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Sometimes, being a mostly Linux user, one forgets just how little Linux is used, and how big a force Windows and MS as a whole is. You start to think that Linux actually matters, and then some developer, user or whatever, comes up and couldn’t care less about Linux. Many times even Open Source itself. Sometimes you need this kind of feedback to bring you back to the real world, I guess, rather than the somewhat insular world open source seems to wrap around itself on occasion. Show yourself how far things have to move before things really start to get exciting.

The sites I tend to visit are all focused around the use of open standards and software. Zeldman.com is one of the main sites I visit. This is focused towards open web standards. I also check out alot of Linux news sites when I'm in Linux. The focus in my browsing of sites like these means that I'm constantly inside the world of standards and open source and removed from the (currently) mainstream world of proprietery technologies and Windows. If I stay there long enough, you can really start to believe that Linux and other things are having a much wider impact than they are. Reality slips away, leaving a pancea in its place. Something's broken? Well, let's just dive into the code and check it out. Then you're in Windows and Word crashes. Doh, just got to accept it, I guess.

In a way, I think that in the future there will be much wider adoption of things like Linux and web standards. Many people like me are, for want of a better term, growing up with these concepts in a way that hasn't happened with computing before. Open source is just there. We use it day in, day out, and consider closed source to be something of an ever stranger concept. Afterall, there are few benefits that seem to come from using closed, proprietary software. Security is no higher and from a moral standpoint you are often on dubious ground, especially where MS is concerned. Their recent killing of IE shows that they really care about making money, as should be expected for a business. With a market share like they have, however, MS should be looking to the long term and embracing standards rather than looking ever towards short term gains that deepen their own self reliance.