“I believe that looking at the “Cold War” between GNU/Linux and
Microsoft as a war between fundamentalism and spirituality may shed
some light on why open source will eventually dominate the software
world, not by killing closed source, but by forcing it to
open.”
“Microsoft has been and continues to fight for its survival with
FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). It also uses power and control
to force compliance. It is a top-down organization, struggling to
control and monopolize the avenues of information transfer. Its top
down model and insistence maintaining itself as the one and only
way, is easily compared to fundamentalism. And what do
fundamentalists stoop to when challenged by superior knowledge,
technique or insight? You guessed it, FUD.”
“GNU/Linux and its open source model is an example of the
evolutionary process rearing its head in the world of
software. Where many new and exciting software models have
failed, GNU/Linux is succeeding. Just as organismic evolution
produces many false starts which die out, so the software world is
littered with alternative operating systems which have come, shown
brightly and died.”