P.S: don’t read this as a personal endorsment of Open Source Software over Free Software on my part.

How could PC hardware have got to the degree of sophistication it exhibits today without the ?? bad business moves by IBM – making the PC an open architecture that anyone could develop and manufacture. Compaq, HP, Dell and myriad smaller companies all competing at the bleeding edge for a share of the market, as PCs became mainstream appliances in every home and business, cutting each other’s throats until only a few distributors with all manufacturing outsourced to China and the Far East remained.

The involvement of Microsoft and Apple in the competition for the home and business market, and the quiet superiority of Amiga and Atari home enthusiast markets for games and useable, good looking graphical interfaces.

Microsoft’s relentless business model, wiping out and often trashing previous MS versions, requiring an uphill upgrade path in order to utilize the new hardware that OEMs were forced to produce to meet the Microsoft Road Map.

Then there were the users, who maybe could not afford an annual upgrade of $2000 but could read about the developments arriving in the marketplace and could salivate over glossy multipage spreads in $5 dollar phone-book thick magazines, which invariably had cover disks – first floppies, then CDs and then DVDs.

It was these CDs that first gave us a taste of Linux distributions, of free internet trials from Compuserve and AOL, of ill-fated Beos and OS/2 Warp OS installations. Then, as the internet grew, in content and speed of access, the thickness of these magazines miraculously shrank, eventually to nothing.

We got free dial-up internet, and then Broadband and then wireless internet, and superb laptops that were just as upgradeable as the monstrous monobloc beige desktops that in reality, after the “Pentium” were only upgradeable from the motherboard up. Still, they were infinitely upgradeable compared to the sleek black boxes that Compaq wooed corporate clients with, that had no room for a decent coating of lint, let alone a network or decent graphics card.

Now, as Google is knocking on Microsoft’s door, we see Google possibly closing the door on Linux users. Despite early Chrome OS versions being based on Ubuntu – Picasa 3.5 has not been ported to Linux, and the last version of Picasa for Linux is a beta version 3. Lets hope 3.5 works under Wine, eh?

So a big thanks to all of these for making Linux great, useable and free, because without them, business and academic mainframes and supercomputers, corporate minicomputers, and dumb clients attached to phone and TV, and embedded systems in automobiles and appliances would be all we have.

I would replace the Ubuntu item with “February 3rd, 1998″ when the OSI had its initial roots and the brand of “Open Source” was first proposed: http://www.opensource.org/history

I suspect Ubuntu was added to not have the last item be 11 years ago. That might say more about the amount of time it takes for an event to be considered critical than any claim that nothing has happened of such importance since. To consider the open sourcing of Netscape as a major event only makes sense when the amount of work and success of Firefox is considered. In 10 years we may point to Microsoft’s first patch, to Sun releasing Java or to the Android phone.

I’d also add UNIX. It was of prime importance to Stallman, Torvalds, and even Tanenbaum’s decision-making processes.

The photo of Linus Torvalds used in the collage is copyrighted. It was published alongside an interview with Mr. Torvalds. See http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovory/linus-torvalds?page=1

Had you asked beforehand, I would have agreed to let you use the photo. Now I expect you to either remove the photo or include a visible and clear link to the original article, listing it as the source of the photo.