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Linux philosophy: more than naive

>>All Linux software should have been ready by now. Now is the time for
>>making deals and Linux is not in that game.
>
>"Now is the time for making deals"?  Says who?  Your financial
>analyst?

Says you... unless you're not one of those aficionados who swear only
by Linux... but always keep Windows on their computer for playing
their favorite games. Pretty soon, it's going to be much more than
games!

>But the neat thing to remember here is that it's NOT.  Not by a
>longshot.  Linux doesn't *need* money to survive.  Or mass-market
>popularity.  Or TV commercials.  Or any of those other things that
>other "commercial" software companies/products require to stay afloat.

Linux don't need it. OS2 didn't need it... but that's what people
want. Of course, I you believe you will keep on programming Linux in
your basement for your own self, just as Amiga devotees do today,
that's something else.

>In fact, not only does it not *need* any of that, but it's come as far
>as it has largely *without* it.
>
>Because Linux *simply isn't involved* in that model.  Never has been;
>hopefully, never will be.  Linux is not a game of corporate strategy,
>or income, or business models, or any of that jargon.  

Whatever the type of economic system, efficiency -- the way to produce
the optimum in as little time and with as little ressources as
possible -- has always the definitive plus.

>As for too late: who's counting?  And furthermore, why?  Do you
>honestly think it's a race, or that there's a time limit for taking
>over the world?

That's what Microsoft thinks. If you don't, big problems lie ahead.

>You're thinking like a typical capitalist. 

Sure! You got me dead on! Capitalist, that's exactly me!

>And while there is nothing
>inherently wrong with it, there is something flawed with taking a
>clearly-non-capitalist set of softwares and saying that they are
>doomed because they don't fit into the capitalist model.  

Well, here's what's happening in the non-capitalist happy-go-lucky
Montreal Linux World.

As everywhere, there are installfests. People with red hats roam an
empty room and ask people if they want to have Linux installed on
their computer. After a few clicks, the new Linuxies are sent back
home with a newly installed linux OS on their computer. From then on,
they're calculated as part of the Linux brotherhood.

A first typical question on the local usenet group is something like:
I forgot my password, what do I do? People don't know how to boot with
a disquette and have never heard about anything as a passwd or shadow
file. Then, there are problems getting the french-canadian keyboard,
the mouse or the scanner. Pretty soon, the question is "How do I
remove lilo?"

In any nasty capitalist enterprise, there would be an enquiry to find
out how successful installfests are in bringing new users. Not so with
Linux! If new users go back to Windows, it's their fault: they don't
read the HOWTOs and won't be part of the happy few who do the
maintenance on a free OS at 100$ an hour. 

Since there had been quite a few installfests, I recently asked how
many people reading the group had begun using Linux an installfest. I
didn't get one (1) single answer. So I suggested another kind of
installfest. 

I proposed to organise an installfest of Debian by
vi-and-the-config-files. Many people in Montreal have done all the
trial-and-erroring with Linux and I was ready to write a tutorial
about this kind of installation that would put html links to some use.

In a main trunk, it would be the installation in a "no problemo"
situation. Then if, for instance, there wasn't a free partition, a
link would have lead to FIPS. Problem with the keyboard, the mouse,
the monitor? Link, link, link. So that the user would have ended up
reading only what he needs and, after installing on a few computers,
he could have acquired a basis to read the HOWTOs.

For two years, in the city where Jacques Gelinas (the author of
Linuxconf) and countless Linux Big Brains live, while I was offering
hundreds of hours to write the tutorial, I was unable to get anybody
to do an install by the files. It seemed I had to do everything by
myself. Unfortunately, I'm not a 15 years old kid anymore and I have
other interests in life. I gave up.

A few months ago, there was a Comdex in Montreal and Linux-Quebec was
offered a booth and a conference room. A University of Montreal
teacher informed us of this and was, at it seemed, in charge of
organising the event. I offered my help for writing, printing,
advertising, whatever, and often inquired how things we going. I never
got an answer.

At Comdex, the Linux booth was empty: nobody, not even a single sheet
of paper to be offered. But, as always with Linux, the situation was
normal: there are only "suits" at Comdex and who wants to talk to
suits?

Across the aisle was the Corel conference room, the busiest place of
all. The guy making the demo was certainly far from a Linux Big Brain,
but he had his routine ready. Fortunately, Microsoft has since seen
that Corel doesn't become a problem...

The image of this empty booth still haunts me. What a show it could
have been if only, for instance, Gelinas would have been there for two
hours a day, for two days. (4 hours!) The man is a show by himself! We
could have explained simple things, how to use Linux as a print
server, for instance. People would have been more than interested.

The booth was empty and there's still no problem!

The first ISP in Montreal, Communications Accessibles Montreal (CAM)
was a non-profit organisation: it was the only way you could get
internet access at that time if you were not a university. But it was
pretty much privately run by a guy named Pascal Gosselin. Then there
were conflicts between him and other founding members. 

Gosselin quitted to launch a private ISP called Mlink and, later, the
other founding members decided to sell CAM... which was illegal as a
non-profit organisation is legally owned by its members. Then, CAM was
really run a non-profit organisation... Watch out for the meaning of
berserk!

Tax exemptions, which are given to promote education, were used by a
bunch of empty-headed administrators for silly promotion and
advertising campaigns. While I was suggesting in vain to organise
Linux groups to discuss cgi script -- hey! we had the luxury of shell
access! -- or html editing courses for kids, nothing was done and all
sentiment of belonging was lost.

Eventually, the compagnies that were members of CAM got fed up of
paying for incompetent programmers to write their scripts and asked
for an NT server to use the "magic" Fontpage extensions. They easily
had their way since the guy who was really running CAM in the
background was pro-Microsoft all the way: hey, he could use his
dictionary in all his applications!

Finally, CAM's server was hacked and many sites, if not all, were
wiped out. With high speed connections being offered at a reasonable
price, half the members left last year.

This was a good place to constitute a Linux user base. At the
beginning of 1999, there were still 9000 members at CAM and there was
money for education.

But Linuxies don't care about getting their hands dirty into
administration, and if you do, and if you're not contributing to code,
and if you're not shouting hip, hip hourra! whatever happens, you're
an enemy of Linux.

Even now, as a new director with sound administrative practices is at
the head of CAM, absolutely no effort is made to get in touch.

So, let's not talk about there being no good browser available for
Linux, Reiser being just a late temporary fix before ext3, the 2.4
kernel being more than 16 months late. Here in Montreal, all is done
not to constitute a solid user base. 

Of course, everybody is hailing open source, but open source is just
like hieroglyphs if people are not taught to interpret it. And it just
seems that making a real free effort to give access to knowledge
doesn't suit people who make money with the knowledge they acquired
the hard way reading HOWTOs. They just find it's quite right to give
beginner courses on a "free" OS at 450$ dollars an hour (15 students @
30$ an hour). And that's when Microsoft's "magic" comes in.

For now, I'm at the point where I wonder if I'll install Linux when I
get a new computer. (I now have an AMD DX-100, 16 megs ram, and I
don't feel like browsing in text mode.) Though nothing essential works
(understand: the constitution of a solid user base), it would be of
very little concern if only the community acknowledged it. But no!
Linux is doing just fine, it's never late, there's no need to control
the efficiency of what's being done, and, if you don't agree, you're
an enemy.

I've got enough of this OS2-like sect. It's doomed. For now, Microsoft
is probably more or less subsidizing some Linux distros. Linux looks
like a rival while it's facing DOJ and, at the same time, it's
undermining its rivals (Unixes). Who could ask for more? But it could
get rid of Linux like a fly on its sleve in a matter of a year or two.

We know that Intel has invested in Red Hat because RH is on the stock
exchange, but who knows about, for instance, Mandrake's financing? Who
knows where AXA, this shitty insurance and investment company that
draws from the poor to get the rich richer, got some of the money it
invested in Mandrake from?

All this Linux "philosophy" is more than naive. It's completely
unconscious.

GP
--
La Masse Critique
Les «non-lethal weapons»: de la science-fiction?
http://pages.infinit.net/mcrit/meilleur.html
Rencontrez Néfertiti, Einstein, Tocqueville, etc.