Charles Connell’s article What the Linux Community Needs to Grok makes some interesting points, but I’d like to correct him on a few issues. First of all, he somehow seems to believe that using open source software for mission critical tasks is something new, and that the community is naive about it. While it may be true that many Linux hackers are newbies when it comes to solving these problems, there are tons of open source applications that see heavy use in mission critical settings. Apache, BIND (which runs nearly all DNS servers, gcc, and sendmail all immediately come to mind. The idea that open source software is something new that doesn’t know how to deal with business is a persistent myth. My second point is that even if Linux achieves dominance and is replaced, it still will have made an incredible impact. If Linux ever becomes dominant, then there’s little chance it will ever be replaced by something proprietary and closed, and will thus have effected the most important change in computing history.