Ding dong! The Witch is dead. Which old witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
By the time you read this, you’ll likely know that the greatest threat to Linux and open source in its entire history has been vanquished. The Wicked Witch is dead. The dragon has been slain. The Army of Undead has been vanquished. Godzilla has been pushed back into the sea. Enough monster metaphors? Yeah, I think so.
But while the good guys prevailed in this battle, the war is far from over and we’ve been distracted nonetheless. Through fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) the Wicked Witch and her evil minions set us back about three years and surely slowed enterprise adoption of open source.
In the meantime, instead of standardization, we managed to fracture the landscape even more. There is still too much variance between the popular distributions, and despite the best efforts of projects like Portland (http://portland.freedesktop.org) and the Linux Standard Base (http://www.linuxbase.org), we have no unified API between the GNOME and KDE desktops, and lack a common infrastructure to enable cross-distribution application development, respectively.
Sure, we’ve got universal support for stuff like DBUS for interprocess communication (IPC), but have we seen the tangible benefits of it yet? And in the long run, is it really a good idea to devote energy to two different desktop platforms when the effort could otherwise be amassed into one really good one?
Sure, in the last three years, some…
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