04.27
One year on, same presentation, absolutely no significant change what-so-ever. His hearts in the right place but I really don’t think that even if the community did exactly what he said it would really change a thing.
If a boat is sinking and when someone does a speech ‘hey, the boat is sinking’ it makes waves* then the issue is not that the boat is sinking, it is instead that nobody has noticed the boat was sinking. Fixing the boat itself will do nothing. Suggesting fixes to the boat will do even less. Your core issue is that nobody actually sees that the boat is sinking. “Guys, I gave this presentation a year ago and there is still water pouring in the sides, what we need is a team to set up a fund to pay for a crew to board up the holes that you guys keep making.” Lets face it it’s not really tackling the actual issue – people keep putting holes in the boat.
Even saying something as fundamentally obvious as ‘Choice in software is good, choice in standards is bad’ creates controversy and argument. Essentially what has happened is Linux has become a movement, rather than a bunch of lines of code. Tenets of that movement such as ‘choice, freedom, superior development model’ are viewed as infallible, thus anything which casts doubt on this is attacked. Saying ‘standardize on a package format’ goes against the ‘choice’ tenet and as such you’ll get slammed for it. Saying Gimp isn’t very good – especially compared to Photoshop – goes against ‘superior development model’ and again, you’ll get slammed for it. Many people actually believe that Gimp is equal or better than Photoshop – which is incredible.
It seems to me that the problem is a culture of defensiveness and denial is at the heart of the issue. Linux uptake is staggeringly slow (~1% marketshare and, what, 50% increase in the last 5 years?) yet the attitude among the supporters when faced with unhappy users is “If you don’t like it piss off, it’s free”. The community consists entirely of people who like it more than the competition – people who don’t like it leave pretty quickly. If the Leopard Print Couch Company wasn’t doing so well, do you think asking a cross section of the people who own Leopard Print couches would provide valuable information into why they were not selling much stock?
I suppose what I am trying to say is that the Linux community reminds me of the Leopard Print Couch Company, who want a couch in every house but can’t figure out why it’s not happening. Someone walks into the shop and says ‘I don’t like Leopard print’ and they’ll get told ‘everyone else here likes it’ and tell the customer to leave and then continue on discussing changes to the pattern “If only we could add more spots, then we’d succeed!”
The feeling I took away from this presentation was that which I get from virtually all these ‘lets be humble’ sessions – “we are nearly there, we just need to sort out a few little issues and then it’ll really take off” – when from where I am standing there is a massive, and widening, gulf between where Linux is and where it needs to be.
The true issue is that the people responsible for the holes in the side of the boat don’t even realise that they are creating them. Pointing at the holes is pointless, getting the people making them to stop doing it is the actual solution. Good luck with that though, as the community largely likes the holes**.
* Sorry!
** Just as the Leopard Print Couch Company wouldn’t change pattern – everyone likes Leopard print after all, just ask our customers!
Your part of a company? What company do you run anyhow?
I do actually run a company (co-founder and director anyway) – not quite sure how you inferred that from the post. I don’t sell couches though.
Plus, the Leopard Print Couch Company is fictional
Looking at Lunduke, I feel a mixture of pity and disgust. He strikes me as a shmuck kid who tries to be cool and make Linux look cool too. He’s also trying, I believe in earnest, to get the Linux crowd to wake up and address the real issues holding Linux back. This is where pity takes over. We’ve seen it before… a lot of us were there once too. We all know he’s doomed to fail, and watching the tragedy unfold with such foresight is like seeing the proverbial deer in the headlights.
By the way, Kerberos, I noticed one of my comments didn’t show up… when I tried reposting, it told me the message already got through. It was for your previous posting. Could you please look into it?
I will give the thingy a jab. I’ve been meaning to fix the comments system for a while, but never can make the time.
As I’ve said before, the reason people are so defensive about their movement is that they’ve emotionally invested themselves to heavily in it.
They’re the typical misfits who identify with underdogs like Linux, backing it because they see a bit of themselves in it. They join the community and find acceptance in it; People who won’t judge them as long as they all drink the same Kool-aid. That same community quickly helps them build an illusionary world around themselves where Linux is king and they somehow share in it’s mythical success.
However, any time someone points out a flaw in their perfect world, they get defensive. After all, an attack on Linux or FOSS is an attack on them. Ironically, this just drives them deeper into their world of fiction and faith.
@TM Repository
You’re right, but it goes a little deeper than that. The roots of the movement stem from the anti-Microsoft trend sweeping the IT industry and from Linux’s reputation itself. Linux is seen as the wrench in Microsoft’s gears even by layman, and to fault it is to automatically assume that you’re either ignorant of how much damage it can do or you’re rooting for Microsoft; a stone’s throw away from Satan worship, according to these folks.
The myth of Linux superiority is also so prevalent that even many in the IT world believe it as gospel. We’ve all heard how Linux is indestructible, useful, friendly, better-written, etc etc. Suggesting otherwise is seen as the same as suggesting that Mother Teresa was not a nice person.
But it doesn’t stop there. Desktop Linux is just good enough to charm most people on first impression (wow! I heard Linux was hard but this looks easy enough! Nice icons!), just bad enough to inspire anti-revisionist fanaticism, just flexible enough to divide its fanbase into factions, just esoteric enough to be a fertile ground for absurd ideas and just mainstream enough to appeal to new recruits!
All and all, it’s the perfect storm for getting it’s already fragile fan base to consume itself.
It gives the fanatics just enough rope to hang themselves with, making Linux appear more like a cult than an operating system. Aggressively spreading the gospel where it doesn’t belong, attacking people who aren’t even involved, threatening those who disagree and generally creating a poisonous environment for anyone who might have been interested.
Couple that with their inability to accept responsibility or reflect on their own actions. They blame Microsoft, insist they’re bribing everyone, and generally demonizing people like Gates so they have a “King” to attack. As if anyone who uses Windows cares about Gates or Ballmer.
If I was a ideological leader I would want a large amount of people to be zealots who are willing to fight and die for my cause. Makes sense.
The ABM “movement” seems to be on the wane. Between Windows 3 and Windows Me it was fashionable, even for the layperson, to trash everything Microsoft did, but since Windows XP, especially since SP2, that angst has gradually subsided. Even “Mac people” have largely given up, as evidenced by their multiplatform households and Boot Camp partitions.
The ABM decline seems to coincide with the similar waning of Linux advocacy, whose decline, in turn, seems to correlate with Linux Hater’s introduction*. Whereas guys our age probably spent their college years tinkering with Linux (et al) before getting real jobs, I don’t think that level of proliferation exists any more. Therefore, I’m highly skeptical to the claim of Linux “growth” of any kind. While absolute numbers are surely higher since the mid-90s due to the explosion of personal computer ownership, I believe Linux desktop usage as a percentage of the market is at a historical low–at least since Linux as a “desktop” was a consideration. I don’t know from where these aggregators get their data, but given that margin of error in something like this must be at least 5%, a seemingly static 1% over the years seems like rounding up to me. Furthermore, if you told me that Linux desktop usage was 2-5 percent in 1998 I’d probably believe you. Even if it was transient, *everybody* was trying Linux back then, even people who had no business installing operating systems on their computers.
So, the boat has holes, indeed. But it’s even worse. There’s been so much water in the boat for so long, everybody has gotten used to their feet being numb and they think it was always this way and/or they have deluded themselves into thinking that the water is preferable to dryness.
* Not saying that LH singlehandedly disrupted the ABM/Linux movement, but a lot of people, at least subconsciously, were waiting to hear its message, so it was at the right place at the right time. In fact, I’m skeptical as to how many “converts” it has achieved, but I do believe quite a few previously “neutral” people are a little more outspoken on the topic. It could be as subtle as “I think using Linux for our next project would be more trouble than it’s worth” rather than remaining quiet.
‘Therefore, I’m highly skeptical to the claim of Linux “growth” of any kind.’
http://counter.li.org/smallplot.png
Bad wording on my part. The next sentence clarifies my position. Besides, what kind of graph is that? You could be showing me users of Leopard Print couches or something. The graph partially proves my point in that the absolute peak was in the 2002-2004 range and has clearly sunk since then. Whatever conclusion you draw, Linux hasn’t “grown” in quite some time while the computing market continues to expand. In fact, it’s even worse than I thought. I didn’t make the argument that Linux has actually shed users!
Finally, the asymptotic growth in 2002 is highly suspect. Even Linux’s widely acknowledged peak growth years of 1996-2000 didn’t see a near vertical line. What’s the rationale for that? It’s not like 2002 was a banner year. Are those numbers literal? As in Linux never saw 160,000 actual users? The graph is atrocious in every aspect. It even looks like it was prepared in MS Paint. Is this GNUPlot? I remember that making some of the most horrid presentations.
Oh, I see now. It’s a membership counting site. You probably should have linked the home page. Surely I don’t need to explain something as fundamental as the problems generated with a self selected sample set. All you can conclude from the data is that N people registered. In terms of extrapolating anything else it’s useless. It’s hard to believe someone would expend effort to construct such a thing with the obvious goal of extrapolating data without doing basic research into surveying methods.
I’ve registered on the Linux Counter about 5 times over the years, so I don’t quite trust their numbers, and their methodology is completely flawed and full of assumptions. They never explain where the “the community has grown by a factor of 10″ comes from, and they apply it left right and centre – in their old estimates, they go by a poll a German magazine conducted involving 1% of their users, 29 of 260 said they used Linux at home, so they extrapolate that to mean 2,900, and throw in, “since the community has grown by a factor of TEN! 29,000 in Germany alone! YAY!” Where in the hell does this factor of 10 increase come from?
Then they use the metric of documents turned up by an Altavista search to corroborate the numbers? WTF?
The October 1994 issue of Linux Journal had a print run of 25.000 issues. If we assume that 1 out of 20 Linuxers read the Linux Journal, we get 500.000 Linux users.
What’s the basis for that assumption? How about we assume that Linux Journal isn’t read exclusively by Linux users? Or why stop at 1/20? Let’s say only 1 in a thousand Linux users read Linux journal, the original assumption has no basis in reality, so this one is every bit as valid, so let’s ramp the numbers right up to 25,000,000!
My news spool, as of August 26, 1994 showed that comp.os.linux.* had 3507 different “From: ” lines among the 8402 messages. On August 19, 1995, the same numbers were 10485 articles with 4649 different “From: ” lines, as measured by Morten Welinder. If 99 out of 100 Usenet-aware users didn’t post this week, and 2 out of 10 Linux users have Usenet access, we might guess a factor of 200 here.
WHERE ARE THESE ASSUMPTIONS COMING FROM?
Of course, the only thing really shown here is that if I am allowed to pick any number, and multiply by any factor I want to, I can get any number I want to get!
Well, at least he’s aware that he’s making shit up.
So, if we estimate 40K of the 90K removed users still use Linux, we could estimate 180k unique users should be in the Linux Counter, of which 40k should have visited the Linux Counter to keep their entries alive, but didn’t.
What’s the basis for the assumption?
The number of 29 million is the result of first calculating the factor at which the number of registered Linux Counter members grew (180/110 ~= 1.6)
Then, we apply that factor to the estimated number of Linux users of june 2001 (1.6 x 18M).
So the 29m figure is based on a multuplier derrived via faulty methodology, applied to a figure derrived from admitedly faulty methodology?
The “Leopard Print Couch Bed”
http://www.officialdoghouse.com/site/1540231/product/U-131
lol’d.
Funny thing is, that couch is probably as comfortable to a humas as using ubuntu is.
Joey Gladstone:
Thanks for expounding. The worst part about all of it is that every information gathering method uses the same faulty self-selected surveying. The German magazine is the strongest, though 260 responses is hardly statistically significant and would only tell the Linux base within the particular readership of that magazine. Furthermore, if the question was really posed as “Who uses Linux at home?” the data is further diluted since you’ll get people with tinker boxes and router firmware. Do owners of Linux WRT routers really qualify as “Linux users”? It’s like counting people who use ATMs as OS/2 users.
Finally, after sleeping on it, I recall registering at some counter site way back in the 90s. This is probably it. Am I still counted? I haven’t used Linux as a desktop system in years. What happens to people like me? The (hard to find) FAQ doesn’t really say:
http://counter.li.org/help/faq.php#person4
Rules have been defined what should be done with registrations which have not been verified for a certain amount of time.
What does that mean? Are they deleted or not? What’s the aging breakdown of the entire data set? What’s the confidence? Where’s any documentation whatsoever on the survey aggregation? This is quite important for a site that deals solely with data gathering! Instead we get useless graphs on CPUs, kernel versions, and uptime. Who the hell cares?
http://counter.li.org/help/faq.php#person1
The Great Deletion of November 2001 removed 90.000 entries.
Yet early 2002 saw asymptotic growth. What’s this about? Given the above info, it looks suspiciously like a compensation factor, as if the user base were artificially inflated to demonstrate growth.
http://counter.li.org/help/faq.php#common1
We are an HTML purists.
Yet the site uses HTML 4 Transitional, which is a compromise between “pure” HTML and Netscape-corrupted style elements, of which they take advantage by using tables for layout and the body tag for style. HTML purists indeed! More like, “We learned Netscape style web design in 1995, never bothered to keep up, and defend our stance by pretending our way is correct.”
This may seem inconsequential to some, but it fits in with the rest of the faulty assumptions the site makes. If they were really purists, they’d either upgrade the site to XHTML Strict and banish all style elements from the HTML files or drop back to ITEF HTML 2, which totally lacks styling with the exception of bold and italics*, which were later deprecated in favor of the realistically equivalent but more structure oriented strong and emphasis tags.
* I guess horizontal rule and preformatted text count as styling, though they’re pretty borderline compared to using tables to layout text.
Nah that chart is bullshit, there was no explosive growth from 1998 to 2001.
OS Share in 1997:
Windows 95/98 69.4%, Windows NT Workstation 9.2%, Windows 3.x (with DOS) 7.7%, Mac OS 4.6%, Linux 2.4%, DOS (IBM, Digital Research, Microsoft) 2.3%, Unix 1.0%, OS/2 Warp 0.8%, other 2.7%
http://pctimeline.info/windows/win1997.htm
Germany has always had a higher than average Linux base but even they are down in past few years.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-DE-monthly-200807-201004
From what I have read Linux desktop share peaked in 1998 and has fallen by about half since then.
As for Lunduke he is not only trying to herd cats but also take them fox hunting. It will be funny to see his Linux sucks video next year when he has lost even more patience with them.
My latest post seems to have been eaten.
It should be uneaten. I think I’m going to get rid of wordpress soon …
I do like how WordPress converts a double hyphen to an en dash, auto-links URLs, and pretties up apostrophes and quotation marks. It even makes three periods into an ellipsis. Blogger is a total joke by comparison. Its functionality is akin to late 90s MivaScript message boards. One Blogger site I visit breaks fantastically when someone forgets to close a bold or italic tag in the comments. Short of administrator intervention, the only thing that fixes it is paging. Besides with amateur-created content management systems, when’s the last time anyone had to deal with this sort of thing? 2001?
Why are Linux users so obsessed with numbers? Why is it so important to them that Linux reaches a critical mass with its user base? If Linux is truly such an awesome OS, it wouldn’t matter how many people are using it, right?
Linux reaching (x) amount of users will not make it a better OS. If numbers were what made an OS great, then Windows would indeed be the best OS on Earth. But no, that’s unthinkable to the Linux crowd.
Of course, Linux *would* reach critical mass if it truly were such a great OS. And of course, the Linux crowd are arse-about-face; joining groups, writing positive reviews and handing out endless CDs won’t make Linux a great OS. It will only be great once its fan- and developer-base stop assuming it already is. And only then will the numbers follow.
Why are Linux users so obsessed with numbers?
And it’s not just number of users. The fourth sentence on Debian’s website talks about the number of packages they support. Linux users are notorious for uptime talk. Meanwhile Windows and Mac users generally have no clue how long their system has been up, not that it’d be a genuine figure since most of them with large uptimes will hibernate their systems when not in use. And if it’s not uptimes it’s kernel versions. Think the average Mac user knows what his patch level is or is even aware that they exist other than part of the update blob that bounces in their dock every few weeks?
To be fair, you kinda have to know your kernel version in Linux land, at least these days, though prior to 2.6 it was like MacOS where you could say, “I run 2.4″ and people would know what you were talking about. Now it’s, “I run 2.6.33.4-git4-am-patch-4-ubuntu9″ only to be met with, “You’re still running that? 2.6.33.4-git4-am-patch-4-ubuntu9 is so mid-April 2010! Get with the times!”
@Tux Sux
That’s pretty accurate, yeah. The Linux crowd has an alarming fetish for irrelevancy. The rest of the computing world is interested in what their computers and software can do. Can you imagine if a bunch of typical Windows users got into a debate about which updates they applied? Or if that’s too abstract for some of our slower readers, imagine if a lumberjack went on and on about the special customized handle and decals on his chainsaw.
Haha, the chainsaw brought to mind a car analogy, which I think also works. While most people are are interested in using cars to get from point A to point B (and optionally provide comfort while doing so), yuppie hipster Volkswagen owners are more concerned about expressing their individuality by slathering their cars in “Go Green!” and “Jerry Garcia Lives!” bumper stickers and then remarking to others how assertive and cool the bumper stickers make them. Meanwhile they’ll cast scornful looks toward the “Jesus mobiles” who are doing the same thing they are but with a slightly different evangelical subject (i.e. different distro or BSD).