"what's interesting right now is that Lindows wants to make a market in ways none of the old "Linux companies" are ready to do: by shifting the conversation from Linux and its development methods to the kind of stuff "consumers" care about, such as brand, features and prices."

Maybe consumers should be educated to care about more things than just brand, features and prices. If that were to happen then I think you'd see some really fundamental changes in our economy. I'd hope too that it would put an end of this giant sucking sound as jobs are Hoover'ed out of America to India, Taiwan and Eastern Europe only to then disappear behind the Scharzschild radius of the super massive black hole that is China's slave wage labor market. Who's going to buy these $199 Lindows PCs when everyone left in the country is making $5.15/hr.?

I guess what I'm getting at here, is that although I love Linux, and would like for nothing more than to see Microsoft handed their business plan on a platter, I sense something really disturbing going on here. That would be corporations moving to Linux not because of its superior development methodology, but simply because it is free, as in beer. Meanwhile, thousands of coders across the world have labored long and hard, often without recompense so that in the long run Reynolds & Reynolds can save a couple hundred grand? ...and then redefine their jobs as little more than hi-tech janitors and outsource them to the lowest bidder?

Perhaps the bush I'm beating around here is that Linux is not well on the way to world domination, but rather that the world (at least the mega-corps) is well on its' way to dominating Linux... and getting a hell of a bargain in the process.