Luis Villa, a lawyer with Mozilla experience, writes about open source licensing, copyright, forking, privacy, and terms of service.
Commenters cite his posts on per-file license information, non-licensing risks, and the Diaspora discussion as useful legal perspectives.
I believe it will continue to grow but not as fast as it needs to be any serious competitor to Windows or MacOS in 2010.
It still lacks a good-enought variety of (proprietary) third-party applications and games.
This is what most of the younger power users care about -- and they are the ones who learn computer usage most easily. But there's no compelling reason for them to try or to switch to Linux.
What blocks the supply of third-party applications is the lack of a default decentral installer on the major Linux distributions. APT just doens't cut it. In a recent review of using a Macbook, former GNOME Quality Control lead, Luis Villa, wrote [1]:
"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great."
I do find new software like that, too, but APT wasn't made for this use case. As a result, I stopped reading reviews of Linux applications. Most of the time, it's a hassle to get the dicussed software installed, for they are often not available in Ubuntu's repositories or it's an old version.
I also stopped buying or reading Linux magazines or journals for this reason.
So, even if there are new great applications out there, the word spreads slowly. As a result, Linux appears…
There are other solutions to fix this,
http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuous-text-also-known-as-all-caps/
However, if you think this is really the problem about ToS, I think you're missing the bigger picture: http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree.html
Furthermore, is it not a better idea to simply include this in the readme and leave it out of the code altogether?
Luis Villa discusses some reasons why you might want include licensing information in every file: http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/
Lawyer perspective on non-licensing (it' dangerous): http://tieguy.org/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-seriously-as-a-statement-about-copyright-law/
Non-lawyer perspective: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
Follow-ups:
http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html
http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/05/08/responding-to-joindiaspora/
They are active:
http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/08/20/notes-on-diaspora-talk/