Robert Pogson

Dana Blankenhorn knows a thing or two about IT but this is just wrong:
“The chasm is that point in the “s” curve where a product is known and liked by experts or aficionados, poised on the brink of mass market success or failure. Most products fall in. Why do some cross and others don’t? That’s Moore’s study.

Important examples are to be found in the world of open source. Linux crossed the chasm on servers. It failed to do so on desktops. Yet Android, a Google-developed Linux distro, seems fated to succeed.”

He presumes GNU/Linux has failed to cross some imaginary barrier when that is not the case. GNU/Linux on the desktop has long ago ceased to be a geek/early-adopter thing. It is being accepted on the mainstream/mom and pop desktop now. That started happening with the netbook. Many millions of netbook users are not geeks and don’t know an OS from an application. They know GNU/Linux works and love it. OEMs have passed up that opportunity in some ways but consumers have not. They have bought GNU/Linux whenever and wherever it has been offered. The news that Lenovo sold a million Ubuntu boxes last year was a surprise to many. How many geeks are there, 1% of users or maybe a few %? Geeks might buy 3 million PCs a year globally but tens of millions of GNU/Linux boxes are being sold, way more than geeks can absorb.

Further, there is all kinds of evidence that consumption of GNU/Linux is increasing:

• adoption in schools, and governments (not early adopters, for sure)
• huge numbers of mirrors with high volumes needed to ship distros
• Ubuntu breaking even and entering expanding lines of business
• continued growth for RedHat and Suse and it’s not all on the server
• mirror stats showing 150 megabits/s – 450 active requests average e.g. http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/stats

There are hundreds of mirrors for Debian GNU/Linux around the globe. FLOSS mirrors put a major load on the web. One mirror might service hundreds of thousands of clients in a year meaning more than 10 million clients run GNU/Linux. Then there are places that have internal mirrors we do not see.

GNU/Linux crossed the desktop chasm years ago, probably 2007 was the point, when ASUS put it on the eeePC. I think 2009 was the year everyone except Dana Blankenhorn and amicus_curious caught onto the phenomenon.

Oracle and the properties it purchased with SUN Microsystems are evolving. OpenOffice.org is being replaced by LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. No word yet on whether or not Oracle will be participating. They let OpenSolaris wither. They may do the same with OpenOffice.org.

see http://www.documentfoundation.org/

There may be a dull year or two in FLOSS but no dull decades… Growth and change happen.

Try out the fork here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

There are issues as can be expected: en-US only for now etc.

Debian Squeeze has OpenOffice.org3. I doubt there is any way the new fork will be ready or accepted in time for the release.

OpenOffice.org has been the killer app for GNU/Linux in schools. The savings on licences for Office alone can justify migrating to GNU/Linux. As Oracle seem not particularly friendly/responsive to FLOSS, this fork may have been inevitable or just a good thing on its own. This action may briefly distrub development but I see a bright future for the software in GNU/Linux.

UPDATE Here is a comment by Mark Shuttleworth.
“Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation’s stewardship of LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments”

See that and others on the “Supporters List”.