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Too many words about Linux Standardization
(Steven Den Beste 20061224)

Via J, I just read an interesting article by Eric Raymond about the coming transition to 64-bit processors, in which he contends that this is the last chance Linux will have this generation to become the standard for desktop computing. Eric says that by the end of 2008 a winner will emerge, and after that network effect and the tendency of winners to keep winning will lock it in as a de facto standard.

It's not bad at all. Eric is no fool. It's an interesting read, especially for engineers who understand that marketing victory isn't always driven by technical excellence. But he ignores one real problem that Linux faces: standardization. The single biggest problem with trying to achieve critical mass in the computing world is that there isn't even critical mass in the Linux world for any particular release.

As I was reading his article, I started seeing an interesting, albeit imperfect, parallel: the situation in desktop operating systems today is partially analogous to what Christianity faced about the middle of the 17th Century. According to this imperfect analogy, Apple is the Eastern Orthodox Church, Microsoft is Catholicism, and Linux is Protestantism. The Eastern Orthodox church was geographically isolated, off on its own, and Apple, with its proprietary hardware base, is also largely isolated.

The grassfire war between Microsoft and Linux to try to dominate on commodity hardware imperfectly mirrors the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism over dominance of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The reason this idea came to me is something I've noted before: Protestantism is inherently schismatic. It's a consequence of what brought Protestantism into existence. The founding statement of Protestantism is, "We reject the idea that the Pope is God's representative on Earth." But having said that, there was no other obvious choice, and almost as soon as Protestantism gained any kind of freehold in Europe, it started to fragment further.

And so it is with Linux. "We deny that Bill Gates should control our computers." Fair enough, but then who? Well, some Protestants thought that every man should be his own Pope. With translations of the Bible into the vernacular, it became possible for educated men to read God's Word for themselves, and to decide how it should affect their lives. Many Linux users think that it is they who will control their own computers. With Open Source, an educated geek can read the OS code for himself, or at least control how it's compiled and what gets included, so as to decide how that should affect his life.

Again, fair enough. But the majority of those who rejected the Pope ended up following the Archbishop of Canterbury, or some Lutheran archbishop, or Calvin, or...

As Eric says, if Linux requires every user to learn how to compile the kernel, then Linux will lose. It's not that the majority are stupid, it's simply that, as he says, "they prize their ignorance" and have better things to do with their time.

Eric makes a convincing case that the operating system equivalent of "every man his own pope" won't fly, because the majority of users don't want to put up with the hassle. They want a turn-key solution. And Eric's key point is that in order for Linux to win and become the new standard, it has to achieve sufficient critical mass so that network effect kicks in, and it has to do it within the next two years.

And that's where the problem lies: which Linux? Linux users themselves can't even pick a single distribution to get behind. There are hundreds of distros out there, and probably 10 big ones. No single Linux distro has 50% of the installed base among developers, and every time any small group of developers out there gets disgruntled for any reason with how things are going, they fork the source and create another Linux sect.

Initially Protestantism was "Catholicism without the Pope" but as it continued to fragment, with nothing really working to hold the various branches together, it began to differentiate widely, and these days different Protestant sects are all over the map. The first Christian schismatic wars in Europe were between Catholic states and Protestant states, but it wasn't long before you started having wars between Protestant states who followed different Protestant sects who mutually declared the other to be heretics. No one does that any more, of course, but Protestantism is so widely spread now, both physically and theologically, that there's no hope whatever of ever reuniting it.

Especially because no one involved in Protestantism really has any interest in doing so, except perhaps in hopes of convincing others to join their own sect. There have been a few cases where divergent sects joined together, but we're also seeing new schisms. Even as we speak, the Church of England is losing its grip on American Episcopalians, and so it goes.

Eric's argument is that if Linux is to win, it has to achieve critical mass on the desktop. But for that to happen, the Linux community itself is going to have to unite behind a single distro. But there are more than half a dozen major distros.

And the reason for all that schisming is incompatibility. It's deliberate incompatibility, caused by ideological differences. The only thing that Linux users fully agree on is that they hate Bill Gates. Aside from that, there's nothing holding them together.

If Linux wants to win on the desktop before 2008, Linux supporters are going to have to give up almost all of their "free-as-in-speech" regarding it. Before Linux will have any chance of achieving a critical mass overall on the desktop, the Linux community itself will have to give up its schismatic ways. Linux cannot become dominant on the desktop until a single distro of Linux becomes dominant within the Linux community. Choices about what is and what is not included in that dominant distro will have to be made by a small group, ideally only one person, and their decisions will have to be accepted by everyone else. Schismatics who refuse to accept those decision will have to be treated as heretics by the majority, and shunned.

For Linux to win, the Linux movement will have to speak with a single voice. And since that's anathema to the very philosophical foundation of the movement, that seems unlikely. As with Protestantism, schism is the very essence of the Linux movement. It's the foundation on which everything else has been built. Protestants have never reunited, since "If we're simply going to pick a new leader for all Christians, we may as well go back to being Catholic and following the Pope." And Linux users won't, either, because "If we're going to pick a single monopolist dictator to control Linux, we may as well go back to running Windows."

There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity now for someone to replace Bill Gates as the Pope of computers. But the majority of users who will, collectively, make the decision for the next generation don't want a bewildering array of alternative sects to choose from. They're willing to depose Gates as Pope, but only if there's another single choice to replace him. According to Eric, it might be Steve Jobs if OSX replaces Windows as the dominant OS. But if Linux is going to take that position, there needs to be a single person who speaks for Linux who can make binding decisions about it, the way Jobs and Gates can for their respective alternatives.

And there isn't. At this point, there's no one with the reputation and charisma to be able to pull the Linux movement back together again. Not even Linus Torvalds, the Martin Luther of the Linux movement, could do it now.

Thus the paradox: the very thing that makes the Linux movement strong, and attracts supporters to it, will prevent it from winning on the desktop. Linux cannot win on the desktop unless the Linux community becomes like Microsoft, and they'd rather be burnt at the stake than do that.