Articles by Richard Hillesley at ITPro:

Double Standards for Microsoft and OOXML
"It follows that an international standard is not dependent on proprietary interests, does not contain binary specifications, does not contain specifications that contradict existing standards, does not include undisclosed patents and incomplete licensing terms, does not exist to deal with one vendor's bugs, and is not culturally specific. Yet, Microsoft's detractors suggest that, by accident or design, OOXML suffers from all these failings and more. OOXML is not so much a specification, as an incomplete description of Microsoft's existing proprietary data formats, warts and all. One of the better known anomalies is the treatment of 1900 as a leap year to satisfy an ancient bug. The industry deserves better."
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Inertia the obstacle to Linux on the desktop
"The progress of Linux on the desktop has been slower than many may have hoped. Microsoft Windows is deeply entrenched, and any competing system has to overcome obstacles of inertia, perception and distribution, but it would be a mistake to assume that nothing has happened, or that no progress is being made."
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SCO's estranged relationship with Linux
"From the beginning, Caldera was not like other Linux distributions. The first official release included the proprietary 'Looking Glass' or Network Desktop, which meant that, unlike most other Linux distributions, Caldera's OpenLinux couldn't be legally downloaded or copied. Moreover, Caldera's adoption of the 'OpenLinux' moniker caused offence because it seemed to infer that Caldera's distribution was somehow more open than other versions of GNU/Linux, which it most definitely was not.

Such niggles confounded Caldera's relationship with the community from the beginning. Ransom Love, the immediate successor to Sparks, engaged in a famous spat with Richard Stallman, after Love had announced that Caldera would drop the GNU GPL (General Public License), the most common free software license, for future products because it was holding back its business. Love claimed: "We add value to Linux, so it can become successful. We integrate Linux in back office systems and we do all the marketing that's necessary. Did Richard Stallman ever invest $100 million ($50 million) in Linux? We did." Love asserted that the free software movement had "no clue" about marketing, and doesn't realise that "someone must pay for it", to which Stallman's curt response was that "Caldera's not a free software company at all. They are just a parasite.""
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Free software is good for business
"Not so long ago the common wisdom was that free and open source software would grow strongly in the market for infrastructure software - operating systems, databases and web servers that have a generic applicability across all markets - but that non-free software would continue to dominate in the realm of vertical markets - where applications fulfil a specific role in a specialised commercial environment.

This view, which is still held by many, was based on the assumption that the "hobbyist" programmers who initiated many of the more famous free software projects tended to pursue sexier and more immediate objectives, and that many areas of applications software development would be ignored as a result. A second assumption was that companies would not find a free software commercial model that worked for more specialist business applications, where there is a smaller market for support services.

But realities change very quickly."
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The inadvertent Linux user
"Embedded Linux is on the rise, and may be found anywhere from the vehicle management system in your car to the smartphone in your shirt pocket. Montavista Linux, for instance, powers not only smartphones from Motorola, NEC and Panasonic, but Sony TV and media devices, Linksys wireless routers and Yamaha musical instrument systems.

Linux is deployed in more than 25 per cent of smartphones, and is second only in popularity to the Symbian operating system (OS) in that market. Experts are predicting a bright future for the OS, with ABI Research suggesting that it will appear on more than 200 million phones by 2012.

This may comes as a surprise to those who have observed the slow progress of Linux on the commercial and home user desktop, where Microsoft Windows is deeply entrenched, and any competing system has to overcome obstacles of perception and distribution. A Ubuntu desktop may or may not be easier to use, but the barriers to entry from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and end users are high. Change is perceived as risky, and users prefer to stay with what they know. Bill Gates once observed that, with each new release of Windows, "our biggest competitor is our installed user base.""
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Is Ubuntu the way forward for Linux?
During the last three years Ubuntu has sprung from nothing to become the most popular desktop distribution of Linux. There are good reasons for Ubuntu's success. Ubuntu is firmly rooted in the Linux developer and user communities, based on Debian, the classic Linux community distribution, and employs some of the key Debian developers. Ubuntu is clean and uncomplicated which makes it attractive to entry level users, without sacrificing the traditional Debian virtues of stability, flexibility and configurability, which has made it an enticing proposition for developers.

The logical next step for Canonical, the holding company for Ubuntu, has been to capitalise on this popularity by making advances into commercial markets, offering industrial strength training and support to Linux users, and establishing partnerships with Dell and Sun to provide pre-installed Ubuntu systems.
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Interoperability in the real world
In a polyglot world, where people exchange information in many different languages and dialects, it is important that there are common reference points that make interaction possible. Standards give us the means to talk to one another in a heterogeneous environment, whatever applications, operating systems or computer language we use. "If I can't talk the language of your proprietary format, I can't hear what you say", and conversation becomes impossible.
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Richard Hillesley