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Quoting Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxx>:
Recently I started a thread about spreading the Linux gospel, which provoked a lot of interest. I have been thinking about all that and my suggested reasons for the slow uptake and lack of interest there seems to be about Linux etc. Plus, of course, all the comments. I have now realised that there is probably one major reason for the problems we have in getting more people to try it. It is simply this, so many people have never heard of it. I am still taking any opportunity to talk about Linux and too many times the other person just doesn't know that such a thing exists. When I try to explain they are often very interested and say things like 'I wish I had known about that before'. Too many think that computers equals Windows, full stop. Thoughts anyone? Neil
I'm not sure what this has got to do with 'What is Open Source?'.I think part of the problem is marketing. Microsoft are a big organisation who have been around for years, over the years they have gained more and more market share either through buying up other software (such as DOS), allegedly copying other products (Windows), modifying Windows to not work with competitiors products (DR DOS with Windows [2], WordPerfect [3]) or generally through a large amount of business customers choosing IBM Compatible PCs and then that filtering through to home users who were upgrading from previous machines or maybe buying their first computer.
I dare say many people (anyone not in the IT, construction, research, medical or scientific industries at least) have heard of Sun, SGI, Cray etc.
Luckily more and more people are starting to learn about Free and Open Source software, for instance applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice. It probably isn't much interest to them unless they are technically minded that many of the worlds web servers run Apache and MySQL, they're probably more interested in what is running on them (just recently, Facebook became an Apache Software Foundation sponsor for $40,000 [5], technically peanuts compared to what Facebook probably earn from advertising).
Things are getting better, Linux desktops are getting easier to use and it gets more coverage in the mainstream computer magazines, so as people try it they start to tell other people about it (hopefully good things), but for some people, they don't care what their computer runs, as long as they can do what they want (browse the web, check their e-mail etc).
Rob [1] http://www.willyhoops.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm [2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ [3] http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1274 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft[5] http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/facebook-becomes-apache-software-foundation-sponsor.ars
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