Linux is a product of the technology oligarchy.
Were this not so, I wouldn’t even mention Linux — ever. I don’t belong to the technology elite, but they aren’t alien to me. At the critical juncture in my life when it was time to start down that path, I had no contact with computers. By a long circuitous route I ended up far more obsessed with something that parallels technology in some ways, but is focused on human nature itself. I’m more a hacker of human nature than of computers, and by extension I study reality itself in terms of human perception. By the time computers became affordable to folks like me, it was too late. I could never quite generate the interest in computer science at that level.
But it did provide a marvelous tool for what mattered most to me. As people and society and the economy became more reliant on computers, I naturally studied them as a critical tool of human existence. At some point, my shepherd’s instinct led me to understand enough to help folks with computer problems. It was more like playing, actually, because it was so much fun to mess with fancy technology toys. The reason I bumped into Linux in the first place was because my interest in computer technology as the infrastructure for a growing social phenomena with too many names, but you’ll recognize the label “Hacker Culture.”
Strictly speaking, “hacker” is more about exploration than destruction, but breaking stuff is a primary means of learning the limits. I am not a hacker in that sense, though I have done some hacking. Most serious computer hackers are just playing, but it’s an obsessive playing that consumes the soul’s resources. It’s the kid that never quite grows up because nothing in his life requires it. Indeed, something about the opportunities makes him a demigod. Linux in particular, and Open Source in general, caters to that obsession.
It was inevitable that some few would see the commercial opportunities, but profit is best served by enslaving the hackers, not setting them free. In Open Source Software, there is only a faint awareness of profit potential, but the real god is some internal vision of computing purity. Some portion of those employed even by the likes of Microsoft will always be hackers somewhere inside the structured necessity for meeting the Merchant Community’s demands.
You and I are not likely part of either community. It’s like watching a very dirty truce between two of slimiest, most corrupt nations you can imagine. Each is corrupt in their own unique way, each unable to exist without the other, each determined to seize upon any opportunity to gain some advantage. They damned sure don’t care about us.
But if you ask the Hackers, they’ll constantly whine about being at a disadvantage. They can never quite force the Merchants to go along with their pure vision. “We are oppressed because we do not rule, as is our natural right.” But the Merchants also believe the lie that they do rule. The Merchants outnumber the Hackers simply because the economic power of captive consumers is under the Merchants’ thumb. But the Hackers exert an influence far beyond their numbers. That’s because there would be no technology without them.
The hackers gave birth to the technology. The governments/merchants funded the incredibly expensive start up of things, but when they tried to collect on their investment, it was too late to corral the hackers. The Hacker Culture grew up and stood solid before the computers were ready for general use. While it has morphed over the decades, it remains fundamentally the same. So because they give life to the technology and all the advancements, they stand at a very strong point of leverage. The only reason Linux remains so big (in the virtual sense) is because of who stands behind it. The Hacker Culture has no real constituency but themselves and a few wannabee fanboys, their numbers remaining quite small.
There is a good chance this will change soon. Granted, the shift will probably be moderated through that strange beast — the Linux Merchants — it could still see Linux use rise dramatically. It’s not chasing rabbits to note that Google’s Android runs the risk of pushing Linux over the line. It’s already the Linux that isn’t Linux because you have to root your device to do anything Linux-y with it. Only a few would even know about that, so we can point to Android as an example of too much compromise with government/merchant demands. But as long as people have any significant use for PCs and laptops with general computing capabilities, that locked-down crap can’t take over completely. And it’s the looming general economic malaise that is key to what we see next.
The world as a whole will slip to lower levels of economic operations. That is, a larger percentage of their resources will go to just staying alive. Generations of social habits won’t die overnight, so for at least another few decades, even if the economy stays at low ebb all that time, you won’t see too many folks drifting back into a simpler lifestyle of subsistence farming, for example. Instead, they’ll struggle to keep using the same infrastructure of life. When necessary, they’ll keep alive older equipment in a market we now see only in the Third World.
And we have to wonder about the operating system and software they’ll run on them. For now, the increasingly effective efforts to end piracy, and the efforts to make running legacy versions untenable, seem to be working. You probably don’t know about the thriving market in vulnerabilities. That is, someone has knowledge of a system security flaw in the software and sells that information for a price. Government agencies use those markets, but that information has to come from somewhere — all “leaks” are permitted in some way by the secret intentions of those who run the system. Most of those leaks are for legacy software no longer supported, but often still in popular use. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to destroy what they consider their worst competitors: older versions of Windows still quite popular. In other words, I am suggesting that the Merchant oligarchs are pushing too hard, taking positions impossible to maintain because their hubris won’t admit that the market is going to crash that hard. Linux is becoming very competitive in certain ways.
Whether or not the cultural shifts kill off the whole general-use PC thing is another question. Mobile devices are taking over in many ways, but the current user base of PCs remains substantial. Maybe it will be the Swan Song of the Linux Desktop to win only because the game was about over. The mobile devices are ever more locked-down against hacking and the vast hordes of consumers are simply getting used to it.
Maybe.
