It certainly can't be a bad thing that Microsoft faces some competition from these Linux firms. And many people will find specific, practical reasons to buy desktop Linux PCs. A lot of software on Linux is better than the Windows alternative, and there is Linux's legendary stability, which Sam Hiser -- who worries about "Windows pucker" -- says is reason enough to move to the open-source OS. "I argue that the 'productivity opportunity cost' of using Windows is important. The productivity gains from Linux are massive. What is your opportunity cost of rebooting X times a week? People think of these things as a minor annoyance, and they don't expect productivity gains. But what happens is, if they started using Linux, they'd go, 'Holy geezum, we haven't rebooted in a month!'"

There's some evidence that Microsoft is responding to the competition (other than with litigation). In answering questions about desktop Linux, a Microsoft spokesman said in an e-mail that "while Microsoft is certainly aware of the competition from Linux and open-source software in the desktop market, our focus is on innovating Windows and delivering the greatest value to our customers."

Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a consulting firm that's not affiliated with the software company, thinks that Microsoft is already reacting to the Linux threat. He sees the improvements made to XP -- which itself crashes far less often than previous versions of Windows -- as an example of that. Cherry worked at Microsoft for a decade, and he says that although "nobody there has spoken to me about it, in general I think they do their best work when there's a competitor. If it was just the Windows guys left to think about what they're going to do with Windows, they wouldn't really need to think about what to do to make it better. The competition is good for everyone -- it's good for Microsoft, it's good for the consumer, and it's even good for the Apple folks."

There's a tradition, at Microsoft, for senior employees leaving the company to write a memo to the staff. When David Stutz, who was a longtime, well-respected developer at the firm, retired in February, he sent the staff an e-mail urging them to wake up to the very real threat presented by open-source software.

"Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open-source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques," he wrote. "Open-source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed."

Stutz told me that he thinks that Linux on the desktop will become significant. "There are a number of markets in which having something that is good enough and cheap is important," he said. "You can imagine in countries where there's not a lot of disposable income -- there's lots of examples like that. And in those cases, you don't need all of the stuff that you get in Windows or Windows plus Office. And I think Microsoft has a growing recognition that this is true. They're trying to move the desktop forward and there's lots of interesting things going on, such as the Tablet PC."

The best thing about the rise of Linux, though, is that Microsoft may be starting to recognize the legitimacy of open-source software. The company has long used legal and P.R. efforts to try to convince others in the tech industry that there was something faddish -- or, worse, "un-American" -- about open-source software. Maybe an open-source threat to its desktop line will change that attitude and force it to take rivals seriously.

"It's unlikely that Microsoft would ever try to put Windows in more of an open-source mode," Stutz said. "What needs to happen is for them to acknowledge that open-source is part of the landscape now, and because it's part of the landscape, to try and find ways of working with it. That seems to be what everybody else in the industry is doing."

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