The Holy Grail of Linux Is Shattered

Let’s tie things to the real world. Were computing no more than a hobby, it would not have gotten much past the Altair. It would remain a very expensive toy, with only occasional use in discovering useful things. Someone found a way to make the computer, and the software, a commodity. That is, it provided a use which actually compelled early adopters to pay the high prices. Early spreadsheets, databases, and word processing is what sold them, until demand and production rose to the point the price could scale down. Now it’s considered a necessity for education, at the least, because PCs are ubiquitous in the world of commerce, as well as academics and government where it was born.

Linux is one giant hobby. The day it is owned and controlled, even if only in fiction, in the eyes of the consuming public, is the day it ceases to be Linux. There are thousands of genuine academic, government, commercial and consumer uses for Linux, so it’s leaking into the public. Still, it’s not a commodity, because it’s never really going to be a single “thing” people can point to and say, “This is Linux.” You and I know what we mean by Linux, but the mass of users will never see that meaning. It requires too much time to grasp it; it’s not something easily inserted into the existing culture. So it remains the domain of those who feel driven to check it out, and those will never be the average Joes and Janes of computer users.

Surely, we have come close in some ways. We have good ol’ RedHat out there as the primary symbol of Linux for industrial use. Novell is trying, and may yet some day remember SUSE should mean high quality with lots of testing — as RedHat does — and still prettier, so as to offer a competing product. These two have an inkling of giving the CEO what he wants so he can sell it to the investors. Then we have a very popular public face for consumers called Ubuntu. Honestly, Canonical is struggling. Users and devoted fans love Ubuntu, but the consuming public are not impressed. Canonical doesn’t listen very well to that audience, just yet. It’s still too much the hobby Linux and not quite the consumer Linux.

It’s very hard to have a foot in both worlds. To commoditize Linux would require someone becoming accountable to the commodity buyers. RedHat and the like have worked out how to listen to industry and government, but listening to the consumer is a lot more work. In fact, it’s an art more than a science. A serious Linux hobby user is, by definition, ill-equipped to hear from the public. Developers more so. If we understand Linux as the mass result of everyone doing their own thing, pursuing some vision of excellence — and often reaching it — developers must surrender any pretense of caring what users want. And if the developers scratch that itch so as to have energy enough to listen to users, they still aren’t going to hear from the commodity crowd. They’ll hear from hobby users, because those know just what they want. Commodity users hardly know, and won’t bother to tell you forthrightly. Indeed, by their nature, they can be sold something they didn’t know they wanted.

I suppose as the commodity culture drifts, it could embrace Linux more readily, but we still have that problem of the commodity buyers who, by their nature, will never quite know how to say what they want. They will know only that they want. Already, they don’t want PCs any more. They want “devices” mostly for entertainment: cellphones, media players, game consoles, and somewhat of the computerized home entertainment system. Getting work done will remain something job-oriented. The PC will become the dinosaur in the homes of the aging Boomers (in the US), and the equipment for information-oriented industry, and little else. About the time Ubuntu figures out what they are doing (if they ever do) they will become much more the darling of those places in the world which haven’t yet had time to grow weary of the PC — the “developing countries.” By then, smart money will be in the Netbook market, because this is the epitome of the commodity PC. Even poor folks can afford a relatively new one. They will be glad to have anything at all, so Linux could find a home there.

The Holy Grail of the consumer-popular Desktop Linux won’t happen in the US, and may not happen anywhere in the Western world. That is, unless some very radical changes come which compel an interest. There are several factors, and they all pertain to the impending economic collapse, and any of several types of civil unrest. To the degree they can, folks enduring big changes externally try to keep things the same internally. As the economy grinds to a halt, those who can will maintain their previous lifestyle. The loss most likely inescapable would be access to new hardware, which would severely limit the uptake of, say, Windows 7. Even if the finance hucksters on the news channels are right, and we are staring to recover, that recovery will not bring back previous profligate levels of consumer spending. Those who still have usable systems will want very much to keep them working as is.

There is a high probability many of them will find a reason to migrate to Linux, provided the Internet survives. Windows and Mac development require money; Linux development might slow down without it, but hardly stop. Nobody expects The Borg of Redmond to simply open their source, though it’s vaguely possible Apple might. A stagnant economy is not a good place for either of them to stay as they are, and I am utterly certain this current economic malaise is long-term. Assuming I’m right, they’ll be lucky to keep the doors open. Even if they do stay alive, most of the folks who have one of their OS products will not be upgrading anytime soon unless it’s cheap. Meanwhile, the threat environment continues to develop because it works off crime profits. Crime profits might drop in terms of buying power, but won’t drop enough to halt crime until long after all the likely prey are dead. So long as there is a way to extract profit from virus and mal-ware production, they will develop apace.

At some point, the patching will stop, if for no other reason than the money to pay the patch makers will go away. Systems such as Linux, which don’t actually require money for patching, will continue to advance. Folks won’t have any place else to go, if they want to keep their systems working and stay on the Net. But what if the reason for those systems dies? Right now, I can’t imagine how the bulk of home PC users will remain interested if the Internet dies or is restricted. The same conditions which crimp the economy will crimp the Net. When the lights go out in the big corporation, they take down their servers, too. The network of networks will most certainly thin out some in the coming months. Worst of all, the consumer bill-paying which supports line maintenance for the Telcos and Cablecos will drop. So the endpoint delivery will thin out inevitably, too. A wifi mesh can replace some of it, if folks have enough hardware on hand, or can get it cheaply enough, to make that happen. It will depend entirely on the random nature of location whether any given average home user will be close to a live mesh. If there’s no Internet, there’s precious little threat from malware.

Worst of all, governments have long made signals they intend to take more active control, never mind economic and social distress. I don’t know all that much about likelihoods in the rest of the world, but in the US this cannot possibly turn out well. The beginning of failure is the utter incompetence of bureaucrats in dealing with something they don’t understand. Just bureaucratizing the system dedicated to understanding the Net (ICANN) has made some mess of things; think what it would be like when you add layers of truly hostile bureaucracy. The very nature of government is the opposite of what makes the Internet possible: a world of voluntary peer communication. Any action at all by any government agency in the US will virtually guarantee the Internet will suffer, particularly in the sense of user experience.

Everything points to a vast swathe of computer owners no longer using the Internet. The ultimate commodity purpose of a PC takes a major hit. Whatever work-arounds arise from these and jillion other factors will once again push it into the hobby/academic/government/business realm. Even those will experience a radical shift with the loss of the current Internet landscape. Linux will survive, may even prosper in a sense, but it will never reach the pinnacle of dominance, or even strong presence, on the consumer desktop. That window is closing fast (pun intended).

Where Linux will prosper, aside from the workplace desktop, will be the underground uses. The line between hacker and cracker has seldom been clear. The kind of people who explore the limits and craft all these amazing advances are typically the same folks who aren’t interested in rules and limits of meatspace. As governments and their proxies here in the West attempt to tighten their grip on all things, they will redefine useful and creative souls into criminals. It is government which will move the boundaries. So long as there is hardware to support networking, networking will be, whether “legal” or not. The heart and life of Linux never quite left the anarchy world, and any mainstream acceptance was mere fashion. To the degree Linux continues to live, no matter who else scrapes off their own brand of product from the smorgasboard of code, it will be the domain of hobby users. Yearning for mass acceptance is little more than the socially awkward geek hoping to impress his “cool” classmates. Is it really worth it?