Some days ago it was reported that Microsoft declared it considers Linux on the desktop no longer a threat for its business. Now I usually wouldn’t care that much what Microsoft is saying, but in this case, I think, they’re very right – and thererfore I wonder why this hasn’t raised any discussions in the free software community (at least I haven’t seen one – if it has and I missed it, please provide links in the comments). So I’d like to make a start.
A few years ago, I can remember that I was pretty optimistic about a Linux-based Desktop (and I think many shared my views). It seemed with advantages like being able to provide a large number of high quality applications for free and having proven to be much more resilient against security threats it was just a matter of time. I had the impression that development was often going into the right direction, just to name one example freedesktop.org was just starting to try to unify the different Linux desktop environments and make standards so KDE applications work better under GNOME and vice versa.
Leave a Reply