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I hope that my friends who are reading this will one day experience the awe of using 100% freely available, and high quality, software. This is one of the only few cases in history in which, 'for the people, by the people,' is not mere propaganda.
Today Bluecurve, Tomorrow the World
I'm rather suprised at the lack of coverage regarding the Bluecurve interface introduced in Red Hat 8.0. It really justifies increasing the major version number. You have to see it to believe it. Kudos to Red Hat. Free software, is now one step closer to world domination, and even perhaps scantily clad women in bikinis, if Linus has his way.
I've heard from friends that they have used Gnome, what Bluecurve is based on, at work on commercial UNIX's. Open Motif is free on Freenix systems.
Distributions such as Knoppix allow a person to see if Linux is compatible with his system without ever accessing the hard drive. Knoppix includes nearly 2GB's of free software runnable directly from the CD. It makes running Linux as easy as putting in a CD and pressing the enter key once.
IBM has validated Linux. Seeing Linux advertised on TV is truly an amazing experience for this user. It's almost a reason to start watching TV [regularly] again.
Linux is ahead of the Mac OS in the number of desktop installations. Additionally all major distributions are Linux Standards Base compliant, which will facilitate the porting of, and consequently increase the availability of, 3rd party commercial applications.
VA Linux provides SourceForge, perhaps one of the most significant contributions to Free Software in history.
Mac OS X is a BSD-based system, and is truly an operating system for the masses. FreeBSD 5.0 including code from BSD/OS and sporting numerous improvements is close to RELEASE. Over 7,500 ports and recent official Nvidia support make it as viable as any Linux distribution on the desktop.
Mozilla is a high-quality, standards compliant, web browser that will only continue to become more usable and stable. It's open source nature allows it to be ported to any platform. And no one imagined Konqueror to be the browser it is today. It's quite a feeling to have so many so many browsers natively available, including the commercial Opera, regardless of the operating system I'm using.
OpenOffice is an open source office suite, and so is the increasingly used KOffice. Applications such as AbiWord, Gnumeric, GnuCash, GIMP, Evolution, etc. are making Linux more usable on the desktop.
The real question is, how far will free software go in the next few years? I can't even begin to imagine. But I know current software will only become more and more mature. That will probably mean more features, but with far more stability than anything from Microsoft. The Source is Out There, folks, and that makes a world of difference.
Note: However, while DVD and MP3 support are available on Freenix systems, today it is 'a question' or, perhaps more appropriately, 'endangered.' MP3 and DVD support out-of-the-box for Linux distributions may be as important if not more important than games support. Hopefully good will triumph over evil, eventually.
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