So say Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley in their essay, "World Domination 201," published in November. The issue, they point out, is that Linux simply doesn't work out of the box for many of the things that an average computer user expects to do. Chief among these deficiencies is lack of support for many popular multimedia formats.

They have a point. Multimedia has always been a difficult challenge for Linux, owing to the quagmire of proprietary codecs and file formats and the accompanying patents that protect them. Linux newbies would doubtless be surprised to learn that few distributions even bundle support for basic MP3 playback these days, out of fear of litigation.

Given that the window of opportunity for Linux to jump ahead of the major commercial operating systems is rapidly closing, Raymond and Landley say we can't wait for free codecs and file formats to catch up in popularity. The solution they propose is for a company to bite the bullet, license the proprietary codecs, and make them available to Linux distributions and end-users in a single, easy-to-install package. They even name a company that's willing to step up to the challenge: Linspire. But while this will certainly help spur desktop Linux adoption, it's only a partial solution.

As Microsoft's ongoing efforts to discourage adoption of ODF (OpenDocument Format) demonstrate, locking customers into proprietary file formats is one of the most powerful tools for preserving a company's bottom line. Once they have a hold on you, they won't let go easily.

Thus, the war for free and open multimedia must be fought on two fronts. While it's important that Linux support all the capabilities that commercial operating systems offer, we must also continue to encourage aggressively the adoption of open formats and codecs wherever possible.