linux, and people will think of it as a simple upgrade -- just like going from 2K to XP.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Know why DOS succeeded, and then Windows? Because it was professional. Professionalism breeds trust. Imagine some pundit trying to sell tax cuts using this guy's writing style. You'd think he was a nut who wasn't prepared to sell his ideas.
And that my friends, as much as I like open source software, is the story of why open source software gets beaten by Microsoft and Apple -- they're great at ideas in places where Microsoft is blindsided, but have no clue how to present themselves to the mass market.
There's a reason why icons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are icons -- they've honed their craft and are master salesmen. Open source makes no effort to sell themselves like established companies.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
The problem with your plan is that is sounds fairly Anti-US, and as you give it, it comes from a US company. Pitching Linux soley as a way to "reduce dependency on the US" is selling it short.
I understand that many non US citizens have a great deal of anger or frustration over Microsoft and other US companies, but a sales pitch that is anti-US isn't going to gain the trust or participation of regular Joes here in the US. While Linux doesn't NEED the participation of American's to be successful (look at how many contributors are not American, most), it certainly is helpful. Even Linus lives here now, after all.
There are plenty of Americans like myself that are fed up with Microsoft's licensing plans and predatory methods. I would think you are better off by devising a plan that includes us, rather than isolates us by simply selling Linux as a way to get away from those bad old American companies.
Your suggestions is exactly what MS is hoping for: Pitching Linux not as a superior product at a better price, but as a knee jerk reaction to frustration about the US.
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The success of the Microsoft Operating Systems really didn't have much to do with their quality or power. As I recall PC-DOS didn't even have nested directories. It wasn't just marketing either -- Microsoft marketed the hell out of "Bob" and "OS/2 Warp", but those Operating Systems were not successes. In those early days of PCs, what sold PCs and with them MS-DOS, were the applications: WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, and DBASE. What the Linux folks should learn is one simple lesson: Most people couldn't care less about the operating system, they just want to run applications that do what they want to do. An operating system should strive to be "invisible". The most disconcerting thing that people used to MS-DOS found when they wanted to try Linux was that the OS was too "visible". "What do you mean I have to mount my disks before I can use them!!? -- I don't have to do that in Windows or DOS." The best lesson that Linux can learn from the Microsoft crowd is "don't assume that the user knows anythhing about computing". When I say I think I'll use the MAC OS because it has a UNIX kernel, my friends don't know what I'm talking about. But if tell some musicians I'm switching to the MAC because of the Music Studio Software, they relate to me immediately. I can be showing of all the neat features of Fedora to my friends, but all they care about is the applications. I don't try anymore to sell "Linux" -- I sell Firefox, Open Office, Evolution etc... To become the munber one Operating System, Linux needs better applications and an Operating System that gets out of the way of the applications. I think Microsoft actually turns a lot of people off with always having a new Operating System to upgrade to. People who have the applications they use running on Windows 2000, Windows 98 or Windows 95(!!?), don't really care about the operating system.
I know people will bring up the issues of security , scalability, etc... but most computer users don't care. They don't care what encryption you're using, just stop viruses from getting on their computers! So that's the key: mold the operating system so that the user doesn't even know it's there and provide some new essential applications that don't run on Windows. There really haven't been any real breakthrough applications on ANY platform in the last decade. Programmers are still creating Word Processors, Databases and Spreadsheets... The OS that supports the next breakthrough App will be able to "catch" Microsoft.