Robert Pogson

I was reading an interview with Jeff Zemlin of The Linux Foundation that ended with this:
“Every failure of Linux on the desktop each year has made Linux on the desktop better. If you use a modern linux desktop, it’s pretty good. and that’s the result of a lot of risk-taking over a lot of time.”

My response is “What Failure?” GNU/Linux has been a success on the desktop with every distro I have tested since 2000: Caldera eDesktop, Mandrake, Slackware, K12LTSP, Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux and a few others I forget (failure of my memory, not the distros). Government, education, business, individuals, OEMs all use it successfully. Consider what some might call a failure on the desktop, Dell and Ubuntu. Just because Dell.com looks like a GNU/Linux desert means nothing. That’s in the home country of M$, the Great Satan of operating systems. Dell is selling GNU/Linux like hotcakes in China. It’s a wild success. They have 220 bricks-and-mortar stores pushing the product.

“millions of Dell’s products with the Ubuntu operating system will be sold every year, covering laptops, desktops, and servers.” see China Tech News.

Success of GNU/Linux is not limited to China, nor to commercial ventures. Many governments and educational organizations are adopting GNU/Linux on the desktop.

If Zemlin believes GNU/Linux has failed on the desktop, perhaps he should do something about promoting it instead of pronouncing “failure”. If he were looking for success rather than failure, perhaps he would have noticed the largest deployment ever, 500K in Brazilian schools. That’s from his own website, for Pity’s sake. Clearly, GNU/Linux is succeeding without much help from Zemlin.

Bribe – A price, reward, gift, or favor bestowed or promised with a view to prevent the judgment or corrupt the conduct of a judge, witness, voter, or other person in a position of trust.
[1913 Webster]

M$’s scheme to mess with competition in 2012? If sellers persuade consumers in their best judgment that Android/Linux smartphones are the best choice, M$ will bribe them $10-$15 a copy to persuade consumers that smartphones running “phoney 7″ are the best choice. M$ plans to spend hundreds of millions for these bribes in 2012. I don’t know what legal fiction this scheme will cloak itself in but if you run a retail business would you want a third party bribing your employees? I suspect M$ will have to sign up retail businesses to subscribe to this mode of compensating salespeople. M$ agreed not to do exclusive dealing but now the creative department at M$ is trying “persuasive dealing” instead, anything to mess with competition.

BTW, a lot of consumers consider themselves, rightly, technologically impaired and do trust what salespeople tell them about tech products.

see Business Insider – Microsoft Will Pay AT&T Staff Who Recommend Windows Phones Over iPhone And Android