“This is not about Open Source. The Open Source movement has
taken a once-ridiculed development model and hammered it into a
commercially viable bandwagon that the entire industry is just now
scrambling to get onto. Open Source is to be praised for the
control and flexibility it has brought to programmers and users
alike. This is not about Open Source – it’s about Linux. I make
this distinction now because, while at the moment they are seen as
something of a package deal, one is a revolution and the other is
nothing more than a twinkling fad in the eyes of the computer
industry.”
“The Linux community has done what only a handful of other
organizations can lay claim to. It has posed a genuine threat to
Microsoft’s near monopoly over the desktop market. And those other
organizations, like IBM, Apple and Netscape? They had hundreds of
millions of dollars at their disposal and they still failed. Well,
it looks like the Linux community may just succeed, and for good
reason too – they have more developers and testers than any single
platform has ever had behind it. And more importantly, those
developers and testers enjoy what they do. They enjoy what they do
to such an extent that most of them are doing it for free.
Microsoft cannot, and has never been able to, say that about its
Windows platform.”
“To these millions of developers, testers, and users, Linux is
far more than just a simple operating system. It’s a way of life.
It’s a religion. It ‘s a holy crusade against the enemy in Redmond.
However, on top of all that, and even underneath it, the people who
use Linux do so because it’s theirs…”