Robert Pogson

Really, M$’s stats are so low you have to look back at 1997, when M$ was trying to catch Apache, to see their equal. Back then, Apache was on 41% of servers and M$ was on 16% of servers. Now, M$ is on 15.73% of web servers and Apache is on 65%. The highest M$ ever achieved was 38% share in 2007. The lowest Apache has had since 1997 was 41% back in January 1997.

It’s too bad that the world is burdened with M$ for the desktop. The same advantages the world has in using FLOSS on servers could be had on the desktop and notebook. Change is happening but it’s still very slow. We know it’s happening because M$ is advertising “7″ even though it’s choking retail shelves. For better IT, I recommend people try Debian GNU/Linux. It’s smooth and reliable and easy to install.

Ed Bott, M$ apologist, writes, “Leading PC makers confirm: no Windows 8 plot to lock out Linux“.

Of course, the PC makers have no intention of locking out GNU/Linux. They could care less about GNU/Linux. It is M$ that is plotting to lock out GNU/Linux. How? By adding one more river to cross for owners of “personal computers”. How many PC owners actually go in to tweak a BIOS let alone some new technology called UEFI? How many organizations with thousands of PCs are not going to count the minutes required to disable the “feature” if they decide to migrate to GNU/Linux? This move, at the very least, increases the cost of migrating to GNU/Linux. Likely it will require a visit to every machine on the LAN instead of just booting over the network. That is a lot of work. I have been in places big enough I could not find all the PCs.

In the immortal words of Peter Plamondon of M$’s Technological Evangelism:

I paraphrase for the situation: Every PC that is shipped with our booting key is a small victory; every PC that is shipped without is a small defeat. Total victory is the universal adoption of our standards by OEMs, as this is an important step towards victory for M$ itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home running M$’s software.”

Good try, Ed, but I’m not buying it. Building in anything specific to the OS of a monopolist is dangerous. M$ has shown for decades that it doesn’t do anything that doesn’t bolster the monopoly. You should know better.

On the other hand, OEMs don’t really love M$ and I expect most of them will provide some kind of kill switch for the lock-in but it will be more work to migrate more PCs to the light.