[TriLUG] Whither Linux?

[Kevin - The Alchemist - Sonney]

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 23:40, Thomas Beckett wrote:
> - Linus Torvalds dies or is incapacitated.

This is when Alan Cox and the rest of the "secondary" maintainers come
into play. It's already assumed that Alan will take over for Linux some
day, and there are at least two others who could take Alan's place
should he and Linus both drop off the face of the earth at the same
time.

Ever see the Happy Days Episode where the guy was trying to run off
Fonzie? 

> - LinuXP with proprietary Microsoft extensions (a direct challenge to the GPL)

It could happen, but M$ would have to deal with the GPL, and a lot of
software legal people won't touch that with a 10 foot pole. 

> - some controversy results in multiple forkings and 3+ significantly 
> different distros

Slackware, Debian, SuSE, and RedHat are four significantly different
distros. There ahve been three or four debian forks, at least two Red
Hat forks (VA Linux and Mandrake Linux), multiple Slackware forks, and
lots of new distros not related to these over the past few years. it's a
non-issue.

> - Microsoft falters in the consumer market, Apple and OSX regain 
> significant market share

Not unless Apple ports the non-open parts of OSX to x86. That has always
been Apple's weak point - their primary profit generator is hardware
sales. And no matter how good the OS, if it doesn't run on the x86
platform, it will be years before it can replace the M$ monopoly.

> - Microsoft falters in the server market, Sun also rises

Sun is starting to embrace Open Source (and, Linux if you listen to the
press releases). 

> - Significant increase in pervasive computing and embedded devices

This is already happening. The difficulty is in the quality of handheld
OSes. CE/PocketPCs have a very robust, strong interface. programmers
love them. And for embeded devices and pervasive computing, the builders
of such devices will use whatever easiest and fastest to deploy on -
cost isn't a factor yet. However, with the arrival of Linux on the
Playstation 2, I think all that may change. And when someone pots it to
XBox (and you know they will), then the battle will really begin. 

-- 
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--      Kevin "The Alchemist" Sonney      --
--  ICQ: 4855069            AIM: ksonney  --
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