Free software
I think that free software in general is losing momentum and reaching a momentary peak in market share or mind share. I associate this with the lack of business success of most large and prominent Linux and free software. It's upsetting to me; I remember that a few years ago, we may have had a touch of the "historical inevitability" disease which is one of my least favorite characteristics in an ideological movement. Like "Linux will definitely take over the computing world because it's better in every way, and people just have to see this...".
But a large portion of the people who are also a part of the computing world don't share our values. I'm really torn between the point of view that says "So let them suffer" (or perhaps "Shall I at least set my lands in order?" or "As for me and my house, we will worship the Lord") and the point of view that says "I will not enter nirvana before all sentient beings do so" (or perhaps "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations"). Interestingly, the more conventional views "Find out what those people want and figure out how to give it to them" and "Different strokes for different folks" don't even seem to enter the picture for me.
I'm reminded of the relativist view that different peoples (a euphemism for "countries") should have different political systems. And that kind of diversity, I always thought, we don't need.
It's interesting to talk with people who have a less moralistic outlook on things.
Anyway, I noted about a year ago that finally lots of people are trying Linux and not deciding to keep using it, whereas back when I got started in the Linux world in 1995, almost everyone who tried Linux immediately switched over or at least kept on using it regularly. So the people who tried it back then, I've realized, were people who were really disposed to like it, people who were on the lookout for something more or less just like Linux, in search of a better way and a movement to which they could hitch themselves. ("That far within our faith we were all waiting"! Dar Williams.)
So when we saw Linux, it was "Yes I said Yes I will Yes".
And we thought that if other people would just try Linux, they would also immediately recognize what they had been missing. (That was actually what I personally thought about a lot of issues until I was in college; I thought that truth and beauty were much more obvious and more accessible than they are.) But the problem is that there's been so much hype about Linux, for various reasons, that people got spurious expectations that had no connection with the technical reality. So a lot more people with different ideas and backgrounds were moved to try Linux, and many of them actually said they didn't like it! Quite the shock for Linux advocates, that someone might have tried Linux and disapproved.
But these people had (for the most part) different values and expectations in the experience of computing. Many of them were content or at least numb in the proprietary Windows world, and weren't hoping for any of the particular technical virtues which pertain to the free software world.
But it's tragic, because there was a big miscommunication about Linux, where Linux geeks said that Linux was the be-all and end-all of the operating system world at the moment (I recognize that Linux can benefit from new technology, but we could say, as they say in Hemingway, that it was "less bad"; remember what Michael Elkins says about mutt). And we said this because that was actually our experience.
But if people have totally different ideas about what they're up to or about what's virtuous and vicious, it's not completely shocking that they would not see why we said that Linux was so great; certainly Linux is very different, which wasn't emphasized enough in its full generality.
Sometimes I've thought that I didn't want to convince people to like Linux: I wanted to make them be people who would like Linux. From that point of view, when Linux and the general public's values in computing don't get along, then typically or more often the public's values -- not Linux -- need to be amended. (And here I'm speaking only of things that were deliberate decisions, not of things that happen not to have been implemented...) I guess that qualifies as an elitist point of view, but it's not so far from what people say on dvd-discuss: "We have to get the public to see the importance of the public domain", "We have to get the public to see the problems with copyright extensions and anticircumvention legislation". Not "the public doesn't care"; not "the public won't care"; not "the public will believe that the public domain is not important". But "the public domain is important, and we will explain that to the public, and they will see it". Or "Linux is good, and the public will see that".
A rather wise comment in opposition to several of the ideas above:
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salemen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.(Alan J. Perlis, quoted in Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
