At my former workplace we had 3 IT people - (this may sound like something from 'Dilbert') - one manager, one UNIX sys admin, and one MS Windows admin. The MS admin constantly bleats in praise of microsoft and poo-poos Linux; he seems to memorize and repepeat (on endless loop) all the latest MS propaganda. Annoyed by his bleating, I asked him how many Linux systems he'd set up and run. Zero. Well, I told him to shut the hell up because we scientists have no time for uninformed bullshit. Now the world is full of people like that sys admin, so there will always be opposition to Linux. As far as individuals go, if you're part of the herd, then Linux isn't for you.

As for not giving linux to your granny - is that YOUR choice or granny's choice? Success depends a lot on attitude; a few years ago a friend of mine, who was 73 at the time, downloaded and installed Debian despite my telling him it wasn't particularly friendly to users. He never had any problems, and he was an electronics repair man by trade, not a computer whiz. I learned one very important thing from that event: some people DO read the manual, and they do OK. Most others rely on what they've been trained to do at school - click this button, now click that - I call them 'click monkeys', but they refer to themselves as 'experts'.

The point of Terpstra's original article wasn't that everyone should use Linux (with other open-source software on top) - after all it's only a tool and you don't use it if it's not the right tool - but that many people making the decisions really aren't evaluating things properly. Translation: they're incompetent. Ooh, it hurts doesn't it? Too bad, if you're a monkey then jumping up and down and hurling abuse won't change the fact that you're a monkey.