“Linux and the open source movement won’t succeed in breaking
Microsoft’s hold on the operating system market, said Judge Jackson
in his findings of fact last Friday. Jackson accepts that Linux has
been growing in popularity, but rejects the ‘resistance is futile,
victory is inevitable’ viewpoint common in the Linux
community.”
“Linux partisans can view this as a mix of good news and bad
news. Jackson’s conclusion that Linux, Be, network computers and
other alternative operating systems can’t shift Microsoft unaided
means that he’s coming down on the side of Microsoft being a
monopoly with no effective competition. By saying this he’s clearly
rejecting the case Microsoft somewhat hurriedly made for Linux
being a serious competitor. The Microsoft pitch is that the sudden
rise of Linux just goes to show that things move very fast in the
IT business, that competition can come out of nowhere, and that
Microsoft therefore isn’t a monopoly really.”
“If on the other hand Jackson had agreed with the people who
think Linux will triumph in relatively short order under its own
steam, he’d at least to an extent have been agreeing with
Microsoft. Confusingly, that also means that that Linux
partisans who take this view are agreeing with Microsoft too,
although Microsoft obviously only wants Linux to look a bit like
serious competition, rather than inevitable nemesis.”