Proprietary software will kill PC in 30 years, conference told

gnu-alternative Proprietary software will kill PC in 30 years, conference told If proprietary software continues to dominate, within 10 years no one will be able to store any file and even view their own content without first paying a service provider to see it and the PC as we know it will be gone within 30 years. Those were just two of the predictions made by German Linux consultant Klaus Knopper, creator of the Knoppix live CD computer operating system, at the three-day Open Source conference, LinuxAsia 2007, in New Delhi.

During his keynote address “The Next 100 Years”, Knopper also predicted that: in 20 years, no company would invest in developing software; that the universal computer as we know it would have died within 30 years with that only very simplistic specialised devices remaining; and that in 50 years, people would not even how to use a computer.

The conference is the largest of its type in the region, and is now in its fourth year. India, which is widely acknowledged as the next ‘boom’ economy, has already established itself as an IT powerhouse. Like China, its government has strongly promoted Open Source software as the ‘platform of choice’ over of proprietary solutions.

Sandeep Menon, convener of the Forum for Open Source Innovation in India (FOSII) and the body behind LinuxAsia 2007, said “The LinuxAsia initiative has been gaining strength and this year brings into focus the ground that Linux has gained among all segments.”

This is backed by a survey on Open Source in India conducted by Linux for You magazine. It said that nearly 55 per cent of Open Source companies had experienced 50 per cent-plus growth. It identified the top-five verticals driving demand as the government, banking and financial services, manufacturing, education and the IT industry itself.

Another member of FOSSI, and Head of Open Source Affairs at RedHat, Venkatesh Hariharan, predicted that the pace of change in Open Source would radically step up in the near future. He said that India - which had traditionally been an ‘open knowledge’ society - should take a macro view in discussions with developed economies, especially on the need for protection and compensation for proprietary knowledge.

“Yoga and Ayurveda, which are perhaps the largest knowledge pools, have traditionally been ‘open source’,” he said, “and yet it is a US$30 billion industry in the US alone. Open source is not opposed to commercial gains, it is opposed to ownership and limiting of knowledge and resources.”

This year the theme of the LinuxAsia conference was how Open Source could help develop pro-poor technologies and bridge the digital divide that challenges developing economies like India’s. It identified 20 critical areas that the Open Source community could find solutions to help bridge that divide, including the interoperability of devices and networks, building robust devices for rural conditions, managing change and obsolescence, security, government regulations, standards for multilingual content storage, financial models, power supplies, education, and user acceptance and ‘Cost for Use’.