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Here's how Linux gets to the desktop

Published: 14 Jul 2003 15:07 BST

Nearly 200 years ago Lewis and Clark arrived in Portland, Oregon on their cross-country expedition to explore the West. It was a journey that captured the spirit of a young and inspired New World that thrived on trailblazing new frontiers. Attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland gave me the sense that the open-source movement is opening a new frontier, and at the same time shedding some of its more idealistic trappings.

The new open-source frontier is now moving toward the front lines of the enterprise. We are in an era of network-centric computing, and Microsoft's hegemony and pricing structures are being seriously questioned. As I wrote earlier, the well articulated benefits of open standards and open-source computing are pushing IT organisations to consider Linux, Apache, and other alternatives to proprietary back-end platforms. That trend has been widely documented, promoted and practiced by the likes of IBM, HP, and others. IT managers are figuring out on their own that Linux, MySQL, Jboss, and other open-source distributions can deliver real value.

On the other hand, desktop Linux environments -- such as KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and OpenOffice -- have been far slower to blaze a trail into the enterprise. You could point to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop as a deterrent, but that's not the only barrier.

In a keynote at OSCON yesterday, Mitch Kapor of the Open Software Applications Foundation (OSAF), offered his predictions for the future of desktop Linux and introduced a market study that assesses the current market for an alternative desktop to Windows.

Kapor and the OSAF certainly have an agenda to promote Linux on the desktop, but the report provides an honest appraisal. Kapor said that the immediate challenge for desktop Linux is to prove itself among transactional workers -- such as those working in call centres and help desks. The study gave 2004 as the year in which desktop Linux would advance significantly on that frontier. General purpose, knowledge workers, would not jump on the desktop Linux bandwagon until 2007 at the earliest.

Kapor said he would not be surprised to see 10 percent of global desktops running Linux in the near future. That's a good bet.

He cautioned that gaining desktop Linux users beyond the techie crowd would require much improved Microsoft Office compatibility as well as fit and finish in the desktop environments and applications. OpenOffice, for example, still lacks the polish necessary to convert the mass of Office users, despite the cost advantages. Kapor said the OSAF is funding extensive testing for Microsoft Excel compatibility to help on that front.