The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has written to 499 of the Fortune 500 most powerful companies in the world to warn them that adopting Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7, at the expense of alternatives such as GNU/Linux, would further reinforce the dominance of Microsoft on the global software market.

The FSF is strongly urging the installation of the GNU/Linux operating system for computers because it’s the platform for which many thousands of free software applications have been written. Millions of people around the world have already taken up the GNU/Linux option and the move towards creating and sharing free software is accelerating all the time, threatening the profits of companies such as Microsoft and Apple, who mostly charge for their software.

“Replacing all your desktop systems with GNU/Linux will give you independence from Microsoft, access to thousands of free software applications, and help break the social ill of proprietary software. Thousands of organizations have already moved to free software. What’s your organization’s plan? Investing in Microsoft’s Windows 7 will only get you more stuck and more dependent on them,” the FSF said.

The only one of the Fortune 500 that the FSF did not write to was, unsurprisingly, Microsoft.

With more than 90 per cent of the world’s computers running the Windows operating system, the maker of the software, Microsoft, has an effective monopoly on the global computer environment. If you also consider the fact that Microsoft also owns all-pervasive applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, any challenge to the company’s dominance is a long way off.

A number of companies have tried to compete with Microsoft, most famously Apple and its charismatic leader Steve Jobs. Apple’s initial success was mainly attributable to the computer’s user-friendliness, epitomised by its use of a mouse and an icon-based graphical user interface (GUI). At the time, Microsoft was still in the DOS mode.

But then Microsoft gave DOS a facade, and that facade was the GUI called Windows, which Apple claimed was too similar to their own GUI. But after Apple’s failure to persuade the courts that Microsoft was practising in plagiarism when it moved from the old DOS operating system to the icon-based Windows, Apple’s challenge fell away. Now, the glamorous Apple only has around 5 per cent of the operating system market with its OS X, while Windows owns the rest, with some leftovers for Linux and even smaller operators.

But wait. Linux may be small, but it has the most vocal and enthusiastic following. Rather like the old Apple, actually. Nowadays, Apple owners tend to be happy that they own an Apple and are not too bothered that the war was well and truly won by Microsoft, to the extent that Microsoft owns shares in Apple.

However, Microsoft’s war with Linux is only just beginning. On the one side, we have Microsoft, the most powerful, profitable software company in the world. And on the other we have a software company that can’t be described as a company, rather a language, Linux, which was derived from Unix, that has been taken up by millions of computer users around the world. The main reason Linux was taken up was because it was free and the software written for it was free. Which is most definitely not Microsoft or Apple standard policy.

It may be early days for the open source movement, but with growing support, it may well be the only real challenge left to Microsoft’s ever-increasing dominance.

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