What Would Be Disastrous For Linux, Open-Source

[Remco]

With all this talk of socio-economic systems, I'm surprised that noone has suggested politics as a major threat to Linux. With all the in-fighting, we always risk fragmentation.

[Honeyman]

The End of BSOD

I think that would really scary:
Microsoft gets out a Windows 8 that not only works reasonably well and is as customizable/configurable as Linux, but which does not feature the notorious BSOD anymore.
People would barely have any incentive to switch to Linux any longer. Linux newbies usually do not care about Open Source Stuff and its philosophy.

[?John?]

The mere idea that you can trivially make claims to own an idea, not an implementation, is simply out of this age.

Exactly. Pirates got a point.

Especially since the large ones in the industry have started to use it as a normal trick of the trade to keep the smaller competition in check. Once Linux makes enough money for some party, the patent trolls will come to leech off what they percieve as their share.

Yet another good reason to "get that crap outta here!"

[DeepDayze]

With all this talk of socio-economic systems, I'm surprised that noone has suggested politics as a major threat to Linux. With all the in-fighting, we always risk fragmentation.

This is true as MS can try political means to crush FOSS if all its efforts such as lawsuits (remember SCO?) fail.

FOSS lovers can counter this by writing to their elected officials to urge them not to cave in to MS's demands, if this ever came to pass

[mrugiero]

With all this talk of socio-economic systems, I'm surprised that noone has suggested politics as a major threat to Linux. With all the in-fighting, we always risk fragmentation.

That might be because noone has stated their position, we just tried to be descriptive about socio-economic systems :P
But you have a great point, fragmentation (independent from the cause) is a great threat to open source as a whole. In fact, unichrome drivers show an example of how fragmentation can kill a project, and many others that I'm not aware of :P