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Did Sir Bill of Redman get his tribute? I'm guessing they are pirated copies.
The F as in FREE exists for government large scale efforts that have the resources to do that. But there's almost NO consumer-usable FOSS on the desktop. There's OSS but it's LOW cost not NO cost. Few consumers are going to download and burn an ISO image of Ubuntu or Linspire. Instead they'll buy a boxed CD version. Now MS is not stupid, so they work hard to cut deals in those countries to lower the retail price of their products. Americans are ignorant on this point. The US is almost the only market where MS is totally inflexible on the retail price, and, it's one of the most expensive markets MS sells into. MS retail prices in the US always go UP not down.
So compared to the $40-50 it would cost to get a boxed retail Linux distro of some kind, the price differential for Windows is not the $225 it is here in the US. It's more like $30-50. So for a few dollars more you get a desktop system that's 100% compatible (with itself).
In the US, OSS software has a BETTER chance of success than in other countries. Not because of the price but because of the price differential. Mepis is $17-34 whereas the download versions cost more. Ubuntu charges a nominal fee for CDs/DVDs about $10.
FOSS isn't just Linux- there's a ton of very high quality applications that run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.
And my company (like many, many, small, medium, and large businesses) runs Linux all over the place. File servers, web servers, etc.
And while desktop Linux is still a rare beast (for a variety of reasons), I strongly disagree with your "there's almost NO consumer-usable FOSS on the desktop"
I happen to be running Windows on my laptop (mainly out of laziness), but on this machine, I have, and use regularly:
and that's not exhaustive. Not all of these are of general interest to everyone, but they're tools for doing pretty typical stuff.
Judging the success of free and open source software by only considering the adoption of Linux on the desktop is, simply, not accurate.
There's no point in worrying about FOSS apps on MS operating systems. There's not much cost advantage there and update and patch maintenance is more expensive not less. But in the Linux space there aren't really many consumer-usable FOSS apps either. They're still too hard to install use and manage. This where Mepis and Linspire do a fairly good job. But it's not entirely free. And why not? What's YOUR time worth? Mine is worth more than zero.
Sure in servers it's 6 one half dozen the other. You've already paid some monkeys to wrangle that and the support ratios are approximately the same in either case; say 100:1 or whatever.
"There's no point in worrying about FOSS apps on MS operating systems."
What does that mean?
The commercial equivalents of the FOSS software on my machine costs $1000's of dollars. I downloaded and installed them without so much as whipping out a credit card. And "update and patch maintenance is more expensive not less"? Ha! Firefox has the best auto-update around, and most others are quite good at either auto-updating or letting you know when a new version comes out. I couldn't disagree more with your statements.
As for Linux- you mentioned Ubuntu earlier. I have downloaded and installed Ubuntu on several laptops with very little time invested. Lots of people know how to burn a CD & restart a computer with said CD in the drive- that's about all Ubuntu requires. I used to have time to futz with Linux, but with four young kids and a demanding job, I'm way past that. And once Ubuntu is running, it's insanely easy to install software using Synaptic. Ubuntu, which is based on a Linux flavor called Debian, is fundamentally based on easy addition/removal of software packages.
I won't even get into the freedom part of Free software. You know, where you have the freedom to use, modify, and learn from the software as you wish.
CvR is intent on spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) about Free and Open Source software for some reason. It's fine if you don't want to use FOSS software yourself; it's a free country; but get your facts straight!
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer."
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Where to find FOSS:
http://www.ohloh.net/
http://sourceforge.net/
http://freshmeat.net/browse/18/
As where I work (a UC) it tends to go the other way around. That is, people get Windows by default on their PC. We're kinda forced into it by the way we're set up - and people install Linux (or some other free OS) over windows if they can at all manage it. Those stuck in windows either just know it as "the computer" or have applications that they at least think they need to run under windows and/or don't have any support to try elsewhere - Mac versions or via wine/dosemu etc.
This isn't quite as common as it used to be as Macs have been picking up in popularity again. If I didn't have the option to do some kind of *nix I'd go that way myself.
I used to think that one of the barriers to wider Linux adoption was that very few computers are sold with Linux installed. My thought was that the average user is a little bit too afraid of the task of installing a new OS on their computer. This article kind of refutes that. Oh well.
A couple things, in response to comments:
1) Ubuntu will ship you a free CD. Check their website.
2) When I used Windows, I spent as much time getting it to work as I do now getting Ubuntu to work. Yes, my time isn't free, but Windows would also require a lot of my time. You very often have to use the command line or edit a text file to fix your problem with Ubuntu, but these tasks are neither time consuming nor difficult. Especially not compared to making a change to the Windows registry which is always a nightmare.
