World without Linux

?

Bwahahhaha. I thought this was an April Fool's Day story--then I remembered, wait, it's not April, and this guy isn't kidding.

Thanks for the laugh anyway.

World without Linux

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's blog entry for Nov 12th entitled "World without Linux" perpetrates the same tired Linux versus Windows agitprop dichotomy that he and other out-in-left-field geeks have been spewing for the past 15 years.

Here is what is really going on in America and much of Europe regarding Linux: mainstream computer users could care less about Linux. It is an also-ran operating system for them. It is barely a player. It hardly registers in their minds. And you know what? This is how it is supposed to be.

Why? It is quite simple. There is no money to be made on Linux, as an operating system. Torvalds baked that into Linux by releasing it under the anti-competitive GPL licensing scheme. The GPL forces its users to share their code with anyone who requests it. This makes it impossible to make any money from the code itself. One has to create services or appliances around the code, then sell these. This cripples Linux for use in capitalistic ventures. Steve Jobs knew this. That is why he picked BSD as the starting point for what became OS X. BSD places no legal or commercial restrictions on its use.

No money = no interest in coding for Linux as a stand-alone operating system. Follow the money. There isn't any money in Linux as an entity in and of itself. Even Ubuntu's Bill Shuttleworth knows says this and said so recently. This is on purpose, by design. And Torvalds wanted it this way.

Professional coders are just like anybody else. They have car loans, and mortgages to pay off. They want their children to go to good colleges. So they want to make a good living writing software code in order to be able to do these things easily. That is why most of them write code for Microsoft and Apple products, not for the .03% of consumer computers that only run Linux.

Ask around. How many people do you know who only run Linux as an operating system? Really? I'd be willing to bet if they count the computers at their jobs, the answer is almost nobody only runs Linux on the computers they use. And the ones who do probably still live in their parents' basements.

But hope springs eternal amongst the fanatic Linux geek crowd, as small as it is. And hope is all they will ever have, too. Try paying your mortgage with hope. Tell your bank you hope you have the payment next month. See what he or she says in response.

One paradox after another exists in the Linux world. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds hoped they were helping to create a ready-made, freely available operating system that anyone could use. Instead they created an elite operating system that is only used by very smart geeks who have more time on their hands than money. In other words, many of them are broke, unemployed, or on disability.

It was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who truly democratized the computer and brought it to the masses. And both of them knew they were doing this, too. They did it by design, and not under some pie-in-the-sky quasi-socialistic licensing scheme either. They did the way all great mass technologies have been brought to the masses: via capitalism. Capitalism has its flaws and problems. But design, manufacturing and marketing of appealing products is one of its great strengths.

Without Gates and Jobs, consumer-oriented Linux wouldn't even have a pulse. It would be another Unix variant that only got used seriously in backend server shops. Kind of like now. The Linux "movement" that people like SJVN have built their slender careers on has been created entirely in opposition to the most successful technology company in the world so far: Microsoft. Absent Microsoft, and the consumer Linux "movement" ceases to exist. No mainstream consumers would ever have heard of it.

Consumer Linux is for losers. And everybody else has gotten the memo already.

World with Linux

APFNews Service Jan. 21, 2013
President Obama today, fresh from his swearing in ceremony as his second term begins as President of the U.S.R.A.(United Socialist Republic of America, formerly the United States of America), officially announced the bailout of Microsoft Corporation at a news conference. "We cannot afford to let Microsoft fail. I.T. jobs in North America have become the staple of our economy since the closing of the last G.M. factory, and those jobs depend upon a solid Windows foundation." said Obama. Bloggers such as Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols have been postulating that the real reason for the long rumored bailout are to insure government snooping back doors in the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system cannot be disabled. In Related news, Red Hat(RHT) stock surged to $228/share in after hours trading, on the news that Red Hat would be re-entering the desktop market. A spokesperson for the recent victor in the server wars said "We never really left the desktop market altogether. It just wasn't our main focus, and we believed Fedora was doing a good job of keeping our presence in the desktop arena." Recent polls show a 21% acceptance of Linux in the desktop market, despite government pressure on vendors to offer only Windows operating systems. Together with Apple's 12% market share, and China's recent rejection, Microsoft has been struggling to hold on to the desktop market.

Fighting FOSS == Blowing air at the sun

Okay, Steve Ballmer, the businessman that can't even right a "Hello, World!" line of code, comes to talk about the death of Linux. :)

This sounds pretty much to me like the mouse teaching the eagle how to fly..

OS vs. the moon

Are you implying that we could have chosen between Linux and affordable space tourism for the masses?

As much as I love my Linux box... I have to admit that would be a tempting choice.

What about now? Things are going well. Someone else could take over kernel development-- in order to free up Linus to go develop "moon rockets for everyone".

Anyone else on board?

SJVN is the Phil Dick of Open Source

Steven, you HAVE to turn this into a book. It would be like "The Man in the High Castle" but for Open Source freaks.

Good, But a Little Off...

Although I really quite enjoyed this, you're taking into account that GNU/HURD would've gone nowhere without the Linux kernel, when actually HURD would have probably matured a lot faster. An awful lot of developers had jumped ship to Linux while they were waiting for GNU to be completed. Without Linux, they would've toughed it out and developed the whole thing. By now, Free Software drivers would probably be available for everything thanks to the large amounts of GPL-compiant-only supporting HURD developers. That would've made things actually play out considerably into Free Software's favor, meaning Microsoft would possibly have LESS grip on the market than they do now.

Nevertheless, it was an entertaining read.