I see Zarax and Kazan going back and forth and back and forth. Kaz is generally right, but he's not doing such a great job at the diplomacy.
Look, Linux and other open source projects are free. They don't cost the user anything. What's more, generally, they come with free tech support in the form of mailing lists, message boards etc. There's literally thousands of websites full of howto's and FAQs and Wikis and the like. All it takes is a small amount of effort. Heck, if you're really curious, ask a techie. He or she can probably point you in the right direction. I'll apologize in advance for those of us, who (like me at times) are short tempered and asocial and undiplomatic.
They're also free in that you get the source for any program you use, meaning that you get to do whatever you want with the code and the program, including making it do what you, personally want. Do you have to? No. You can use all that software stock, just the way it is and you won't miss a thing. Zarax is frightened of this idea though. He predicts in the future that Linux will be controlled by corporations and be closed source and we'll be back where we are now.
There's just one problem: The cat is out of the bag. The source code is in the wild. I have all the source for FreeBSD sitting on a CD right here. You know what? Microsoft could snatch up FreeBSD, close the source and declare WindowsBSD to be the new paradigm. What exactly would that mean to me or any other BSD user? Exactly nothing. All we have to do is take the source code we have, and work from that. This is a process called 'forking'. As long as we have the code, no matter what IBM or Redhat or Mandrake or SuSE or Microsoft do, we'll still have our OS. We'll still have the tens of thousands of software programs for our OS. They cannot take it away. They can only fork their own versions. We'll still have ours. We'll still have the real deal.
Someone (Zarax or Kazan) mentioned that some people might not want to share their source code. Guess what: you don't have to if you don't want to. There's always the LGPL, if you feel like you need the GPL or the BSD license. You don't have to give away your source code if you really feel that strongly. Of course, this is highly discouraged because its actually got more disadvantages than advantages. Closed source depends on obscurity for security, for example. You have to hope that, since they can't see your code, no one will be able to exploit its flaws. In the history of software, we've seen that this is a pretty foolish way to handle software. We have but to look at the depth and breadth of Microsoft's security deficits to see that this model is fundamentally broken. On the other hand, we can look to OpenBSD and its history for why Open Source is a good way to go. They've only had ONE remotely exploitable root-level compromise in the entire history of the project--a project that's the better part of ten years old. No other organisation producing an operating system in the history of the Earth has a track record as clean as OpenBSD. Windows, for example, had more security patches issued last year than OpenBSD has had in the history of the project.
People continue to talk about compatibility and applications as if they were still a going concern. The fact of the matter is that they are not. With products such as WineX and WINE, *nix users can run those precious Microsoft Office apps and Unreal Tournament and even Freespace on *nix.
Ease of use: I hate to break it to you, but Windows isn't easy to use. My mother--and most likely yours--couldn't install a program on her own if her life depended on it. Installing the OS? Give it up. These are not metrics for determining the transition. The real metric is how easy the PROGRAMS are to use. I have news for you, *nix people and Windows people: there's no difference between the two platforms except cosmetics. If I were to sit my mother or father or sister down in front of a *nix machine running Mozilla, they'd have no problems getting their email and surfing the web. If I showed them StarOffice, Koffice, or OpenOffice.org, they'd be able to do everything they do in Microsoft Office--and they'd be asking me exactly the same questions they'd ask me if it was a Windows box. The user experience isn't terribly distinct in these environments. If it were, it wouldn't be so easy to make a *nix box masquerade as a Windows box and vice versa.
Oh, and back off the MCSEs, Kaz. I'm one of them. Of course, I earned my MCSE through, oh, you know, six years of administering WindowsNT domains. I didn't go through the happy slappy boot camp certification mills that most of the paper certificates went through.
