My wife and I had this discussion today about the “force”. Once years ago, we had talked about religion and our differing views and how people of differing views that love each other can find reasonable places and spaces. I had said then there was a “cosmic force” that drove people to good or bad. It could be called God or it may be another thing but archeologists as I was then could believe in things. As a famous one said, “there are more things in heaven and earth than in your philosophy”. The force runs to both. It can yield results if used correctly or it can devastate and leave ruin and desperation.
I’ve come to the conclusion recently that people share that with the force. We have been given those tools by that self-same force and we can build, destroy, or do both. Often in the past, confronted with questions around how technology could solve problems and whether Linux represented a quantum leap, I believed that there was this continuity of Linux and that it was part of the force. The force needs to have things that disrupts its fields or at least challenges the status quo. Through that, the force gets stronger.
Linux provides a set of conditions, a view, a meaningful alternative to a world filled with broken windows and micro’s. My view has changed a bit though as I went down the habilis path with Linux. I think people now need to make the case for their tools and find the solution that will work the best. I can use Linux on the desktop, run apache on my debian server, do tasks that have great tools that are free as in speech and even free as in beer. All of them can come together for me and solve problems. But so can the proprietary tools. I have my short-list of applications and utilites i find particularly useful that cross over. Some are cross platform/cross operating system but others live only on Windows. I’ve paid for more than my share of them because they do a thing of value that I cannot find otherwise.
Finally, the other place I’ve been is how companies and enterprises see this entry point. I won’t dwell much on that because I have decided opinions on how we adopt Linux into new markets, what we do to ensure that Linux is weighed and measured in a diligent fashion, and finally what we all can do to ensure that people make informed decisions regarding using Linux in all its shapes and sizes. People give lip service to believing in a system. It goes back to that earlier quote… Or as a friend said once to me.
Its good to know what you know. Its better to know what you don’t know.
And its best to know the difference…
Live that or live with it; as a friend’s sig used to say about OS/2. I won’t start on OS/2 because I started on OS/2 so many years ago. I’m like a long lost consort of that operating system. I could go back easily but Linux satisfies me in many ways. I do like championing causes though. From about 1995 on, I did OS/2. It taught me a lot about people and it also taught me a lot about how people choose to compute and what it means. I was lucky enough to live in a world then where i found work with literally thousands of OS/2 desktops.
But now I’ve digressed and this blog post is over.
