Back When Linux Was Fun

[ Thanks to Marcel Gagne for this link. ]

"When are you ever going to grow up?! Act your age!

"When you're a kid, all you want to do is grow up. When you get old enough to realize that being older isn't all it's cracked up to be, people invariably point out that you should start acting your age. I used to throw out the following argument as a retort. "But if I'm 24 now (later it was 30, 37, 42, and so on) and I act this way at 24, then by definition that's acting my age. Right?" I've been using that argument as long as people have been telling me to either grow up or act my age and it still doesn't work. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I'm supposed to have matured and become serious about things.

"And so it is with Linux. It all started out in fun. I know. I've got Linus Torvalds' "Just for Fun" here on my bookshelf. Says so right there on the front cover. Fun. And it was fun. But as with anyone approaching adulthood, Linux was apparently not taking itself seriously enough. If Linux was to conquer the server room, the desktop, the mobile market, the real time processing world, etc, etc, then it had better clean up its act. Add a little polish. Get serious about business. And it did."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Death of the Desktop (a video panel discussion)(Jun 05, 2010)
• Bad Stuff About Facebook, But Not What You Think(May 26, 2010)
• Copyrights, Copywrongs, and Copyconfusion(May 18, 2010)
• Cooking with Marcel(Apr 15, 2010)
• COSSFEST; A Calgarian Tale of FOSS, Betrayal, and Murder(Apr 14, 2010)
• Lucid Dreams and Death By Techno(Mar 28, 2010)
• Fresh Faces, Universal Access, and Really Plain Text(Feb 23, 2010)