Jon “maddog” Hall is a legend in the Linux world. During his 30 year career, the executive director of non-profit Linux advocacy group, Linux International, maddog, as he prefers to be called, has worked and taught with the best of them. He will be in Sydney in late March to present to the inaugural LinuxWorld Australia conference and expo and he thinks Microsoft has a problem. Needless to say, that problem is Linux and Open Source. We caught up with maddog via Skype and he told us all about it.

According to maddog, Linux is becoming a more attractive alternative for the desktop and the key driver is the need for Microsoft to keep pumping its new products into the market.

“People will be going through a big change with the (Microsoft) Vista project. There’s a lot of people who are still on Windows 95 and 98 and moving from that to Vista is going to be a big move. It will require new hardware but some of their hardware is still viable in the Linux space so instead of going to Vista they’ll go to Linux.

“Microsoft has been dropping support for various operating systems. People are becoming aware of that and that may force them to upgrade where they haven’t before.

“I would be the last person on earth to tell somebody if they have a working environment - particularly if it’s already on commodity hardware like Intel – that they should go over to Linux. However, what we’re finding is that people who have new projects are looking at true client server systems and these are the people who are much likely to look at an open source solution, even including on the desktop.”

All of that may be true for people on old Windows operating systems but what about all of us on later versions like Windows XP?

“We live in an artificial environment – the information environment - and we’re used to computers. But if you go out into the environment of the small store owner, or the doctor or lawyer, who got their system a couple of years ago, and, in going to Vista, that may not be a cost that they’re prepared to pay.

“Also another market that people haven’t talked about that much is the turnkey system market. This is the place where people are going to be buying a full blooded system where they’re not going to be doing word processing necessarily. This is the type of environment where you could also see a very big turn to Linux because years ago these markets used to be owned by SCO.”

And what about Microsoft’s much touted new version of Office – Office 12?

“The word is yet to come in of whether people value the new pieces of (Microsoft) Office 12 or whether they simply look at it as yet another learning curve they have to go through. A lot of people have looked at version 2.0 of Open Office and remarked at how closely it looks like Microsoft Office. There have been a lot of companies, such as the Central Bank of Turkey, that have switched over lock, stock, and barrel from Microsoft Office to Open Office 2.0. For the first month, they heard a few complaints that there were slight differences but after a while the complaints disappeared.”

And what about home computer users; can Linux gain traction in that space and what are financial implications?

“Home computing came into being because people in the office took their computers home to do work. The interesting part about this discussion is that if the office updates to Vista and Office 12, then the person at home is going to have to do that and that’s a big financial hurt. In the case of Linux, if you update Linux in the office, say with Red Hat Enterprise edition, then you could probably get a free copy of Red Hat Enterprise for the home and even create a dual boot machine at home if you wanted to. So you could have the same thing at home as at the office and it’s not going to cost you any money.”

According to Jon Hall, the Vista project is the biggest gamble Microsoft has taken for quite some time.