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The Glass Cathedral (partie II)

More money and power is at stake here than at any other moment 
in history and it's no use to expect the game will be played 
fairly: any kind of manipulation is possible. Never-ending inquests 
could be undertaken (1) to determine who's THE vilain and who's 
just a simpleton in this silly game. It would be a terrible loss 
of time.

(1)For instance, how is it that AOL, who got along so well with 
M$, finally bought Netscape?

The only thing that matters is the users base. People must feel 
that Linux is not a geeks' toy, that they too can apprehend and 
comprehend it. Pretending to turn the young generation into a 
bunch of Linux geeks is talking nonsense: even if it was possible, 
it would happen way too late.

Measures must be taken immediately to provide well-organised 
information to people who want to get a basic knowledge of 
their system, people who don't intend to become top-flight 
programmers but don't want to get stuck in front a user 
interface when the first problem arises(1). Otherwise, the 
Glass Cathedral will shatter.

(1) See: "AutoInstall is for experts, not beginners!!!"  
on comp.os.linux.misc, for a possible way to achieve this goal. 

Here's my previous posting. Figure out which hoax is the most 
extravagant : )

---------

Linux: 750 million users by 2004?.


"I Want to Live in a World Where Software Doesn't Stink" 

In a Q&A, Linux evangelist Eric Raymond talks about unseating 
Microsoft as the OS of choice. (Businessweek)

(...)

Q: Five years from now, how many people will be using Linux?

A: If we continue to grow our user rate at the level we've been 
doing now, [Raymond writes an arithmetic formula to determine 
this] we'd get six doubling periods, which means just shy of a 
billion people, 860 million in fact. I'm not expecting it to be 
quite that high because trends like this tend to show logistic 
growth rather than exponential, and it's not clear what the 
threshold is. I'd say somewhere near 750 million would be a good 
conservative estimate. 

(I made up the following paragraph.)

Q: A conservative estimate? Isn't Microsoft still thriving on 
selling software? How can Linux survive giving away its own?

Something must be made clear here. Microsoft is selling software, 
we're selling service. Let me give you an exemple. While working 
at the prompt, whereas Windows asks before overwriting a file, 
Linux just sends it  to limbo. Though nowadays people rarely 
work at the prompt, on some occasions, they have to. After 
loosing a few files this way, they call support. We provide a 
little shell script and they're back to heaven. Expect to see 
Linux prices skyrocketing in the next few years.

(...)

Well, who am I to contradict such an "evangelist"? But I'd lay a 
bet: if there ever is 750 million Linux users in 5 years from now, 
90% of them will still be booting Windows by default. Lilo's 
end isn't near.

Do read the whole story:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr1999/nf90427c.htm

GP