more ramblings about vision and future ;-)

In the comments section on OSnews someone noted how it would be very hard to gain marketshare for FOSS due to the dominance (and use thereof) of Microsoft. I thought my reaction was worth posting as a blog ;-)

Indeed. Uptake of linux will go slow, and not at all if Linux doesn't offer advantages to both developers and users. We need to be clearly better than Microsoft and Apple. We need to out-innovate them and bring the latest technology at the earliest possible moment.

Yet it happens to be that we're particularly good at these things, and as our ecosystem grows, we grow faster and stronger. FOSS development techniques, unlike proprietary development models, scale pretty well.

As more and more companies are joining FOSS one way or another, we will cross some threshold were a FOSS system will have such clear advantages it will be impossible to ignore. Lower costs, better availability and more capabilities; and a more healthy ecosystem with more competition and smaller, more innovative companies.

In the long run, I don't think MS and the other proprietary vendors will be able to stop it - unless, UNLESS they can do so through legal and political barriers. But the tide is turning against them - Europe is slowly getting committed to FOSS, and it is keeping a close eye on abuse of marketpower - which is the only real asset Microsoft has against FOSS.

The above is why I think what is going on with KDE 4 is crucial. I've blogged before about that, and I also talk a lot about these things on forums... One on of these posts, I wrote about Novell and how they are (imho) wasting resources (re)writing stuff for yast in GTK. (probably worth reading before continuing. I didn't want to paste all my posts here...)

And one of the comments was that I was trolling. Now, I agree I wasn't very nice. Saying Gnome release announcements feel like a timemachine from the KDE 3.3 era - a bit harsh, I know. And also of course an exaggeration - there is regularly stuff in there which was not in KDE 5 years ago. Anyway. I did reply on it, but I think Segedunum put it much better:
Ahhhh, the emotive question of open source desktops. You can only go so far before pointing out the truth, and when you do, others are simply not going to like it -).

Aaah well. Time will tell what happens. At least we have big plans.

Another thing, as my previous dwarfhamster died (did I blog about that?) and I went through the mandatory period of mourning, I got a new one. This time not from Animal Protection (or whatever you'd call those guys in english, too lazy to look it up) but from a pet store. I'm not too fond of those, as they generally don't treat animals too well, but OK, it was a gift by a loved one ;-)

So the question to ya'll. How should I name him? Not tux or something silly, nor those horrible names like 'sniffy' or Blacky or whatever painfully cliche names ppl seem to come up with.