What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

" "The fate of the Linux desktop is tightly coupled" to the willingness of the Linux community to make efforts to accommodate commercial (and presumably closed-source) software vendors. This amounts to a thinly-veiled threat. "Unless you volunteers do what I say, I won't be able to make money off you!" Where's our motivation? "

I belive it hasen't anything to do with 'commercial vs free ', but with stable vs development. This 'commercial vs free' is just a smoke screen, it isn't real and it's hipocrytical at many points.

Can't i sell something that is completely GPLed ?... the problem is fragmentation due to differentiation by *features* instead of services.

Linux isn't a *platform* yet. Its a collection of tools and frameworks, whose major commercial parts are working very hard to keep it as a *constant flux* development paradigma, so they can extract value by *feature differentiation* because they have resources(lab and programmers) that much smaller competitors dont have.

So a rock solide *stable platform*, in the sense off lasting long time unchanged and apart of the development cicles and trees, is something we wont see in the next times, because the installed commercial partys in Linux world are affraid of losing control. LSB and other efforts are still going at a snail speed for a while. That in a sense isn't much different from Microsoft, bypassing the all for users nature of GPL to have an all for business nature like Microsoft.

Linux/OSS still as to fullfill many promessed achievements, pitty the barriers to enter are so big, specialy for small contenders like those in the article.

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