Bashing Microsoft is Like Kicking a Puppy?

It’s not too often that a headline manages to give me a minor case of whiplash, but one that compares Microsoft-bashing to kicking a puppy… well, that’s right up there as one of the best. According to Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin, that’s not just a sensationalist headline, but it’s how he feels about the Linux ecosystem, and he makes a couple of good points to back up his feelings.

Jim isn’t ignorant of the fact that desktop Linux isn’t quite there yet, but he is happy to proclaim that in the server realm, Linux is used on over 70% of machines world-wide. It powers major businesses like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Then of course Linux is also making a splash in consumer devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and so forth. With Google’s Android platform rapidly growing in popularity, and Microsoft struggling to impress with Windows Phone 7, Linux stands to gain some massive marketshare going forward.

As a Linux fan, I love reading articles like this because for one, the facts are true, and two, it gives me hope that just one day, I won’t be one of those people in the minority who use it on the desktop. Jim goes on to explain in the simplest of ways why Linux hasn’t exactly taken off on the desktop, and I couldn’t agree more, “There was this monopolist who just kept everybody else out of the marketplace.”

I always found it a little bizarre that the EU attacked Microsoft for something as foolish as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, when the truth of the matter is, it’s technologies like DirectX that are keeping a huge number of people away from Linux, and not to mention OS X as well. Though, if you were Microsoft, would you put DirectX on non-Windows platforms? I don’t think so.

Despite Zemlin’s sunny outlook, he notes there are still challenges. Patent lawsuits and legal uncertainty might prevent some people from adopting open source, even though these problems aren’t unique to open source, Zemlin said. “We have to educate producers of products how to comply with open source licenses in a low-cost and efficient way. That’s a challenge,” he said.