Meaning at Robert Pogson

“the days of Linux being the mascot of the trench coat mafia are long gone. Linux has grown up and is on its way to becoming the darling of the business world. Many out there deny that statement; but if you dig in deep enough, you find that most of the larger enterprise-level companies already rely upon Linux. It’s various governments around the world, Google, Facebook, Novell, IBM, Panasonic, Virgin America, Cisco, Conoco Phillips, Omaha Steaks, Amazon, Peugeot, Wikipedia, New York Stock Exchange. You cannot deny the collective power of that list – and each of them has grown to depend upon Linux.”via Linux Advocates: Linux: What it means.

Amen. In the 1990s there was scarcely any space on retail shelves for FLOSS. Now it’s everywhere as Android/Linux, Chrome OS, and even GNU/Linux. It has been a long slow road. It has been a lonely road because there are few, if any, GNU/Linux salesmen. Dell, Canonical, IBM and others have changed that. We knew we were winning because the enemy was fighting hard just to maintain share. They lost the battle when retail shelves opened up. They will lose the war when the majority of retail shelves open up. That should happen this year if I can judge by my local Walmart. There the “desktop” models don’t even get out of their boxes and a few notebooks are displaying error messages from that other OS. Meanwhile there is a whole aisle of Android/Linux machines.

What it all means is that M$ could not fool all of the people all of the time. The price the world has paid to feed M$’s greed has been huge but the end is in sight. Within the next few years Free Software may well have a near monopoly on computer OS.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.