Linux Becomes Female 4592

But maybe in a world where people too often trust trappings than something concrete, the real way to break things is to not follow into the trappings.

Microsoft has dominated in part because the old IBM saying has morphed into "You can't make a wrong decision by choosing Microsoft". They aren't analyzing what is there, whether it's the best choice, or whatever, they are choosing a Brand Name that everyone knows.

Just the other day, I got mentioned on the radio for making a comment about a website some months ago. It was a flippant comment of mine, but it was based on the very real concept that the internet lets us speak, so when people turn around and coat those words with flash and gloss under the impression that that's the only way the words have importance, it negates the power of the internet.

Of course the revolution doesn't happen immediately. But it will never happen so long as people think they need to be someone else in order to have value for their words or their work.

LInux is really a pretty wide field. We have terribly commercial parts of it, such as Red Hat, and areas where commerce really isn't a big thing, Debian and even Slackware. But the names reflect a culture, and the names reflect a world that isn't all that commercial. Someone puts together a program that helps you put your records into digital form, and calls it Gramofile. They've released it to the world, they've let the source code loose, so they will see very little return on their work. The value of the program is in it's helpfulness to others. Indeed, they may have written it for themselves and that's good enough return on the investment of their time; if anyone else gets use of it, that's icing on the cake. But if they put a quirky name on it (I wouldn't call the example quirky, but there are quirky names), it puts a bit of themselves on the program, it may let it stand out from others doing basically the same thing.

Since they aren't going to get money for the work, then there's no incentive to make it "user friendly" or give it a name. If someone really feels the need, the sourcecode is out there for someone to make some business like OS. All they have to do is write it, and of course respect the GPL.

Does it work? That's the key thing. I've run Slackware for four years, would have run Linux earlier if I'd had the hardware, and yes indeed it does work.

I fit the Linux culture. I'm not anit-Microsoft, but I do see neat things in open software. I was put off by the name "Slackware" originally, but in tasting some other distributions I'm put off by the software arrangement. I like the fact that out of the box Slackware names the system Darkstar, and to know that Patrick digs the Grateful Dead, which ultimately can link to all kinds of things.

The small computer field was fed in part thirty years ago by the counterculture. A lot of the early Big Names came from it, were influenced by it, were linked to it. Now we have an operating system that is in part a counter-OS, and yet it's also pretty mainstream, just like so many parts of the counterculture are mainstream.

Michael