Monday, December 22, 2008

Advancing the Free software movement

A few years ago, I thought the efforts regarding getting Linux to run really well on the desktop were not particularly interesting. I was wrong. It turned out a butterfly effect stemming from the OLPC and the MacBook Air (the former marginally related to Linux for everyday people, the latter completely unrelated) lead to the Asus Eee PC and netbooks all over, requiring an OS which was lightweight and useful, namely not Windows Vista. And thus Linux was brought to the mainstream, and with it (hopefully) the world-changing philosophy of the Free software movement. It turned out the key was not keeping-up-with-the-Joneses Mac Aqua or Windows Aero but something with low memory and CPU footprint.

I applaud everyone who called it right.

Inspiration: this article Windows 7: The Linux killer, by Preston Gralla

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