On ZDNet today, Jason Perlow wrote a fun blog post 2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.â€. Instead of the usual opinion piece, he instead tells us a day-in-the-life story of an average Joe (Josef Konsumer), who works in New Jersey for a global bank conglomerate HQ’ed in Bangalore. It’s an interesting snapshot of Jason’s vision of a world of Linux-based cloud computing, ubiquitous broadband connectivity, and smart household devices.
Without getting too deep into the specifics of his ideas (essentially subscription based access to Linux via semi-dumb terminals) or the literary merit of the piece (a little thin on plot, but this is what Orson Scott Card would call a “milieu story” — lol), Mr. Perlow supplies us with something I find lacking in general discussions about Linux – a clear singular vision of what Linux can be.
My main problem with the Linux community is the feeling that the FOSS nature of Linux means it can be literally all things to all people. The OS can be anything, so therefore it can be everything. Whether the future of Linux is going where Jason wants it to go remains to be seen. However, for it to go anywhere, someone is going to have to step up with a clear vision of a niche where Linux can be the best solution. Despite major leaps forward in that past decade in terms of simplicity, ease of installation, look and feel, and number of available applications, Linux still can’t shake the “me too” stigma.
Linux has a nice GUI, too. Linux has an Office suite, too.
What I want to know is, what is Linux the leader in. What can Linux be that no other OS can be?
The answer, I suspect, will not be a technological one, but rather an entrepreneurial one. Some bright, tech-savvy, business-minded person (or group of people) will see a need and will leverage Linux to bring this solution to market. Rather than build something from scratch, they will instead leverage what Linux already can do. The future, I believe, will not be in innovations to Linux itself, but rather to applications of Linux. Perhaps it will include major proprietary components, along the lines of Apple leveraging BSD for use in OS X. Perhaps it will be fully open source.
Regardless, it is going to require a visionary leader to stand out in front of the community and lead the charge. And thanks, Jason, for showing us a glimpse of where that leader might take us.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Glad to see you back posting again. Keep it up.
I think of what Linux and open source in general will do for us as a framework to live our lives by. Producing software, especially an operating system has to be one of the hardest things to engineer successfully. The vision, coordination, groupthink that it takes to create such a thing as Linux must serve as a lesson to how we can solve today’s largest problems. The technological benefits Linux has brought the world is only the beginning of the framework it might provide for humans. Now, back to my cabin in Montana.
Thanks for checking in, Barry. Great to hear from you.
I agree with you. One of the biggest accomplishments of the Linux community was getting it together enough to create so much great software, and so many different distros. That is a great model for how groups of people can come together under a common purpose for a common good.
But I think about why desktop Linux has, thus far, been a dud. Ubuntu is doing great things, but why isn’t a desktop OS this feature-rich, with so many applications, that’s 100% free not rocking the world?
So, if Linux as a technology (as opposed to the movement or the community) is going to be great at something, what is that going to be? And who’s going to be the person to make it happen?
I really feel like that kind of inspiration must be a singular vision. It can’t come out of committee or compromise.