A recent column on Zdnet, by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, discussed the reasons why people won't change from a retail operating system to a free one. The implication is that Linux can't even give away their software.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet seems to have insighted a small firestorm of debate on a recent post “Is Ubuntu becoming the generic Linux distro?” in which he observes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a great post over on Datamation entitled, "Linux...Why is it So Hard to Give It Away?". He addresses the difficulty in getting retailers to sell cheap Linux-based PCs, and decides that the problem is the support burden: It's easier to offload that to Microsoft than to undertake it to save a few dollars:

This is a response on an article at my neighbor site: http://www.nintenlord.com/x/?page_id=405. This time, it is not Pro Linux, but Con Linux. I agree with David's article, but many people do not. So I'd like to sum up what most people walk into when trying Linux. Note: This is written out of the viewpoint of a regular user that wants to try Linux. Not from "our" viewpoints.

I was wandering through the mall the other day with my youngest, we happened to stumble across this... I did a double-take when I saw the screen on the photo booth, blinking away, looking for input. The power in the mall had blinked a half-hour earlier, and I imagine the system has been rebooted then.

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"As I promised after the Avi Bryant interview, here’s a great conversation with Adrian Holovaty, well known creator of the Django web framework written in Python..."

Free Software Foundation chairman and all around computer freedom guru Richard Stallman has written an article for the BBC entitled ‘It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars’.

the orignal "Linux Audio Server Project" article was first written back in 2004, talking only about the LIRC setup with my headless server to use it as any other hifi element: stop, play, pause, etc. I soon needed more functionality, which was easy to implement, but which I never actually updated this article for.

In a break today I found yet another article outlining why "Linux needs its own Steve Jobs for it to be good". We get those quite a lot it's kinda the Top10 list of people with half a brain. Well, here's the final discussion why that idea is wrong (and retarded), so people can stop writing the same article that was wrong back in 1999: