I know I said that part 3 would be the end, but, as you can see, it was not. A lot of people made a lot of good comments (and a lot of spam, which has been deleted) on the three previous parts so I decided to quote some of those so people can see them/I can respond to them. With good comments, though, come long comments, so in most cases I only quoted a piece of the comment.

Paul Zarucki said:
“Another class of home users, and possibly some small businesses, creative professionals, etc., might be those that depend on a friendly neighbourhood “geek” for their tech support. Geeks like me, who have gone wholeheartedly over to FLOSS, have lost all interest in supporting Windows and don’t want to waste time learning how to fix problems that people have with it.”

True. I have nothing to add. This is somewhat similar to a word-of-mouth type of spreading, which I believe may be the main way Linux will spread.

In a long comment, Roger made a number of good points. Here are two of them:
“For me, Linux needs to first attract the following groups:
…
- Mobile devices (phones, PDAs, UMPC, …)
Windows is too heavy for these. Windows mobile is not good.”

Linux has an additional advantage here, as Roger pointed out. I don’t pay much attention to smartphones/cellphones, but I have heard a lot of about how bad Windows Mobile is, both from tech news sites and from smartphone users.

“There has also to be room for commercial applications in Linux, any free application is going to be a professional replacement for autocad or photoshop.”

I think you meant to say “any free application is not going to be a professional replacement for autocad or photoshop,” but, either way, I agree that there has some commercial applications on Linux, even if they are just to help people get used to the way open-source works.

Robert Pogson said:
“Education is also another growth area. Always under-funded, cost is a huge factor.”

Thanks to this comment, I changed one of the groups of people to schools. I can’t believe I forgot schools, but they are certainly a very important market for Linux. See part 3.

Thanks for all the great comments! Keep them coming!

If you feel I misunderstood your comment or you don’t want your comment quoted, feel free to e-mail me (right side or very bottom of the page) or leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Comments, Future of Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.