Wednesday October 11, 2006

Users first?

Reading Driving to Domination in the September 2006 issue of Linux Journal by Doc Searls we are made to beleive that Linux will win the desktop war because "Linux likes its drivers in the kernel tree". I'm sceptical that this is a cause for domination and not an effect of open source religion. And in fact a negative effect. If a platform has a stable interface an engineer can write a driver to then you are able to leverage a wider cast of people to help with support. But then you have to accept that some companies might want to keep their source closed and you need to have the engineering ability to maintain a stable interface. That might fly in the face of your goal if its a certain philsophical bent, but not if its user support. If your philisophical goals are truely aligned with your user community then it won't matter. All the drivers your users accept will have their source code available.

I'm also uncomfortable with the word Domination. The point of building a healthy user community shouldn't be one of domination but rather of cooperation. I shouldn't be trying to beat you into submission on only using hardware which has open source drivers nor should I try building silos where you are only allowed to use drivers anointed by some open source high priest. Instead I should be building a dialog with my user base helping to choose the best solution while also helping the community to grow.

A sign that this is more religion then reason comes in the sentence after the one quoted above. "There's no need to annoy the hacker and confuse the user with a CD of binary code and promotional lockware." Huh? Yea, thats one tactic. But its not specific to binary only drivers and its not necessary for driver distribution. ( Oct 11 2006, 11:05:23 AM PDT ) Permalink