Hi everybody,

Things are going well over at 18th Street. I had a chance to meet with my good friend and soon-to-be business partner Steve Williams last night, and ate way too much Italian food. (hmm. pizza :) We're working on that networking site project together and everything is proceeding according to schedule. The public launch will be sometime between mid-December and the 1st of next year, and more details will follow as that gets closer.

Now for some advocacy:

I was reading an article online the other day about the Linux desktop, a big area of interest for me. For those who don't know, there are alternatives to the Microsoft platform (ie. Windows) that are available for free and include all of the software you are ever likely to need. It's true. Click here, here, or here for some of the possibilities.

Anyhow, the article was saying how the Linux desktop needs to innovate rather than simply copy whatever the current market leader (Windows) does. You hear this complaint a lot. Linux is part of a broader "open source" movement, and these projects are often derided for not breaking any new ground relative to commercial, "closed source" projects. Basically, the closed source programs establish a market for a particular type of software or set of functionality, and then the open source folks come in and attempt to commoditize it through copying that functionality. While this pattern is correct, it isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, and a similar thing happens in almost any sphere in life. Once the first insurance agent proved you could get people to give you money upfront for potentially disasterous events that may come along in the future, you better believe that 25 million other folks started lining up around the block looking to "protect" people from all sorts of things.

The problem I see is that like most developers, the author of this article has an "if we build it they will come" mentality. This happens a lot with us programmers, since we always like hot and sexy new technologies that change the world. The thing is that this isn't really true. People don't choose operating systems because they are sexy. Just ask Apple, who have had a consumer coup with their iPods and yet only modest success in getting the Mac accepted as a mainstream platform afterwards.

Instead, the problem with Linux is that not enough people are getting it preinstalled on their computers. There are many reasons for this, but I'll highlight the two I think are the most important.

One, most of the top OEMs (like Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, etc) are scared of Microsoft, and in fact would go out of business if Microsoft got testy and took away their OEM licenses for Windows. OEM licenses let those companies distribute Windows on new PCs for (I've heard) about $90 per copy, versus the $249 or so price it ships for. (The numbers might be wrong, but you get the point) In an age where PCs sell for $500, there isn't a lot of wiggle room to make up a $150 price increase, and vendors with that increase simply wouldn't be able to compete. While it is no doubt illegal for Microsoft to explicitly say "if you ship PCs with Linux, we will yank your OEM license," the implicit threat is enough to keep Linux out of the circulars and catalogs. A vendor could survive without Windows, but they are all profitable businesses right now and it is unlikely that they would leave that for an uncertain future. In the rare cases that top OEMs will give you Linux on a PC, it is very often only on limited hardware choices and at a cost higher than Windows on the same machine. Since you can get Linux for free, there is obviously something else making this so.

Two, Microsoft has done an excellent job in promoting their platform and has created an entire generation of corporate IT folks who can't see any other way of computing, and see any incursion by non-Windows systems as a threat to their job security. This is absolutely killing Linux in the corporate desktop space. Programmers, system administrators, and other IT staff have fairly straightforward career trajectories; most learn some languages and platforms, get some certifications, and work for many happy years with those skills. In such an environment, every IT vendor wants to be "the" platform on which technicians establish their career. Hence all of the vendor certification programs, developer conferences, free software, and other enticements they use to lock in people to their platform. Microsoft is a master at this, and all of these locked in techies do more to perpetuate their dominance than any advertising campaign ever could.

I laud the Linux community and actually use the product myself, but I've become convinced recently that it will never be able to have a significant impact on Microsoft desktop hegemony since it can't provide a real answer to the two problems above. I think the open source community as a whole would be well served to start supporting projects like ReactOS, which is aiming to create a free implementation of Windows built entirely on open source technologies. If that project reaches maturity, OEM vendors can have a retort to any threat Microsoft might make, and Windows platform devotees will still be able to utilize their hard-earned skills at work. Given the reverence the community has for Unix and the Unix way of doing things, though, I'm dismayed at the likelihood of this happening.

We shall see...