<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 5.5.2653.12">
<TITLE>RE: [plug] Linux viability on the desktop</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">The main advantages of moving to linux are immunities to viruses, and the main disadvantages are lack of support for various applications. What you must realise is that these are essentially one and the same. If (or when) the market realizes there's good reason to support a linux environment and produce nice stable applications for users to run, and everyone starts to move across to Linux, you'll also get more people writing viruses specifically for linux. At the moment to only reason both of these things are lacking is because the userbase is lacking.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Sure Linux is far more robust than windows when set up correctly, but if Mr Average off the street sets up a machine and doesn't maintain it, after a couple of months security holes will become visible that can be taken advantage of by anyone who does actually keep up to date with these things. Mr Average might not keep up with it but Mr Virus writer will.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Your trade off for using open source over closed is that having the code available means anyone can find a security hole. The good thing about this is patches become available when they're found by people with ethics, and thus the holes get fixed, the bad thing is when the holes are found and not patched, anyone can find out how to abuse the system. With closed code, it's up to the developpers to patch the code which is both good and bad: if someone manages to find a security flaw in some code and doesn't report it to developpers it'll be left open for a much longer time, on the other hand, without the source code such holes are significantly harder to discover. This is, like it or not, the main reason most organizations will avoid using an open source platform.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Having said that, i am still personally in favour of pushing towards an open source platform for desktop users. It will just mean very smart implementation of the network and individual user's workspaces, and a full time employee to maintain everything.. that means less money going to microsoft, and more going to Linux professionals, which is a Good Thing (tm). The hard thing is trying to convince everyone to go down this path: software developpers (who wont write software unless there's users to sell to), and businesses (who wont use the operating system unless there's software to run on it) have gotten themselves into a viscious circle of reliance on MicroShaft. There are always ways to overcome this though. Things like vmware or wine will let users migrate to Linux and still use Windows programs. The moment you find a piece of open source software that exceeds the features of the Windows based software, make the change, untill all such pieces of software have been migrated, and the need for vmware (and the guest operating system running within it) will disappear.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">(Apologies if this post is all over the place... that's just the way my mind is working right now =P)</FONT>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>