People make a big deal about Linux. Canberra just had linux.conf.au so it seems a particularly topical time to stir the pot. Because right now the afficiandos of Open Source have had their spirits refreshed and their fingers set on a course for an internet cold war. I mean, they go batpoop crazy and start up enraged fundamentalist bents over why their way of binary banality is going to save the world from the assmunting monopoly of Microsoft.
Hey boffins, most people who buy prebuilts couldn’t know or care about coding the kernel, they just want to send pictures of their filthy offspring to Grandma in a way that is as unambiguous as possible. Sure, we malign these sorts for being too easily duped by ad men, trojan asses and virus coonts, but then the business opportunities the mooks feed is what leads to investment to increase internet power ya dummies. If you like your java app that traces your IRC social network plotted to a graph with colour coded continental relationship lines with interdependency density, then you need these goofs and their disposable cash to make broadband cheaper. You could convert them, but I’ll share that nugget of bile shortly.
Anyway, I’m a windows man. Not for any particular reason, just the bias of my tertiary degree and a simple insistence that I can tweak my muffin just fine with clicks as opposed to parsers. I don’t have anything to prove. This socialist fervour over freeing the world via open source just turns you from curious social oddities into religious freaks that would turn the most staunch MSN babbler into a luddite overnight.
Sure, you’re hellishly useful in showing the way forward into innovation. That Microsoft is only just unveiling the new version of Office and it’s new spam filtering abilities as an evolution is testament to their knuckle dragging bludgeon of market share vs onus to compete. As long as you keep churning out the clever for free, they’ll keep harvesting it for their own and keeping you in the shadows. Anyone who knows the story of DR-DOS and suicide knows that.
You will never truely win because you never talk in a way that the majority of users would understand and therefore seek and adopt. There is too much RTFM and not enough SFTI. Yes, I just invented an acronym, it stands for Spoon-Feed-The-Idiots. You will never bypass Microsofts iron grip of dumbing it down, the very thing you malign so much.
And never mind anything Microsoft might say in offence to Open Source, you don’t need to have that argument in order to win it. The moment Fuhrer Ballmer danced on stage he lost the layman’s interest. Sure was funny though, hey Steve, we were laughing AT you ya dumbass.
I thought Open Source was beyond the concept of competition. You weren’t building better software to compete because there was no prize to be won. It was aboutr doing a job and doing it the best way, a way that was inclusive. The Open Source gurus were in a state of technocratic enlightenment, letting their calm ocena of their engineering nouse bring El Dorado to us all. By entering into the argument, you empower the greedy agenda of those that disrespect your efforts, you make yourself out to be the virus propagating bum anarchists they would make you out to be.
Just be better, because you are better.
As for the real future in computer use innovation, I say it is the introduction of an ‘All Of The Above’ button, as this glimpse at Davey OS will attest to.
I CAN’T DECIDE, I WANT ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!