The Technocracy of War: Part 1 (fiction)

The screens displayed before him were somewhat more colorful than the rest of them, the hundreds throughout the building. Still, it was the same old Bread and Butter, and it was his bread-n-butter.
It was the reason he wore one of the few US Army CW5 rank insignias. All of the advantages, yet few of the hassles which came with wearing the military uniform, and everybody called him “Mister.” He thought back how it all came to be, and still had to pinch himself every now and then to make sure it was real.
Some of it he could only guess, because he didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. There were so many other players in the story.
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Never the playboy, and just barely a billionaire, Brandon Breeze at least had a memorable name which really was his own. Born a nobody, he stumbled upon a series of ideas which carried him from YouTube sensation to Web Tycoon in just a few short years.
But his latest idea would almost surely lose him money. He was ready for that. He was tired, tired of estimating and chasing the front edge of the next fad. It was time to scratch that old itch, that one technology concept which, even if it succeeded, was unlikely to bring him any more fame and fortune.
Everyone was grabbing Linux for their devices, but it had always been a patchwork of things which didn’t always work out. Of course it ran on the devices, and millions of them running some version of it every day proved it was fine, but that “fine” was really “just okay.” It as okay for the broad consumer market on those devices, but seldom penetrated the corporate market. For all the fun which came with marketing hype, there was really only one operator in the Linux field actually making big money: Red Hat.
Governments and corporations were hardly nimble, and wanted today’s hot product with yesterday’s long term reliability. Since that was actually impossible, they often settled for whatever was reliable because, while flash sold to the consumers, it was long term stability which paid the bills in the office. So when Red Hat kept each release of their Enterprise Linux alive for a decade, it allowed the corporate and government bureaucracies to include it into their multi-year planning.
Thus, the one Linux product most hated by an Open Source developer crowd, a crowd infamous for their breakneck pace of rolling development, was the one which didn’t change much for a decade at a time and made all the money. Brandon Breeze wanted just a piece of that market, but with something more internally unified and consistent. He was willing to throw away most of his fortune to see if he could fork some of those brilliant Open Source ideas into an even more stable software project. He chose to build on the BSD base.
Thus was born Bread OS, earning him the hatred of seemingly every BSD aficionado. Sure, he could buy cooperation, but that wouldn’t do him much good in the long run. This thing had to draw its own constituency to survive in Open Source.
He thought it was his final piece of good luck when some government official, whom had encountered in the parks department as a volunteer when he was just a teenager, rose through a series of quick promotions to the head of the Private Prison Bureau. This was a new government office created to regulate what had been a spectacularly abusive system caught in a series of scandals. Just as more governments sought to contract out their prisons to private corporations, they were all caught making CIA torturers seem benign. So it was the chief regulator was his patron saint, because some of the newest crackdowns on “crime and terrorism” netted an awful lot of computer hackers.
For these, there was one chance for an early move to a low security, pre-release environment: They could volunteer to work on Brandon’s new project. It was completely up to Brandon whether the quality of their work earned them any extra points in the system. While there were a few who hated Brandon and his project enough to refuse involvement, there were always a fair number willing to compromise their purist sensibilities and add some code to the project. With exposure, it was only natural a few would become real fans and supporters. Not a few ended up working directly for Brandon at his company.
It all remained completely Open Source, but Brandon followed the Red Hat model of releasing the code, and under the much looser BSD license. He planned to charge for the pre-compiled package, pre-compiled updates, and most importantly, for actual support calls and contracts. The initial plan was to support and patch each release for ten years, and if there was enough demand, longer.
Going head-to-head with Red Hat was no small thing. It had already curried much favor in the various government agencies through cooperative projects. Still, he was confident there was a market for something which was somewhat more secure and stable, with a promise it would be less patchy and subject to the whims of external projects for the GUI and software. Some things could be ported and used as is within a bureaucratic environment, but too much of the wider array of stuff typically included in a Linux distribution tended to shift in bizarre directions for no apparent reason, not to mention with awful timing for other projects depending on it.
At some point Brandon’s project naturally divided into two streams. The basic code base derived from BSD was still called Bread, but the divergent needs of the workstation and servers called for a second line. He called his server branch Toast. His experience taught him playing into the hands of his detractors so directly would eventually raise his project’s profile. Let them wisecrack about servers “being toast” — a common phrase would become his trademark.
Finally, Brandon decided everyone had had enough of the GUI wars. The X server concept was okay for serving a GUI across the network, but that was passé. The code base was a patchwork, as were most major elements in Linux Land, and Brandon was willing to start almost from scratch with a simpler GUI, since eye candy was hardly a concern. While work on Bread and Toast proceeded steadily, Brandon quickly invested the bulk of his man hours coding the new GUI, calling it Butter, of course.