Two weeks ago I wrote a column on Linux and said, “Linux distributions are like rock’n’roll bands: Everyone has a favorite one, with reasons that are more emotional than anything else.” My basic point was that Linux distributions are fragmenting and that the trend might not be good for the world of open source, a world I find exciting and provocative.
As you might expect of any column on the Web that didn’t claim that everything in open source is perfect and everything in the world of Windows-centric software was terrible, evil and about to disappear, I quickly found myself lost under an avalanche of e-mail, more than 90 percent of it negative. This week, I’ll share some of the printable e-mails and respond to them.
Some of the letters were pleasant, informative, and well-reasoned, like this one from Rob Bos: “Your recent Tribune note on Linux shows a few minor misconceptions that I’d like to clear up for you in the three minutes I have before heading to class. Linux distributions are often intended for different niches and as such engender a wide variety of designs based on the same discrete set of packages that the rest of the Linux distributions use. Think of it as a set of different automobiles targeted for different markets dependent on what is essentially the same set of concepts and parts. Linux distributions are typically only about 30 percent GNU code – the rest is either licensed under the GPL but not officially associated with GNU or licensed with BSD-style licenses. The XFree project, for instance, one of the largest portions of a typical Linux distribution (weighing in at 20-30MB for the binaries) is BSD-style. There isn’t a heck of a lot of Linux hype – it can back up a whole lot of the claims being made against it.”
Rob’s points were sensible, arguable, worth discussing. I wish I could say that of much of the rest of the e-mail the column provoked. Some of the most common (publishable) words used to describe me were stupid, clueless, moronic and so on.
As I noted that most of the complaints in my inbox were about me, I remembered the Mac Marines, the army of Macintosh enthusiasts who used to bombard columnists’ inboxes should they dare to infer that everything about Apple Computer might not be perfect. Not great, perfect. I once received a note from a Marine warning me not to report the existence of a Macintosh bug “because if it got out, it might hurt the company.
Now that Linux has supplanted the Macintosh OS as the favorite operating system for people who hate Microsoft, many of the same attitudes expressed by the Mac Marines have been picked up by a group I’ll call the Penguinheads. Most of them don’t argue facts (and I love arguing facts, guys); they argue against my right to express a point of view. If I point out that Linux isn’t as easy to use for non-programmers as a mainstream OS should be, I’m accused of being on the Microsoft payroll. If I point out that the existence of KDE and GNOME, although both are worthy packages, might cause some confusion among Linux newbies, I receive a note telling me I’m “Bill Gates’s pawn.” Anyone who has read this column regularly is familiar with my criticisms of Microsoft products and practices; why has no one from Redmond written me that I’m a pawn of Linus Torvalds.
The wonderful thing about open source gurus like Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond is that they’re inspired idealists who want to change the world. And in small ways so far, they are. But as people like Torvalds, Stallman, and Raymond become deified in the new Church of Open Source, any disagreement leads to accusations of infidelity. Most of the hundreds of people who wrote to me wrote as if the fight for Linux was a holy war, in which disagreement is bad for the cause. I’m under the impression that the idea behind democracy is that disagreement is a good thing. As long as Penguinheads want to advance a world in which everybody believes that everything open source is by definition good and everything created under any other development system is by definition evil, Linux will never become a mainstream OS. Isn’t Linux as a viable alternative what the Penguinheads want? Or is the truth that many in the Linux community are elitists who want to keep their beloved OS to themselves?
More answers
Our final Final Debug contest, completed last week, asked what were the eight socket functions built into Perl. But wait, there’s more. As many correspondents noted, Perl 5 brings the number to a full 13, as listed in the definitive “Programming Perl:” (O’Reilly & Associates, $44.95)
accept
bind
connect
getppername
getsockname
getsockopt
listen
recv
send
setsockopt
shutdown
socket
socketpair
