[Gllug] Re: Open Source Lobbying

[Christopher Currie]

On Sunday 15 October 2006 11:16, Richard Turner <richard at zygous.co.uk> wrote:

> I can foresee some of my family being quite happy to switch to Linux if
> it means they get good support from me once again - I used to be able to
> help them with Windows-related problems but these days I've so little
> experience of Windows that I can't!

Sorry to pick out just one message among the optimistic buzzes. My view is 
that FOSS for home users is about to start to decline, and could be dead in 
five years, because people want to be able to use Wifi connections at home 
and while travelling, in hotels, caffs etc. That means Windows XP, for all 
practical purposes.

The situation is moving back into what it was when 56KB dialup was the norm 
and PCs came with a Winmodem installed: the ordinary home user couldn't even 
*try* Linux, because you couldn't get onto the internet with it without 
buying an external modem. 

Wired broadband gives FOSS a big advantage over Windows, for reasons some 
people have rehearsed in this discussion. 

Wireless broadband disadvantages it again.

I know SuSe Linux is not the only fish in the sea, but the number of wireless 
cards that work with 10.1 is actually far *lower* than those that worked with  
immediately preceding versions. And even those won't work without a lot of 
effort from the user in investigating, downloading, compiling,  installing, 
and testing drivers and other software, much of it not available from SuSE. 

If laptops come with wifi cards already installed that won't work with Linux, 
that is a big disincentive to their owners switching to it.

The community round PC-BSD, which IMHO is quite impressively friendly to the 
naive user (easy interface, easy to install, easy to add applications and 
ugprade software) is talking about another year before wifi is reliable. That 
delay will sink it.

If Vista gets off the ground and onto the next generation of hardware before 
FOSS has solved the wifi problem to some significant extent (i.e. after 
you've done a compatibility check on the Web, you can go into a shop and buy 
a card  that will work with your distro out-of-the-box), then M$ will corner 
the market again, despite its new anti-PC-owner features. 

Conversely, if one or more Linux distros can solve that problem without 
dropping other good features, they will clean up.

Christopher Currie
ccurrie at usa.net
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