tlug: Linux Users Old and New (was: High-end vs Low-end Linux)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

By the way, I hope you [tjh] won't drop the "philosophical threads,"
as you threaten to do.  The fact that I disagree with you publically
means that I think you are wrong, of course.  But the fact that you
don't change your mind leaves open the possibilities that I'm wrong or
that there's a middle ground.  The "future of Linux" is something you
shouldn't leave to the "old guard" alone.

>>>>> "tjh" == tjhaslam  <tjhaslam@example.com> writes:

    tjh> Now, as for some other people (who shall remain nameless),

Don't do this.  We're grownups here, I hope.

    tjh> their comments on the broader issues are occasionally--if not
    tjh> often--quite blatantly moralistic.  I wonder: is Linux a
    tjh> hobby-horse, an OS, or a religion?

None of the above: it's a community of self-selected individuals.  We
do need morals to work together.  In one sense, it is a very fragile
community, however; a couple of mail-bombs or DNS spoofs can rip it
apart, at least temporarily.  (Cf Cliff Stoll, _The Cuckoo's Egg_.)
In another sense, it is very robust; lots of bullet-proof egos, you
can express any opinion you like on those fragile links.  But if it's
not just flame, you may ultimately be called on to back it up with
code or an URL.  How we deal with these paradoxes is ultimately a
moral issue.

    tjh> Think there is something of an old guard: and think they have
    tjh> more than their right to their private--and even civilly
    tjh> expressed public--opinions about the new class of users.

This is hard to parse, especially since you won't confirm that you're
referring to me.  :-)  I think most of the "old guard" simply express
their opinions without denigrating the opinions of others, but without
a hint of deferral, a long tradition on the Internet.  Nobody has more 
right than the next person to _have_ or _express_ an opinion; some
individual may possess a more correct opinion that another, but we
don't know who.  Exception: everybody has confidence in the "first
person's" opinion or they wouldn't express it.  See above for an
alternative phrasing.  ;-)

    tjh> The recent developments in Linux--the big money following in,
    tjh> the suits who want to make Redhat the default distribution,
    tjh> MS`s not very loving attention--these will profoundly impact
    tjh> and change the Linux community.  In regard to all that and
    tjh> more, people like myself and others--I`ll perhaps unfairly
    tjh> and certainly without his consent include De Hoog--might have
    tjh> something positive to offer even by the current lights of
    tjh> Linux community.

Nobody has denied that there will be an impact, nor that you have
something to offer.  Your requests for attention from the current
developer base are in themselves valuable; lots of developers will get
great satisfaction (and probably some income) from developing apps to
satisfy your needs.  And you'll probably end up working in the
development effort yourselves, if only as beta testers.  (Betcha can't
keep your hands off the code in the end, though.)

However, Linux is a self-selected community of volunteers.  In fact,
today it is many communities, interlocked with yet others.  What I
object to is the notion that the community as a whole "should" respond
to any outsiders' demands.  For one thing, there's John Galt's pledge.

But for another, the primary demands today from those who have been
proselytized and "would like to try Linux" are "ease of use" and
"powerful applications."  Both in themselves are GoodThangs[tm].  Both
are hard to achieve.  One has to admire the sheer scale of systems
like Windows NT or Word, there is enormous power there, and instant
ease of use in some applications.  But responding to those demands is
potentially dangerous, and I for one will do so only where it supports
other parts of the open source program, and not simply to provide ease
of use or power, no matter how valuable to how large a market.  That's
what business is for, anyway ;-).

But that scale implies a huge drain on resources.  I, and I think I
can fairly include Chris Sekiya, believe that that drain on resources
is a threat to our community (not just Linux, but the open source
movement as a whole).  Linux cannot adopt the NT strategy toward
network security, which is to default all services to OFF.  Not if we
wish to maintain the "friendly user" kind of community (get the
manpage for GNU su; you'll know which one it is because it contains a
long rant on "wheel privileges" by Richard Stallman---I don't go that
far, but I sympathize with him) that is the basis for the open source
movement (reread Stallman's GNU Manifesto).  Doing security right in
an open community requires a lot of work, balancing security against
invaders with ease of access for our buddies.

Pressure to get large apps done _now_ is also a threat to the
community.  "Getting the first (Linux) version done" is a threat to
portability, which pisses off our open source compatriots.  Emphasis
on ease of use diverts resources from standards conformance.  Ease of
use is inherently a competitive and individualistic issue---_ours_ is
easier for _you_: efficient UIs are a mix of standard elements (so
that you feel comfortable the first time) with innovative layouts (a
good enough layout may become a standard element in its own right).
But on the network side, that kind of half-baked standard conformance
is a threat to interoperability, a direct attack on our community by
fragmenting it.  MS can get away with it; they have the market share.
Open source developers cannot.

You probably don't feel the urgency that those of us who were there
for the Internet worm (I wasn't, missed it by a few months) or the
Serdar Argic 'bot attack on Armenian newsgroups or the original "Green
Card Lawyer" spam do.  I did see the latter two personally, and read
first-person accounts of hosts and whole local nets shut down by them
in the news.admin.* groups, and watched the Usenet community descend
nearly to civil war ('bots, and anti-bot-bots, and
anti-anti-bot-bot-bots, yuck) over the appropriate response to them.

Maybe you were there, and just don't believe it will happen again.
You may be right.  But some of us do worry about the social aspects of 
the technological development.  While I don't believe small is more
beautiful than big, growth for its own sake is something I'm against,
at least for now.

I've also written that I think tools emphasizing ease-of-use often
lead to technically poor output, at least when coupled with the
"instant gratification" of WYSIWYG, but that's an orthogonal issue to
those of "community."

-- 
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