The Future of Linux

Linux will forever be relegated to the domain of hobbyists and contrarians and will never achieve mainstream status. Not only is it based on technology that is over twenty years old, the proponents are dumb.

To write open-source graphics drivers without help from Nvidia or ATI is tough. Efforts to reverse-engineer open-source equivalents often are months behind and produce only 'rudimentary' drivers, said Michael Larabel, founder of a high-end Linux hardware site Phoronix ... Torvalds has argued that some proprietary modules should be permissible because they're not derived from the Linux kernel, but were originally designed to work with other operating systems.' The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.

Computer users, generally, could care less about Open Source Purity. They want a product that works. Not only works, but works well, works easily and works intuitively. As long as the Linux community is going to get into pissing matches about what is and what is not appropriate for "their" OS the world is going to pass them by.

Companies (and countries) will toy with the OS because they think Microsoft is evil, but as they experience delays in getting features that they want I think they will abandon the experiment.

I'm hopeful that Apple will wise up to what is holding it back (proprietary hardware) and starts to challenge Microsoft for space on the desktop, but Linux is hopeless.