The Debate within the Linux community has always been what is equivocal to a philosophical vs practical debate. Now you’re probably asking yourself what do I mean by that. What I mean by that is simple the whole closed-source vs open source software firmware argument. Personally I use Linux and other operating systems. I would not be representative for the most part to the typical end user. At some point the Linux community has talked about the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, but the question becomes will that ever be a reality.

The Year of a Linux desktop will not happen when a majority of things need to be fixed within the community first in order for Linux to truly succeed at the desktop. While personally I believe that open source is a better business model as it makes for more competition. The fact of the matter is the FOSS community needs to come to the realization that not every company will either get or understand open source. So criticizing a company for deciding on a proprietary business model while with in your right does not mean Distros should not support commerical software. Yes some FOSS software is better than others while some FOSS software is  not better then the proprietary counterparts. Simply put yes as far as I am certain freedoms that need to be granted is the whole EULA needs to be changed. To where if you buy the software yes you own the software.
But in the End the Philosophical debate of proprietary vs open source in the end does not matter to the general end users. General consumers only care to know that software or hardware that they buy will work. Now most certain sets within the Linux community will say that people need to know there hardware will work beforehand,but when all is said and done. The facts of reality are consumers generally go shopping for hardware or software based on price or name recognition. The Linux community if we really want to see the Year of a Linux Desktop then we need to also come to realization that 6 billion people 6 billion different opinions and way to do things. Hence the reason open source will help with each one of those opinions not everyone wants to program people just want their software hardware to work with there system.
So if fellow Linux users that means KWord works for you or Office 2003(w/wine) works for someone then so be it. But in the end more products and software mean more competition means the odds of what we have now with Microsoft dominating everything is less likely to happen as much in the future. If we show that we are welcoming to ISV’s. Now on a side not as far as hardware is concerned hardware vendors need to start becoming less OS dependent. Hardware should be operating system neutral. Now when I say that like i said eariler 6 billion people not every one is going to want to run a Microsoft operating system. When I say Operating system neutral I mean that if I buy a graphics card it should work the same on BSD as it does on a Microsoft OS. that’s my 2 and half cents lets hear your thoughts.