Discussion on:

Open source community up in arms over proprietary software for Ubuntu

also it'll be a LONG time before MS, Apple, Adobe, and co go away.

From what I am seeing, Windows 8 is slow to take off, and without software that works in Linux, companies will not have much of a choice. If companies do start to sell software for Linux, then they may find that Windows 8 is not worth their time to re-train users. A CEO could get Linux Mint, since it has the same look and feel, but costs a lot less, as in free, trade or purchase licenses for software, and implement in new PC's as they come due to be replaced. No one has to put up with the Win 8 frustration or loss of time or revanue, and they save money in the long run by not paying MS for licensing fees.
It is not inherantly evil to make money, and developers and companies should be compensated for their hard work and risk. Those that think the Linux should be only open source should take off their rose colored glasses. How would a company survive if they did not get cash? Money does make the world go round, and I am sure the people that think Linux should only have Freeware do have jobs, and get paid to do whatever it is they do. We do not live in Utopia.

I am very encouraged at this change.Opensolaris has always been a work bench for proprietor y applications.The developments in the mobile community will undoubtabliy have an effect on the whole open source philosophy.Perhaps its a better understanding that open source is been recognized as a growing part of the market accelerated by the recession.I can only be encouraged that greater recognition and development will ensure for open source.

At least the Ubuntu (which I never really cared for) people still have choices.
If you want it to look and feel like Windows - get Windows. LOL

I have been railing at the linux community for a decade about becoming more user friendly. It needs to just work. Not be something you have to enter a command prompt to use in any real way. EVERY other OS is in GUI mode for everything. Unless of course it's used by a bunch of hammer headed geeks with their panties in a wad about the purity of coding.

People want to turn it on and use it. Not get some error message and a response on a website from a nose in the air *******.

Every distribution of Linux I've tried in the last five years or so "just works". You don't have to use the CLI at all.

Every one of the major distros (and most of the others, as well), can be run from a live DVD so you can try it out before installation. Or do what I did, download several and install them onto a USB drive (I used LinuxLive USB Creator). You can test them all with only a reboot between each one; you won't even have to swap DVDs.

And, for what it's worth, sometimes you have to use the command line in Windows, too.

... in GNU/Linux is graphical. I almost never go to the CLI at all unless I want to do something really different like compile my own latest/greatest version of Blender downloaded from trunk (svn up) and even for that, there's a gui for configure and generate (cmake-gui).