Thanks to David S for
this link.
“Often cultware is an operating system–the stuff that gives a
lump of silicon its personality or lack thereof. The winner and
all-time champeen of computer cultware is, of course, the Mac
operating system. Any technology writer who’s ever neglected to
champion Macintosh as the One True Way has felt the collective
wrath of the MacEvangelist mailing list, an experience not unlike
being nibbled to death by goldfish. If Steve Jobs ever gets a Ouija
board, he should call up L. Ron Hubbard and compare notes on how to
found a 20th-century religion. Say amen, somebody!”
“There is, however, a new jug of purple Kool-Aid in town, and
its name is Linux. Linux is what happens when you combine the ABM
(Anything But Microsoft)ism of the Mac crowd with the
bargain-hardware urges of the PC heathen. Even better, the Linux
crew has a holy jihad groove on: Open source is the bedrock on
which the path of true (i.e., non-Windows) computing was built in
the time of our fathers, and only by turning back to the True Path
will we be saved from the Redmond Menace. Selah.”
“Linux was recently awarded grand prize in the prestigious Prix
Arts Electronica, which normally recognizes groundbreaking digital
art but chose this year to give Linux the award in order to
emphasize that ‘the real material of the Net is the code.’ In
addition, the presenters of the award praised the freely
collaborative (i.e., open-source) fashion in which Linux was
developed. That collaborative genesis has not, by the way,
prevented the Linux hordes from deifying Linus Torvalds, the
developer who laid the foundations–but whoever heard of a cult
without at least a titular head?”