“Warning: This article is not against Microsoft, for Linux, or
both, or neither, or vice versa. If you want to bash or advocate
either OS, go to an open forum. In case you haven’t noticed, this
is a Linux site.”
“We have a problem. I think it was about when kernel 2.2 came
out. Suddenly, Linux wasn’t a little toy anymore. It wasn’t the
brainchild of a gifted programmer anymore. In about 2 months, Linux
went from the Internet’s little secret to the newly christened
warrior against Microsoft and the proprietary world. People flocked
to it like lemmings to a cliff; they had no idea what they were in
for. The media swarmed Linux, as if it has some divine power just
because it’s open source. GPL became the magic word; you were
nothing in Linux if you didn’t have that COPYING file somewhere in
there. Newbies became the majority, which turned out to be
where I think we went bad. Then came the god-awful word I don’t
think anyone wants to hear, ‘Average Joe.’“
“Then, companies realized something. They found out that people
pissed off with Windows and MacOS would like Linux. Despite the
fact that Linux is just too much for ol’ Joe here (The mere
presence of the word “system administrator” should have been a big
hint), corporations could get Joe to use Linux, or at least try to.
So, companies popped up. They advertised and sold Linux, gave
customer support, and put the open source part on the back-burner,
using it when people questioned their motives. They took ‘a robust,
complex networking OS’ to mean ‘a simple, easy-to-use single-user
OS.'”