Re:The Poetterisation of GNU/Linux (2013)
by akkartik on Sunday February 14, 2016 @02:14PM
(#11099553)
I'm sympathetic to the sentiment that trying to acquire market share has caused Linux to forget its roots and end up in a sort of uncanny valley. However it's important to understand the forces that led to it so that we can do better in future.
Amassing a large user-base is a highly misguided aspiration for a purely academic field like Free Software. It really only makes sense if you're a commercial enterprise trying to make as much money as possible. The concept of "market share" is meaningless for something that's free (in the commercial sense).
It took me _years_ to internalize the importance of status in human relationships. Even if no money exchanges hands, much of human endeavor is motivated by the gain of status.
We hackers have this strange blind spot: we pride ourselves on focusing on only what is real, but we forget that 'real' money is just a social construct, a reified form of status. It's utterly blind to focus on this one form and ignore the real thing.
Open source software is just geopolitics by other means.
Amassing a large user-base is a highly misguided aspiration for a purely academic field like Free Software. It really only makes sense if you're a commercial enterprise trying to make as much money as possible. The concept of "market share" is meaningless for something that's free (in the commercial sense).
It took me _years_ to internalize the importance of status in human relationships. Even if no money exchanges hands, much of human endeavor is motivated by the gain of status.
We hackers have this strange blind spot: we pride ourselves on focusing on only what is real, but we forget that 'real' money is just a social construct, a reified form of status. It's utterly blind to focus on this one form and ignore the real thing.
Open source software is just geopolitics by other means.
Related link: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/02/11/minimum-viable-superorg...