Open at Adobe

Caution - small grouchy rant following.

I said it in 1998 and it's still true today. "Linux will only be important when nobody cares."

End users don't care about the operating system. Developers care. Information architects care. Administrators care. But the guy doing his job, be it reading email, talking on his phone, driving a taxi doesn't care... as long as it works. When it breaks, then these guys get upset. Why/where is Linux successful today? In places controlled by a "care' category. Where is it heading? In places where "breaking" means a big deal. What's been the hard part to crack? (In '99 I predicted a 5% desktop for Linux by 2006). Places where it OS is overwhelmed by the applications.

Fortunately, the applications are coming up to meet the "good enough" levels and the "doesn't break" requirements. And fortunately, people are beginning to care.

Linux is an (nearly) invisible enabling technology. So was Intel at one time. Intel successfully branded "Intel Inside". Unfortunately, it's not "Linux inside" to the end user, it's Red Hat, or Debian, or SuSE, or Ubuntu. It could be "Linux Inside", but based on a previous life with MIPS, the phrase really should be "Attitude Inside". (This was a short lived T-shirt run of MIPS before the Intel lawyers sharpened their pens.)

The open source world is full of attitude. It's full of ambition, talent, overarching goals and ego. It's creative, driven and a great place to work. But in infrastructure, it's invisible (except to specialized people who care) and should be. And in applications, it needs the attitude to drive and thrive.

We hype how well Apache does, and it's success being an open source success. Nonsense. Apache's success is  because of how well it works, what it does, and to be fair, it's underlying costs. Maybe driven by open source, but not because it is open source.  And honestly, of the billions of hits on Apache served pages, how many of those visitors ever go "Wow. Thank goodness this web site is running on open source Apache!".

Does the average advertising executive care if the image he picked was photoshopped or GIMPed? Really? The artist may care, the designer might care, the ad exec could care less.

One of my colleagues has a rule here that you may not just say "XML".  You have to state "XML for ". Try it.  XML alone describes nothing.  XML for ____ describes everything. Linux needs a similar rule.

Anyway, my apologies for the rant. Triggered by an exchange of emails on how we need to promote Linux... when honestly, it will win just as well without hype.