The Economist Predicts an Open Future
Happy New Year!
After what has undoubtedly been the best year ever for Open Source (See Matt Assay’s roundup of 2007 here and here for more) 2008 has just started and looks set to continue the growth and momentum.
The Economist has predicted Open Source growth, along with advancement in life on the web, and changing-of-the-guard for the proprietary behemoths of yesterday. The author is clearly an Ubuntu fan and extols its virtues at every turn…
Rejoice: the embrace of “openness†by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable.
… No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.
… When firms are used to buying $1,000 office PCs running Vista Business Edition and loading each with a $200 copy of Microsoft Office, the attractions of a sub-$500 computer using a free operating system like Linux and a free productivity suite like OpenOffice suddenly become very compelling.
And that’s not counting the $20,000 or more needed for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint server software. Again, Linux provides such server software for free.
Welcome to 2008 and may your year be an ever opening one.
The Open Sourcerer
(Alan Lord)
Tags: Open Source, Ubuntu
