Recently a friend of mine approached me with a weird question: how to install Windows on a machine without a CD or Floppy drive. I was intrigued. The obvious question here was “why?” “Why don’t you just keep Ubuntu?” I asked him.

I am pretty sure that the question in the title is asked quite a lot. Especially by enterprise managers and bean counters the world around. When that question is asked of us, how should we answer it?

Last week I asked the question, if open source has won, then where do we go from here? A number of different answers were forthcoming to the two parts of the question.

"At the beginning of this month I helped a programmer modifying a Perl program he had written, and gave some advice on the how and why of my modifications. When he asked me how I wanted to be compensated for my help, I asked for a copy of the sixteenth edition of the GNU Emacs Manual [...] But why Emacs, you might wonder? ..."

I came across a post today in one of the mailing lists I frequent where the user asked "Why would anyone pay for something at is based on Open Source". This question comes up many many times in various projects and in various forms. I did post a reply to the message, hopefully helping to educate, but thought the question was worthy of deeper exploration.

A little while ago, a friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder--virtually speaking--and asked me why there isn't an easier way to install software on a Linux computer. He asked innocently enough why we can't have a Universal Package Manager (UPM) to handle the software regardless of distribution. Ha! How could he be so naive?

What distribution is ideal for me? This is by far the most often asked question on just about every forum board. New users are adopting Linux by the hordes everyday, and that’s a great thing, but because of the large number of distributions to choose from, they can’t help but wonder which is best for them.

I asked what role does open source play at Verizon now, especially in light of the recent SFLC lawsuit against Verizon on GPL infringement. Strigl looked at me with a blank face and asked me to repeat my question. He was completely clueless. He then asked one of his PR people to answer, and they too were clueless.

In my last post, March 23, 2008, I asked the question “Linux - Is it really for me?”. That post was actually written a few weeks ago and was lost when my Blog went down. Now I have the answer to that question. It is a very firm “YES”.