On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 7:34 AM, Charles Curley
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Oh, lighten up. All of you. There are times and places for "immature"
> humor, and times and places where it is inappropriate. Learn which is
> which. I think that most of the PLUG crew are mature enough to handle
> that.
Whining about how we offend your sensibilities and don't appreciate
your refined sense of humor is hardly the sort of maturity you seem to
be calling for, either. If giving silly names to Microsoft products
was actually funny and not a sad and depressing echo of thousands of
worthless Usenet posts from years gone by, we would have just chuckled
and moved on. This isn't about the maturity level of your "joke" at
all. I chuckle at immature jokes, at least when they're genuinely
funny.
Those of us who comment about this have strong feelings about it,
because the way people communicate and the shared cultural values they
hold (from whence rises humor, among other things) are important.
Calling Microsoft names like that reminds me of an aging hippie
sitting on his lawn making peace signs and ranting about Vietnam.
Sure, those were important and culturally relevant things back in the
70s, but time has moved on. We should learn from history, not try to
live in it. Holding on to the particularly worthless and caustic
parts of it is a recipe for a small, dying, insular community rather
than a strong and vibrant one.
Linux and the community behind it was indeed involved in a battle of
ideas and culture in the 90s, one not so far from the one the hippies
were fighting in the 70s. But a lot of people on the front lines had
a distorted view of the overall strategy and movement of things.
Casting the fight as 'Linux vs. Microsoft' was a popular view, but
ultimately missing the point. It was not a fight against Microsoft,
but a fight against corporate control of how computers could be used.
It was a fight for the freedom to tinker with things, to explore how
they worked, and to modify them. Linux let you do the things with
your computer that *you* wanted to do. It kept computers from
becoming only reconfigurable appliances, like video game consoles for
productivity apps.
Linux won that war absolutely. It's cheaper, easier, and more fun to
hack on computers now than ever in the past. It also blew the
shackles off of Windows use. You can download development tools for
free that let you write low-level device drivers, fancy graphical
applications, or anywhere in between. You can easily port Linux apps
to Windows and use the same command line environment, if you want.
Windows PowerShell gives power users a first-rate command line
interface to the guts of Windows. The days of thousand-dollar
development seats required to do anything beyond point-and-click are
gone, and no one even wants them back!
There are still battles to be fought for hackability and freedom to
tinker, but the problem is that Microsoft and Linux aren't at the
front lines of any of the interesting battles anymore. Linux is the
new establishment, hanging out there with Microsoft as part of "the
man". It's not run by hackers for the love of tinkering anymore, and
hasn't been for some time. It's big business now, and that's awesome
and exciting, but in different ways than before. All the time you
spent hacking on Linux for fun can now pay your bills, and can still
be fun, but when something starts paying a lot of money out to a lot
of people, it stops being the vanguard of anything truly innovative or
game-changing.
The new horizon, at least as far as I see, is the intersection of
software with the physical world. The computer I first installed
Linux on is now far less powerful than a system-on-chip the size of my
fingernail that costs a few cents and uses a mere couple of watts of
power. Your new car has more networked computers in it than most
homes. The phone in your pocket may have been considered a
supercomputer a decade ago. All these little computers can sense the
world, and they can interact with it. It's never been cheaper to fab
a prototype circuit board and it's never been easier to source in
small hobbyist quantities the materials you need to build stuff.
Where did the original MIT hackers get started? A model railroad
club. Hacking has never been just a computer thing. It certainly
hasn't ever been just a Linux vs. Microsoft thing. That's not even
remotely relevant anymore. Microsoft still dominates office software,
but that's okay. How dull is that stuff?! Why would you want to hack
on that for fun? Where's the future in it? How many of you are
remotely interested in writing boring desktop apps for office workers?
That's legacy stuff. That's the new Cobol.
Linux is a tool you can use to do cool stuff. Is that new gadget you
bought locked down? So what! Make your own, there's plenty of
resources to do that now, and it's only getting cheaper and easier as
more people empower themselves. It's a wonderful thing that companies
can provide cool gadgets that work as appliances, but what's even more
wonderful is that you don't have to rely on them or those gadgets to
do what you want.
Anyway, that's what my disparaging of "M$ Turd" was about. I wasn't
just being a stick in the mud.
--Levi
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