OSS Revolution?

A friend of mine, we’ll call him Dr. P., is a fellow chemist (so you know he’s intrinsically trustworthy) and he has been a good evangelist for Linux and the OSS revolution. Open Source Software and freeware seems like such a great idea and Linux sounds like a great, robust operating system.

So when I recently upgraded and got a laptop (Vista OS) I felt I could spare my old Dell desktop as a “testbed” for Linux (Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope) and test driving free OSS.

So, with significant help from Dr. P., I wiped my old harddrive (I had previously backed everything up so I could still use old files and stuff on my new laptop) and I turned it into a “Linux Box”.

Only problem is; I’m a neo-luddite when it comes to things computer. I like to fantasize about being geeky enough to do Unix and command-line type stuff. I like being able to type commands in and make the computer do stuff, but there’s a big part of me that is NOT an “under the hood” kinda guy.

I am my dad’s worst nightmare. He was old-school and could keep a car running forever because he loved to get under the hood and make it run. I, however, could barely find the gas-cap (don’t get me started about a particularly embarrassing event in my past as I was driving a car in Norway that I literally could NOT get the gas cap off at the filling station.)

So turning a former Windows machine into a Linux box was probably not the wisest move for someone like me who gets easily pissed off upon frustration. Because Linux and OSS, no matter how “user friendly” (like Kubuntu), is clearly a Swedish term for “frustration”.

Then Dr. P. sent me this excellent essay from 2008 that discusses free software usability!
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

The keys to me appear to be Items #1 and #8 in the list. It is an immutable law of nature that “there ain’t no free lunch” (I believe that Newton or someone came up with it, it’s probably in the Principia somewhere.) For neo-quasi-luddites like myself for whom the computer is first and foremost a TOOL and not an end unto itself, I just want to turn the system on, push some buttons and get my results. I don’t want to sudo any-fucking-thing. I just wanna make it work. Now if I were a L337 H4x0r or some such I would have put in immense hours “learning” this stuff. A lot of work put into it. I would “pay dearly” for the skills to program the computer and code the hell out stuff. Make the computer do my bidding like the little whore it is. OR I’d simply PAY someone to code stuff and make the computer do my bidding with minimal effort on my part.

One or the other. No freebies.

For people like me OSS is the ultimate in cheating. I am way too lazy to “learn” how the system works at that level, nor am I willing to pay someone for their efforts in programming.

And for that I feel bad. So I realize that Linux and OSS will likely always be, for me, a back-up curiosity. I’ll play with it, but I will still, when the chips are down, pay for software that is professionally produced.

I mean, to be fair, I want to get paid for my work, so if someone came along and made free versions of what I make my living from I think I’d secretly hope and pray people who used it would suffer inconvenience of some sort.

There’s often a reason “free” stuff is free.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t like Microsoft. I think Office 2007 is an amazing example of people who have taken something usable and turned it into shit. They trained us up over about a decade as to how these software packages worked and then scrapped it all. That means more “learning”, which as I stated earlier, when it comes to software I don’t want to do.

But in the end at least the interface for professional software is “consistent” and “reasonably stable” (sorta kinda). It does what it’s supposed to do most of the time. They could improve, sure. But then I’d have to pay more I suppose. I already feel like I pay too much for shit software, but at least I’m paying something for someone’s work.

So in the end I’m going to pay to play. It’s only fair. I want to “act such that the maxim of my actions should be universal law”, and in this case that universal law is there ain’t no free lunch. For me or for you.