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Money has changed microsoft (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by Waffelson@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world

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[-] ricdeh@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

How would that affect any of us? Linus Torvalds would still be the lead kernel maintainer, all the other FOSS distros would still exist, and all the people that currently use Linux (out of conviction, out of idealism, out of the FOSS/GNU philosophy) would stick with them, meaning de facto no change whatsoever.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 7 points 5 months ago

Not everybody uses linux out of conviction, idealism, or principle. Many use it either by chance or convenience. The purists are probably not the majority of linux users.

There are people who already won't switch to linux because windows has WSL. Gaming has held back many people from switching too, although that's becoming less of a problem. However, if there were no reason to switch to other distros, and an M$ distro were to become the most used distro...

Do you know what M$ did when they had the largest market share for browsers? Do you know what Google is currently doing with their marketshare on the browser market?

Windows has a pitiful representation on the server side, but if that changed to an M$ distro with proprietary linux modules in order to make certain software work (or something more insidious that I can't think of), it would change the server landscape too. And suddenly, you can't write stuff for the most popular servers without installing M$ kernel modules or software.

The linux zealots are not the majority. Zealots never are.

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