By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
One of the more interesting parts of my job is to go out and
lurk around on Windows community sites and see what they are saying
about, well, us. I do this mostly to see if there’s any new twist
of fear, uncertainty, or doubt about to head our way. I am usually
disappointed, which I’ll explain in second.
As you might expect, it’s the usual rhetoric: “Linux isn’t more
secure, Linux isn’t that fast, Linux is not ready for the
desktop… blah, blah, blah.” What’s disappointing, in a macabre
way, is that none of their objections are original. Theme for
theme, and almost word for word, they parrot exactly what comes out
of the halls of Redmond. It’s all the same stuff. Is there nothing
originally bad to say about Linux amongst the Windows fan-boys?
Linux users, on the other hand, don’t have an übermeister
speaking the Word that Must Be Spoken. When they come up with an
opinion, it’s usually on their own. Granted, others will usually
pitch in and agree and thus establish a bit of group-think. But the
original ideas come from individuals in the community. And that is
a huge advantage.
Someone reading this column might think that Red Hat or Novell
might qualify as our corporate overlords, and think that would
dispute my point. Are you kidding me? As the folks in these
companies (and all the other commercial Linux ventures) surely
know, being big and having bling in this community just makes you a
bigger target.
Even Linus Torvalds does not have universal power over all that
is Linux. He has the kernel–that’s it. If Linus came out tomorrow
and said that the new Linux mascot will henceforth be a llama, the
community would laugh in his face.
Conversely, if Bill Gates came out and said that Windows makes
better spaghetti than Linux, you can bet that within a week, every
pro-Windows user with a blog would have the best recipes for
spaghetti carbonara on their site.
As I said, this single-source of FUD against Linux gives the
Linux community a distinct advantage. Unlike the Windows community,
which has to fend against Linux from all sides (server, desktop,
embedded, high-end) from different organizations (companies,
projects, foundations), all we have to do is consistently point out
the facts of what goes wrong in Redmond. Once.
For example, say the pro-Windows community said that the whole
notion of Linux being free was an illusion. Because, guess what?
They do, constantly. They look at products like Red Hat or SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server and say “See? Not free!
Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!”
But they would not be right. Remember, they are saying that
Linux is not free. Which Linux? All of it? That doesn’t make sense,
because I certainly don’t remember sending anyone a check for my
Kubuntu software. Or the OpenOffice.org software I’m typing this
in. You know what? I didn’t send anyone a check for the Fedora Core
I was running before Kubuntu, either. So, some of Linux is
free, isn’t it? Big, sweeping statements simply do not apply.
(Actually, really all of Linux is free; Red Hat and
Novell are just charging for services and upkeep, but I did not
want to confuse the Windows folks even more than they are.)
Now, let’s turn that around, shall we? We can say, pretty
accurately, that Windows has a huge number of security problems.
Does that affect all of Windows? It certainly does.
You can argue that Windows XP code is different from Windows CE
and Window 2003. You can stipulate that they have totally different
developer teams. Those would be good arguments. Except, at the end
of it all, you are still left with the burning notion that this
insecure code was all produced by one company. One. Responsible for
it all.
And sooner or later, the message will get across: if this one
company is so sloppy in some areas, what prevents it from being
sloppy in others?
C’mon, do I really have to spell out the answer?
Everyday more people are learning that even if there are
problems in certain parts of the Linux operating system, it is not
as reflected upon the whole as problems within Microsoft reflect on
Windows.
Linux is the greater sum of many parts. Windows is just the
product of one company, eventually inheriting all of the faults of
that company.
It’s the curse of the monolithic culture, one that Linux will
never fall prey to.