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Harvard Concludes Linux Will Remain Second Best

watzinaneihm writes "A Harvard Study which uses formal economic modelling to determine "Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?" came to a (not so?) surprising result. Linux is likely to remain second best as long as Microsoft has a first mover advantage."

3 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As long as ... by daniil · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You didn't actually understand a word they said, did you?

    --
    Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
  2. Re:Second Best Where? by tomhudson · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I found something that qualifies as a trojan under linux - beagle. Periodic bouts of 100% cpu usage. Got rid of beagle (which nobody needs - take 15 minutes once in a while to organize your files, people. You might end up actually backing some of them up at the same time :-) and it just hums along.

    slocate and find are "good enough".

  3. Re:problem right now is that linux is unknown. by gregorio · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Then and not until then will my mother think "why do I need this windows for anyway?" and might try linux out on the home computer.
    She will never think that because the "MUST REPLACE WINDOWS NOW" ideology is exclusive to people with emotional attachment to Linux. Normal people don't see the word that way. For them, Microsoft is not the enemy that needs to be removed at any cost.

    Windows is just a product and as long as is makes user's life easier (even if it's only through familiarity) and it's cheap (or free as in "Dell included it in my PC"), it will be used my the masses. It's not like the average user spends his day thinking "man, I need to replace [whatever product], because [whatever company] is really evil and I hate its founder". And even if he did, he would think about companies and products related to his profession or his interests. And computers are not included in that.

    Another thing: Linux fans (as opposed to Linux users) ignore the fact that Linux is not the best operating system in the universe and the first perfect creation of mankind. As much as they think that "MS SUCKZ SUCKZ, DIE BILL GAYTEZZZZ", both Windows and Linux compete in individual features, where one is better than the other, while in other features it's the opposite.

    IMHO, Windows is still the better choice for a lot of people. A proof of that we have dozens of bootable CDs created so users can use specific applications, like MythTV, without spending hours configuring the obvious and making application configurations work with daemon configurations, something that needs to be resolved automatically between both softwares, and not manually.