[PLUG-TALK] World Domination 201

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>
> The greatest weakness, and the greatest /potential/ strength, of
> Linux is sysadmin.  Almost everybody in the industrial world uses
> the world's most largest and most complex computer system daily;
> no, not Google, but the public switched telephone system.  And 
> users accomplish this using little more than a dozen buttons.  And
> it Just Works, because the user is not forced to master the details
> (but yes, you can get Asterisk on your Linux box and dive into them
> if you want).
>   
Ah ... but look at how long this took to happen, and the circumstances 
historical and economic, the people that became very rich, and the 
people that got ruined psychologically and financially and legally in 
the process. It's a long history -- Bell's first telephone was in 1876 
-- and it's well documented, just like the long and equally complex saga 
of Edison, Tesla and the spread of electric power, and the development 
and spread of the piano and of radio as "home entertainment centers."

But I do want to make a couple of points about this, given that I have 
experienced a couple of the points along the way personally.

1. The telephone, like the telegraph, electric power, radio and the 
automobile, followed an *industrial* pattern of adoption. First they 
emerged as either laboratory curiosities or from some inventor 
scratching a personal itch. In the case of Linux, this is Linus Torvalds 
-- he is our Alexander Graham Bell, our Thomas Alva Edison (or Nicola 
Tesla, if you prefer).

2. The growth of the telephone, like the others, was a long process, 
from the initial invention to household and business necessity. That 
transition involved truly vicious financial and legal battles -- you can 
look them up in the history books. Suffice it to say that Bill Gates is 
*not* by any stretch of the imagination atypical in the way he behaves 
towards his fellow man, either those who choose to compete with him in 
the business arena or those who are uneducated, impoverished or 
otherwise unfortunate through no fault of their own.

Does Linus Torvalds strike anyone on this list as being of the same 
personality type as Gates, Edison, Carnegie or Henry Ford? For that 
matter, what about Eric Raymond or Richard Stallman? When you come right 
down to it, like it or not, it's about making a lot of money in a hurry 
through any legal means and sometimes legally questionable means. To be 
blunt -- is Eric Raymond willing to face personal, psychological and 
financial ruin to see Linux beat out Windows and MacOS? Or is his essay 
a plea for *others* to do this? Sadly, that's the way *I* interpreted 
his essay, which is why I started this whole discussion.

3. The initial telephone network was manually operated. At some point, 
someone actually said (I don't have the exact reference but it's 
probably easy to find), "At the rate the telephone system is growing, in 
a few years, everyone on the planet will need to be a telephone 
operator!" So the hand crank telephone and buildings -- yes, whole 
buildings -- full of telephone operators gave way to the rotary dial 
telephone and whole buildings full of relays and other electromechanical 
switching equipment. One analogy here might be the phase-over of the 
Internet from a mix of email, gopher, ftp and telnet protocols used 
mostly by researchers to the World Wide Web, browsers, home pages, etc.

4. This is where I come in to the movie. :) Do you remember when 
telephones had rotary dials? I do. Do you remember when many people had 
"party lines"? Do you remember when you didn't go down to a store and 
buy a telephone, you leased it from a monopoly business? Do you remember 
five-digit and three-letter/four-digit telephone numbers? Do you 
remember when only local calls were made automatically by the equipment 
-- long-distance calls required operator intervention? Do you remember 
the phase-over from rotary dials to touch-tone? The phase-over from 
AXE-4455 to AX3-4455 to 203-4455 to 1-800-IFLYSWA? The phase-over to 
first being able to dial long-distance calls inside the USA yourself and 
then international calls? The "Captain Crunch Whistle", the "Blue Box" 
and "Phone Phreaks"? The 110-baud modem? :)
> Linux can be just that easy.  It is secure, virtualizable, and 
> naturally accomodates communication and broadband and distributed
> tasks.  It is great for infrastructure tasks.  Because it is free
> as in freedom, it is potentially infinitely refactorable.  So the
> sysadmin tasks can be distributed among many providers and around
> the world, with a highly efficient division of labor between human
> and algorithm.  So the master carpenter can use her computer without
> worrying an more about it than the composition of the motors in her
> power tools.  All it will take is a non-arrogant, service-oriented,
> and scaling-minded attitude in a sysadmin service provider, and
> Linux will become the easy choice for most (and that provider will
> become filthy rich while doing good).
>
> We are still figuring out how to penetrate deeply into a world that
> is still mostly proprietary.  If the GPL isolationists have their
> way, we will stay separated from most of the world by a wall of
> self-imposed incompatability.  If the GPL appeasers have their way,
> we will watch our code get nibbled away by larcenous schemers and
> enclosed in proprietary domains. 
>
> A third strategy, engulf and devour, has been used successfully by
> our principle competition, and we should study this strategy and
> apply it ourselves.  We can swallow whole all the proprietary
> lumps like DRM, and if the rest of our system works well, we will
> dissolve them over time.  It is all about economic advantage and
> personal convenience - if it is cheaper and more fun to avoid DRM,
> it will go away.  With the right tools, creation is more satisfying
> than consumption.  If open communities become the creation platform
> of choice, then the minority that favors the DRM paradigm will stay
> small and toothless.
>
> So it is up to us, not to focus on DRM and what we reject, but to
> focus on our strengths and amplify them, while correcting our own
> self-imposed weaknesses.  We will not get there by pretending to
> be Microsoft; we have much better to offer.
>   
I don't want to rain on your parade or anyone else's. Yes, it *could* 
play out that way. Yes, there *are* creative communities today, and some 
of these will emerge into the mainstream as examples of what freedom can 
accomplish. Yes, there are "benevolent dictators" like Guido Van Rossum, 
Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, Matz (the creator of the Ruby language) and  
large creative communities self-organized around them. There are 
millions of people who use Linux and other open source software, either 
deliberately by choice on their own equipment or under the hood on the 
Internet in LAMP-backed web applications.

There are some "successful" business models involving open source 
software that are less brutal than the typical 19th and 20th century 
model I described above. And yes, there are talented software engineers 
willing to give away moderate amounts of their time to create valuable 
software and then give the software away, or test the gifts of other 
such engineers. But that's *not* the way the telephone system went from 
Alexander Graham Bell to "Just Works". As Damon Runyon once said, "The 
race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong -- but 
that's the way to bet!" :)

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.