World Domination 201

[mdlbear]

Good article by Eric Raymond and Rob Landley about why 2008 is a hard limit by which the dominant OS for the next 30-50 years will be chosen, and what Linux has to do to be the one.

The industry-wide switch to 64-bit hardware is opening a critical transition window during which the new dominant operating system will be determined. This window will close at the end of 2008, a hard deadline. The last such transition completed in 1990, the next one cannot be expected before 2050.

The three contenders for the new 64-bit standard are Windows-64, MacOS X, and Linux. The winner will be determined by desktop market share, the bulk of which consists of non-technical end users.

This paper tries to answer a number of questions: Why is 2008 is a hard deadline? What is the current state of the three major contenders trying to become the new 64-bit standard? What are the major blocking issues to to each platform's desktop acceptance? What specific strategies and tactics can Linux use to cope with its most pressing problems? We close with a sober consideration of the costs of failure.

(From slashdot.)

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

This goes along with what I reflected on earlier: Apple stands to clean up big here, if they can keep from shooting themselves in the foot.

I can think of much, much worse end-scenarios, really.

[mdlbear]

They might, but I think it's unlikely. They have nearly as much DRM encumbrance as Microsoft, and the additional baggage of being primarily a hardware company. They'd clean up even bigger if they ported their UI to Linux, but they won't.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Maybe the platform is Google and an extended browser? I can't see any reason that wouldn't work, and lots of reasons why it could

[mdlbear]

Not really the subject at hand. The browser has to run on something, and there are plenty of tasks for which a client-server architecture is simply unsuitable. And a smaller "Moore's Law" exponent means that network bandwidth is falling further and further behind local storage and local CPU power. One way or another the transition will happen.

Goobuntu

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Users of large multi-processor networks are going to be the hardware drivers, and those users are Google, major research institutions, and the entertainment industry. I think, really, that Google is the only plausible candidate; they're the only ones with the interest in offering general-purpose computing services to end users. The research institutions don't have an interest in providing end-user applications, and the entertainment industry is only interested in offering closed special-purpose systems to end users. Google already has an internal distribution of Linux which it claims not to plan to release, "Goobuntu". But Google doesn't need a full OS to be the next platform; it needs a Linux kernel, a few server apps, a version of Firefox, and a good VM with JIT compilation; given Google's Sun connections that would probably be a Java VM.

All hail the no-so-evil empire!

Re: Goobuntu

[mdlbear]

So, there are maybe 1,000,000 servers, 100,000,000 general-purpose home computers, and a couple of billion cell phones, each of which has more compute power than you had on your desk ten years ago.

It's the 100M home computers we're fighting over -- Linux has already won in servers, and it's catching up fast on cell phones. Home computers are not going to go away, so if we can educate users soon enough about how M$, Apple, and the entertainment industry are trying to lock them all down, Linux can win.