I am really enjoying the latest Ubuntu. They added lots of polish, and the OS is consistently moving steps ahead as far as ease of use for geeks and non-geeks alike. My thoughts center around, “but does it even matter?“. Sure, Ubuntu is free on a couple levels that OS X and Windows aren’t, but most non-developers don’t feel the shackles, so they don’t care. Like an invisible tax the cost of the OS is bundled with the hardware for the vast majority.
Again, for non-developers, the licence restrictions are slightly annoying at worst, also they are accustomed to paying for software, so they think “who cares?“. It would take something more significant than a very usable and free alternative OS that they would have to take the effort to install and get accustomed to make them care. I won’t be wasting a lot of breath trying to convince these sorts of users to make the switch. My lengthy discourses on open source ideology would merely prove to be confusing or annoying.
That is not a guess, it’s happened. Developers, however, have much less of an excuse for not caring. They should be feeling, or at least be aware of, the shackles of the closed environments and ecosystems. Those with a choice, often choose to ignore or to justify. I have noticed they justify their use of OSX or Windows for what tend to be short sighted reasons.
If such short sighted excuses were ever really valid, is another debate, but either way, those justifications are getting weaker and weaker. Ubuntu, from a developers perspective, has potentially crossed over from being a viable alternative to being a superior one. 10.04 == a better chance of them actually being convinced, like me, that Ububtu is mega cool!