Is a Linux Civil War in the Making?
A good op-ed from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:
I see the current uproar between those who partner with Microsoft–Novell, Linspire and Xandros–and those that swear off Microsoft partnerships—Ubuntu and Mandriva—as being just another variation on the theme of open-source pragmatism versus free software idealism.
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Differences and all, though, the Linux companies still have more in common with each other than they do with Microsoft no matter who partners with the Windows giant or who doesn’t. One way or the other, they’re all out to carve out their own chunk from Microsoft’s territory.
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Sure, Microsoft loves to see the Linux companies fighting with each other. Microsoft hopes that this will lead to a repeat of the Unix wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which made sure that the Unix businesses never mounted a successful challenge to Microsoft’s desktop operating system business and eventually lost the x86 server market to Microsoft’s own NT, which was followed by Windows 2000 and Server 2003.
Linux isn’t Unix though.
Bottom line — there’s no civil war, just healthy disagreement among companies committed to open source. Read the whole thing.
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