[conspire] Ah, another test subject for this Saturday's CABAL

[Christian Einfeldt]

>
>
> > something called "Ulteo" that I'm not familiar with.
>
> New distro from France, by the former head of the Mandriva company
> (previously MandrakeSoft).  Like gOS, it emphasises _hosted_ (online)
> proprietary applications at an ASP (Application Service Provider),
> instead of providing local (real) applications in the distro itself.
> This is sometimes called the "Software as a Service" (SaaS) model.


SaaS hopefully will be a wedge that will allow Free Software to gain
sufficient OS market share that it can start commoditizing even these
non-Free SaaS offerings.  Right now, no competitor can easily get past
Microsoft to gain sufficient market share to start getting network effects
in its favor.  Microsoft just sucks all the wind out of any competing OS.
At some percentage of market share, say 20% for Apple and 15% for GNU Linux,
we will see third party vendors start committing their resources to
supporting GNU Linux in a meaningful way on the consumer desktop.  And more
OEM vendors will selling Free Software boxes, at which point we will have
real competition on the consumer desktop.  Right now, the only consumers
that have real choice are those who are willing to pay the premium for Apple
products, or those of us who have somehow stumbled into Free Software.
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