Comment Computing History (Score 2, Insightful) 1348
Compare the size of the market to the size of the market for various other systems. There were 17 million Commodore 64 machines sold. I suspect there are easily this many people with open source desktops in the world; there are around 10 million users of Ubuntu alone. Does the author mean to say that the Commodore 64 was unsuccessful, was itself dead on the desktop, for having a mere 17 million users? It seems unlikely.
Being the sole desktop option is a hazardous place to be. If you believe in capitalism, you should prefer a mix, you should prefer that users (at some level, potentially corporate) decide which system to use.
I use GNU/Linux: Ubuntu on the desktop, Debian on servers and sufficiently high-end embedded systems. That's not about to change. I'm glad others are concerned about converting people, but only so far as it causes them to make better the software I use.