[ale] The future of Windows and Linux (was M$ refund)

[Robert Reese~]

> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 09:10, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com>
> wrote:


>> Agreements that say what a vendor can sell when NOT selling your
>> product sure sound anti-competitive (monopolistic) to me.
>
> Possibly, but why did the vendor sign the contract with the product
> producer (also a vendor)?   What you've hit on is the greed of the
> middle man. ;-)

Smaller companies may not have a choice.  But larger companies do that as a 
negotiation tactic as was releasing systems with Linux on them.

Of course, this explains why a laptop with Ubuntu costs the same or more than 
one with Windows (the last time I checked, anyway).


By the way,  keep an eye out for Windows 7.  It's obviously patterned after 
Linux with a modular design, and there's some sort of task bar that is creating 
a buzz... and to me it sort of looks like the menu on an old iMac or on E17, as 
well as similar to a Gnome bar.

In short, it appears to be getting very close to Linux.  And you know what that 
means... after it becomes mainstream and people are comfortable with it, the 
learning curve for the average user to transition to Linux will be tolerable, 
and to many will be comfortable.  Further, by then the open-source share of 
critical software such OpenOffice.org will have reached a point where the 
average user will be comfortable and familiar with it.  Lastly, the portable 
storage devices, most likely 2.5" (or smaller!) SSD will allow for the entire OS 
to fit in  your pocket.  Simply walk up to any PC or station that allows for 
booting to an external port such as USB or eSATA, plug your (enter witty acronym 
here) into the port and fire up the machine.  Actually, by that time you won't 
even need to boot thanks to hypervisors providing a generic, standards-based VM 
"hardware" under which you'll run your own hypervisor.

Will you be ready?

Cheers,
Robert~