[Tfug] Alan Cox: "I've had enough"--what else is new?

[bpoag at comcast.net]

I do try. :) 

Seriously. And yes, I mean seriously, a number of us would be well-suited to start to think of "free Unix" as something other than Linux, something other than mucking around with GNU tools. You know how economists always take forever to acknowledge the obvious, like that we're in a recession? Same thing applies here. We're in a post-Linux era, now. It simply no longer makes sense to declare a "movement", and then watch it fumble around without direction. 

The Linux era ended when we had no answer for Vista's awkward silence. Vista face-planted on the stage, and the spotlight quickly moved over to Linux. And what did we have? Nothing. Two divergent projects that weren't ready for prime-time with near-zero high quality commercially-supported software to make the switch desirable enough. 

Worse, people are beginning to realize that code developed under the open source model isn't immune to the same "shelf life" principles that closed-source code suffers from. I mean, think about it. All the code people wrote even 6 or 7 years ago when Linux was still more or less a quietly cool thing people did for fun....Practically none of it works anymore, at least without uprooting and fundamentally screwing your installation by interspersing it with old library versions, patches and hacks. It was all for naught. 

Who wants to do that? 

I have a hackintosh now. It's BSD, it's kernel is free, and it's fun.. It is, IMHO, what Unix should be, and what a constantly pissy/disagreeable herd of cats like the Linux community will never, by its very nature, ever be able to produce. 

Cheers, 
Bowie 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Roberts" <deepspace at dataswamp.net> 
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org> 
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 12:50:18 PM GMT -07:00 U.S. Mountain Time (Arizona) 
Subject: Re: [Tfug] Alan Cox: "I've had enough"--what else is new? 

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Bowie J. Poag<bpoag at comcast.net> wrote: 

> The whole free software movement has been tainted with this sort of crap. 
> It's always has been the case for the Linux movement as well, even from its 
> earliest days. 
> 
> Oh, by the way, here's a video of Richard Stallman sitting down on stage, 
> pulling his sock off, and eating his toe cheese. These are your "leaders". 

The way you left Linux can only be described as cinematic. Walking 
away from a big dark building in slow motion, pulling your collar up, 
cigarette danging out of your mouth, only to be flicked back toward 
the building. The camera zooms in on the lit cigarette tumbling 
through the air in slow-mo, only to land in a puddle of gasoline, when 
suddenly BOOM, the entire building goes up, but you don't look back. 
No dammit, you just...you just walk on, past hot chicks in leather 
pants looking lustfully at you in your duster and popped collar, the 
building a hellish inferno behind you... 

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