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The Glass Cathedral (partie I)

Of course, we all know where distributors' and system administritors' 
moolah comes from: an inadequacy between the system offered and 
the needs of the general public. There's absolutely not a shade 
of a doubt that Linux, an OS that overwrites files without prompting, 
is not for the casual user. This fact has been recognized by M$ 
at least since DOS 3. 

But how the hell, in this crocked world of ours, would "evangelist" 
Eric Raymond admit making his dough in such an horrid way? I 
never thought my hoax would stand for more than a few hours. How 
could the clever Linux community not find out that I had made up 
the whole second paragraph of my "Linux: 750 million users by 
2004?" (See my original posting below below.) 

Bah! I don't know... maybe I would have been fooled myself, but 
I would certainly have checked the original text. Raymond's true 
pretension about Linux having 750 millions users in five years is 
just too outrageous. Gee! Who would be left using Windows, save Gates, 
Allen and Ballmer? I even thought Businessweek was putting on an 
hoax of its own. How about this excerpt: " [Raymond writes an 
arithmetic formula to determine this]" Does this sound serious?

Then I thought of Raymond's authoritative opus: The Cathedral and 
the Bazaar.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.html
The big bangle there is in the sort of "Release Early, Release Often" 
and "The Importance of Having Users", in other words, thoughts after 
the fact on developing on the internet. How long does this go in 
the way of describing the new structure of development as a "bazaar"?

As we all know, the odd numbered versions of the kernel -- 2.1, 
2.3, etc -- are development versions. People with some programming 
experience can get their hands at it, adapt it to their hardware or 
purpose, which wasn't possible before the internet and open source.

Isn't there inevitably a Cathedral structure in the development of 
any OS? If you can't write a driver, it's very unlikely that you'll 
be checking other people's work under Torvalds' supervision anytime soon. 
The term "Glass Cathedral" would certainly describe this kind of 
structure more appropriately, as you can learn from the code 
other people write and the community can evaluate other people's 
skills.

As for the bazaar, I'm afraid it does exist, but it's rather in 
the distribution scheme. It's Redhat saying "Of course, Linux is 
free! Just don't forget if you lend your CD with BRU, you might 
get into trouble" or "Too bad if you have Windows installed and 
Rockridge extensions don't work! Why don't you buy our distribution 
with the book?" or "You think our instructions lead you nowhere? 
Just call us, we're strong on $ervice!" It's also Suse installing 
an Applix demo (400 megs!) by default. It's all those Netscape-pl'ed 
and QT-pl'ed and whoever-pl'ed licenses that spring from all over 
and are intertwined with true GPL software, etc.

In terms of classic economy, this is a hell of a bazaar. At the 
present time, euphoria seems the only politically correct attitude 
towards this turmoil; I just hope it doesn't end up in a legal 
chivvy like the world has never known.

For now, it seems to me Linux is going nowhere fast. It's not 
sound to expect that we'll put the whole population into a sysadmin 
spirit. People in general have other concerns and they will neither 
pay gurus for support everytime a problem arises, nor roam usenet 
until they find out which answer really makes sense. If users don't 
get a fairly clear understanding of the basic structure and functionning 
of their system, the game is lost for Linux.

I'm certainly not much of a Linux guru: after checking HOWTOs, 
minis and maxis, and FAQs, I still haven't found out how to get 
the keyboard I want for working at the prompt (CF). But I've got 
a feeling that many other non-gurus share. Like investors, I believe 
that if the present conditions prevail, Linux will be a passing 
fad. In ten years from now, when bank transactions, home buying, 
car rentals, hotel reservations, movie rentals, etc., will almost 
obligatorily go through the internet, Linux will only be a nice 
geek's souvenir.

Of course, we know that Gates and Allen are selling their shares 
like crazy, but is it that they're afraid Windows is loosing 
ground or are they only getting more and more people economically 
interested in the survival of Windows, while investing themselves 
in satellite and cable networks, data and image banks, and all 
kind of rental services which, of course, will all be Windows 
oriented?

Getting a better share of the server market for Linux won't do. 
The ludicrous "Frontpage extentions"(1) have already helped M$ 
enter the server market. Imagine what a wedge they're building now!

(1) But did the Linux community help understand the use of scripts? 
Were simple scripts installed on servers so people could learn how 
to use them, or were they only offered as "$upport" to commercial 
accounts? (Some ISPs offer free pre-written scripts. But they're the 
exception.)

(suite à la partie II)