Editor’s Note: What Is Easy and What is Right

By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor

Two headlines jumped out at me this week as overly troll-like. I
would imagine you can guess which ones.

The first was David Coursey’s eWeek article “Bill Gates Is
Not the Next Linus Torvalds.” Yeah, no kidding. And let’s give
a big thanks that “Linus Torvalds Is Not the Next Bill Gates”
either, or we’d start to see snide little notes from the head
kernel developer asking us to stop sharing the code so he can start
making money from it.

The second was an even hotter flame: Iain Ferguson posted a
commentary on ZDNet Australia entitled “Time
for Linux Bigots to Take a Back Seat.”

Hello! If this wasn’t an article calculated to draw out a
flaming mass of vitriol from the open source community, I don’t
know what is.

I’ll let you read the articles, if you haven’t already, and let
you draw your own conclusions. What interested me was the common
thread that permeated both articles, and it wasn’t the rudeness.
Essentially, the central thesis of both pieces was to tell the open
source community to sit down and shut up, you’re getting in the way
of the real businessmen.

Right. Because real businessmen are so reasonable. They
certainly wouldn’t call people names, like oh, say, “a cancer.” Or
throw furniture around. Or launch lawsuits with little to no
evidence just to make a buck on their stock options. Boy, there’s
no one I’d rather buy my software from. Not.

And when the tar brush is applied to the open source community
as a bunch of “bigots,” “heretics,” or what have you, these
incidents, along with countless others, seem to not get mentioned.
Funny…

But these are just knee-jerk reactions to flames. I know when
I’m ticked off. They are accurate reactions, but pretty sophomoric,
just the same.

So let’s go deeper.

If you analyze these articles a bit, the specific commonality is
not such a personal attack: in order for Linux to be commercially
successful, these articles maintain, it is up to the business
community to interact with the customers so they can provide a
single voice to represent Linux for the cool piece of technology it
is.

On the surface, that actually seems reasonable. After all, I am
not a coder, so I leave it up to the developers and the software
engineers to put applications together for me. Separate
functionality is a worthy goal for efficiency’s sake.

Where these columnists go wrong, I believe, is asserting that
the business people should have all of the commercial say
and the open source community should be out of the picture
altogether. We, as a group, are apparently too potentially damaging
for business deals to be left in the process of representing Linux
and open source software.

Okay, I will be the first to admit there are times when I would
like the Linux community to settle down. But should it just be
clamped quiet altogether?

Hell, no.

First off, let’s not forget who’s work this is. In some degree
or another, there is real work and effort involved in putting
together the technology that these business people are so willing
to sell. I cannot pretend to guess all the reasons why people are
motivated to write or work with free and open source software, but
I can safely hazard that while many of these participants may not
have anything to say about this or that, they will certainly want
the right to say something–especially if it concerns the
project into which they put their blood, sweat, and tears.

To even hint that these people should shut up just because you
might not like want they have to say is nothing more than
cowardice. It’s taking the easy way out.

Second off, as I snidely mentioned earlier, the business people
might not always have it right when they represent Linux. For
instance, I personally believe that this whole per-seat licensing
model that Novell uses is a throwback to a legacy business method
that ultimately handicaps sales of Linux because it is forcing
Linux to play by proprietary vendors’ business rules. That’s not
accusing them of being malicious or evil; I just think they’re
wrong. They may think I am wrong. Is that such a horrible
thing?

The bigger issue here is that the traditional business community
has no skillset how to deal with the open source community (and
vice versa). The business folk either get into a mode of trying to
please everyone all at once and they tie themselves in knots doing
it, or they think that any non-business person doesn’t know
anything about business and thus they ignore any input they might
have. In essence, they treat the community as a bunch of free
workers, ready for exploitation.

If the business community wants to get the “heretics” out of the
picture, then start opening a dialog. Not a marketing plan: a real
dialog. Where opinions on each side are shared, listened to, and
maybe acted upon. Use the Internet, hire open source liasons, start
funding projects–the ways you can do this are innumerable.

This will take real effort and it won’t be easy. Easy is handing
out a bunch of goodies at the trade show booth to appease the great
unwashed. Easy is hearing a huge outcry and doubling back on your
initial decision to avoid a conflict. Easy is telling the community
to shut up.

Listening to the community, being honest, and being ready to
say no–those are hard things to do. You might not win over
all of the community. But you will definitely earn their
respect.

Which is what we all want.

---

You may or may not have noticed (I sure did), but LT was
running a slow this week. Traffic has been going up lately and it
was finally taking its toll. So, last night, we moved the site to a
new bigger, faster server. (Linux/Apache, in case you wanted to
check Netcraft.)

If anyone had problems with the slowdown or the switch,
thanks for bearing with us. Keeping up with growth is one of our
challenges, but it sure is a nice challenge to have.