In a column that will warm the hearts of open source partisans and leave everyone contemplating the impending end of the software market as we know it, ZDNet's Evan Leibovitch sketches in broad strokes the patterns of history that have brought us here, to the eve of “the Redmond Giant's” fall. Leibovitch writes . . .

My, how time flies. Things sure have come a long way since I started writing on open source issues for ZDNet a hundred columns ago.

At that time, one of the prime goals of my corner of ZDNet was what they called 'FUDbusting.' There was no end of misinformation floating around about Linux, much of it generated by fear and intended to confuse and confound people wondering what all this open source hoopla was about.

In the two years since, the complaints about Linux have gone from:

• “It's just a toy” to
  
• “So it's not a toy, but it can't run reliably” to
  
• “So it's reliable, but there are no apps” to
  
• “So it's got apps, but nobody's using it in a corporate setting” to
  
• “So people are using in a corporate setting, but Oracle's not supporting it” to
  
• “So Oracle supports it, but there's no commercial help-desk support” to
  
• “So there's commercial support, but where are the hardware vendors” to
  
• “So IBM's putting a billion bucks into Linux, but there's no enterprise support” to
  
• “So there's now enterprise support, let me think of something else…”

One by one the objections have fallen. Bit by bit (pardon the pun) the people who code, document, and market Linux have dealt with the obstacles, technical or otherwise . . .

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