Thanksgiving for a Continued Thriving Linux FOSS Harvest

Happy Thanksgiving (Image Credit: Mepiscommunity.org)

More than ever, we need to give thanks as part of our American yearly custom of celebrating Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.

It's not about the harvest.  Nor is it about the President 'pardoning' a Turkey or religious proclamations made by Church priesthood in any secular sense.

No, we should not lose sight of what initially formed as the 'Pilgrim' holiday during the early 1600's in New England.  Pilgrim and Puritan immigrants from England brought their traditions to New England in the form of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving celebration.

It might make more sense to have such celebration following when the 'real' harvest bounty occurs, but history being what it is, the date chosen for Thanksgiving changed over time, most recently to the fourth Thursday of November from the last with a resolution made by President Roosevelt in 1941.

In terms of what we should be thankful for in the Linux Community, I feel the strongest consideration should go to the Gnu Public License from which a great bounty or code base sprang forth.  This bounty remains the stock of open source software that keeps giving of itself over and over, thanks to one Richard Stallman.  We should never forget that without such a novel licensing framework in place, the success of a Linux kernel and its 'moving parts' in the open source 'factory' would not have been possible.

So, remember as you celebrate this holiday that giving back to the FOSS community is essential, or, we would still be under the rigid control of monopolistic proprietary software vendors the likes of Microsoft and Apple.

Thanksgiving wishes go out for a continued thriving Linux FOSS harvest! -- Dietrich

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Linux Advocates and Freedom Advocates

by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Some Linux advocates have had the bitter experience of being labelled "faux" advocates and dismissed as being invalid advocates who must be ostracised. People who are Linux advocates arrive from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, either political, philosophical, or whatever. Some Linux advocates engage in parallel activism in the areas of feminism, government transparency, censorship/free speech, and science, to name just a few. Those do not interfere with the goal of advancing Linux, or GNU/Linux.

It is disheartening to see and I regret to say that some Linux advocates get muzzled because to them, GNU/Linux advocacy needs to accompany a broader agenda, which may or may not convey some of the same principles adhered to by GNU/Linux luminaries.

It is fair to say that Linux is apolitical because the project's founder rarely mixes his technical work with political burden. But if by "Linux" one refers to a broader system, for instance GNU/Linux with some vast desktop environment like KDE, then it is fair to say that freedom advocacy deserves plenty of room. KDE and GNU both market themselves as being pro-freedom, more so than Linux.

When Linux advocates argue that freedom takes precedence over power (as in the power of a program), they should not be dismissed as "radical", "extremist", etc. It is most likely that these people actually represent the views of many Linux developers, where by "Linux" they refer to a system far bigger than a kernel. Whether immersion of politics in software contributes to infighting, division and alienation of corporate participation is a subject which merits debate. But open discussion is definitely compatible with the underlying strengths of Free and Open Source software.

-- Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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GNU and Linux: It's Not Just About Attribution But Also Philosophy

by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Branding is the key

An increasingly-tiring debate over the naming of the (GNU/)Linux operating system was recently rekindled. It occurred rather virally after several Web sites and longtime authors who habitually cover the subject of (GNU/)Linux had weighed in again, opening an ageing jar of worms.

Like many flamewars in the GNU and Linux world, we should accommodate these, not suppress them. With suppression -- after all -- moral advantages are lost. It is widely understood that no corporation wants to project infighting, but in the Free software world corporations are not central. Likewise, branding is not the top priority.

What the argument over the names often boils down to is philosophy, not just attribution or credit. GNU was created with software freedom in mind. Linux, in its genesis, was proprietary until it adopted the GNU GPL licence and then became mainstream. A former colleague of mine was the first to distribute GNU and Linux -- a practice which over time saw the system's name abbreviated to "Linux". The motive for this abbreviation is an interesting subject which merits its own in-depth research.

Rather than argue about what the system should be called we should pay attention to Katherine's post  and ask ourselves, what is it that should be prioritised? Freedom or popularity? These are not mutually-exclusive and describing the problem as such would be a false dichotomy. But practice suggests that those who insist on calling the system just "Linux" are happy to de-emphasise the values originally incorporated into GNU in 1983.

Richard Stallman famously said, "Freedom is having control of your own life. Power is having control over someone else's life." To a lot of people -- yours truly included -- freedom and justice are the goal, software is part of the means. For those to whom branding wars are of greater interest, the "Mac versus PC" (or Apple-branded PC versus Windows-saddled PC) is right around the corner. Or as I often put it, those who do not like Microsoft go to Apple, whereas those who do not like proprietary software turn to GNU/Linux or BSD.

Distributions of GNU/Linux bring yet more brands into the debate, not to mention all the pertinent components that belong neither to GNU nor Linux. Distributions adopt different philosophies which often reflect the views on their founder, e.g. Mark Shuttleworth in the case of Ubuntu and Patrick Volkerding in the case of Slackware Linux, Inc. The brands we use to refer to software often reveals something about our preferences, philosophy, likings and convictions.

Rather than fight over naming of systems let us reason about the innate values each of these brings. Brands are instruments of association, reputation, kinship, and/or status. We need to go deeper and explore what actual substance each of these has got. And we can choose the brands which suit us best.

- Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Cookie Cutter Distros Don't Cut It

by Dietrich Schmitz

There's no question that Richard Stallman's great vision caused an explosion of open source wealth and sharing around the world.

We see the by-product of his genius.  The ongoing cultivation of collaborative community development continues unabated.  It's all good.  Proponents appreciate having choice and so do I.

But when one surveys the landscape and takes a tour of Distrowatch.com and comprehends how many individual Distros there are, it begins to seem like quite possibly something else is going on.

The Distrowatch rankings is a veritable weather barometer of trending Distros both on the rise and fall. It is watched like a stock market ticker tape to divine what is happening daily, weekly, monthly in the Linux World.

But is there a flip side to having so many Distros from which to choose?

What effect does one more spin variant of Debian or Ubuntu have?

Does having more 'me too' cookie cutter Distros help the ecosystem or might they dilute the strength of those that precede them causing confusion and less innovation?

I have my concerns that while differentiation is potentially good, copy cat Distros may be doing a general disservice.

What are your thoughts?

-- Dietrich

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Linux or GNU/Linux: Is the Distinction Worth Preserving?

by +Katherine Noyes

As a young reporter just starting to cover Linux not so very many years ago, I quickly learned that simply calling it “Linux” is a grave mistake in the eyes of some.

“It should be GNU/Linux,” they'd urge. “Linux is just the kernel.”

That distinction was made crystal-clear for me when I had the opportunity to interview none other than Richard Stallman, whose willingness to be interviewed was actually conditional upon LinuxInsider's agreement to use the term “GNU/Linux.” (Image credit: springfieldpc.dyndns.org)

“Linux is just one component of the GNU/Linux system, which is, in turn, just a part of the world of free software,” Stallman told me back then. “You'll have no chance of understanding or explaining anything about the Free World if you don't keep those distinctions straight.”

The Free Software Foundation, of course, provides a very nice explanation of the difference on its site.

Rarely sighted

Fast forward to today, and I still occasionally hear the same argument made. Just the other day, in fact, I was reminded by a reader of the distinction.

Take a quick scan through the Linux media, however – including not just LinuxInsider but also Linux Today, Linux Journal, the Linux Line section at PCWorld, and the site you're reading now, among numerous other publications – and you'll soon get a pretty strong indication that the distinction is rarely upheld.

You won't see it made routinely by the Linux Foundation or on Linux.com, and Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself has reportedly dismissed it.

My question to you, fellow Linux Advocates, is whether it's really still worth making. Personally, I don't think it is.

More than a mouthful

I realize that there are strong historical and philosophical reasons for separating the Linux kernel from the GNU system.

I also realize that it's technically more accurate to call it GNU/Linux.

What I'm also aware of, however, is that few beyond the inner core of free software enthusiasts still adhere to or understand the distinction; to most mainstream users, it's baffling. The term GNU/Linux is klunky and unwieldy in printed text, and even more so when you're speaking.

Meanwhile, as Linux advocates, we all want to promote Linux, and to advance its use over proprietary counterparts – right? We'd like to see Linux covered as much as possible for all its many successes, making clear to the mainstream world that it is now a fully competitive alternative.

Are those goals worth sacrificing in the interests of a linguistic distinction? I'm thinking not.

Connecting the dots

Please make no mistake: I am nothing if not an advocate for Linux and free software in general.

Personally, however, I'd rather see Linux trumpeted on the pages of PCWorld and other mainstream publications as “Linux” than see stories passed by because of the niggling debate over its name, which tends to make editors groan. Personally, I'd rather be able to have a conversation with an SMB about the advantages of “Linux” than have to bog down my speech with the clumsy “GNU/” as well, thereby potentially confusing them.

Realistically, we're lucky if mainstream users and readers today are familiar with Linux, per se; I generally make sure to add the “Linux” name to headlines involving distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora to help them make that connection.

But to add “GNU/” to the conversation? It's unreasonably idealistic, and just doesn't make sense. If we want to advance the use of Linux in the mainstream world, let's leave the history and the deep-seated philosophy for the background.

It won't get lost, I promise; rather, it will still be fully available for those who care. For all others, it will free up the “Linux” term to help us chip away faster at all the many proprietary monopolies in this computing world.

In closing, I offer you this last bit of evidence. Go to Wikipedia.org's home page and search on "GNU/Linux." What do you get? It redirects you to "Linux." That, I think, sums up the prevailing sentiment nicely.

-- Katherine Noyes

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Freedom on Buses, Computers and Everywhere

Rosa Parks (ca. 1955)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By +Robert Pogson

Today, I watched the president of the USA speak at the installation of the statue of Rosa Parks. She was an icon of the US movement for civil rights when I was just a child.

He said,

"Whether out of inertia or selfishness, whether out of fear or a simple lack of moral imagination we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice, rationalizing inequity, tolerating the intolerable like the bus driver but also like the passengers on the bus. We see the way things are, children hungry in a land of plenty, entire neighbourhoods ravaged by violence, families hobbled by job-loss or illness and we make excuses for inaction. We say to ourselves that's not my responsibility. There's nothing I can do. Rosa Parks tells us there's always something we can do. She tells us that we all have responsibilities to ourselves and to one another. She reminds us this is how change happens. Not mainly through the exploits of the famous and the powerful but through the countless acts of often anonymous courage and kindness and fellow feeling and responsibility that continually stubbornly expand our conception of justice, our conception of what is possible. Rosa Parks' singular act of disobedience launched a movement. "

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