[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[John L. Bass]

Daniel Herrington <nclug at iherr.com> writes:
> Like you, Linux isn't my first OS of choice (anymore). I'm curious  
> what configuration of FreeBSD you're running now, and on what  
> platform. I'll share some of my experiences with Linux.

I've been a UNIX advocate since the mid 1970's, and a Mac advocate
concurrently since the early 1980's. The biggest problem with the
sucess of FreeBSD, and later the success of Linux, was that UI and
operating system innovation stopped dead for 30 years ... failing to
advance the art as hordes of programmers set out to clone what should
have been a dieing UNIX/X11 standard, and kept it revived for 20 years
past it's point of innovation on a desktop.

The strong advocate market place, unwilling to simply access MSWin
platforms, failed to innovate while keeping dollars out of the tills
for for-profits like Apple willing to pay programmers to innovate, and
well.

When Steve decided to shut down Next (with it's Mach kernel) and take
the technology back to Apple in the form of OS-X I was thankful that
someone would continue to innovate again, and afford to pay programmers
to do an excellent job at advancing the state of the art. The iPhone,
is a long string of excellent advancements that the industry follows
Apple to keep pace with.

While I used Mac's as my desktop up thru 1997, I switched to SGI Indigo
and Indigo 2 machines up until 2002, before adopting a Redhat Linux
desktop (and later Fedora). My G3 Mac sits in the corner, seldom used
these days ... although it's been very tempting to get a G4 Mac with
OS-X off ebay.

The lack of commercial applications and difficulty of use has a number
of roots, probably most notably RMS's preaching that OSS movement must
put any proprietary software out of business. To that exent, the great
purge of "non-free" software from Linux distributions was a huge mistake
as it clearly said that programmers wanting to get paid for their work
were not welcome to contribute reduced functionallity shareware or
trial version in binary only formats.

While the OSS movement has a number of key products to point to, it must
be noted that these large projects have been funded to a great extent
by for-profits wishing to "beggar thy neighbor" by their gifts to the
OSS community. Linux OS, Open Office, Xorg, and many other examples
are staffed by paid professionsals in large companies that have as their
"day job" to support their OSS projects for use on their employers hardware.
To a large extent this has been ment to dig deeply into the profits of
Microsoft, SCO, Novel, Oricle and appear being the good guys by supporting
OSS projects and hurting the competition. Looking past that, and their
motives, generally means that as soon as the self interest in OSS is
gone, they are much more likely to revert to their product differentiation
corporate goals and contribute less to OSS projects that help remaining
competitors.

That the linux GUI is finally catching up to the Mac, some 25 years late,
isn't a good thing. It means we have missed 25 years of ground breaking
innovation.

John