Linux Took Over the Web, Voluntaryism is Taking Over the World
I see parallels between the rise of Linux and the rise of Voluntaryism.
ON AUGUST 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. “I’m doing a (free) operating system,” he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this would just be a hobby.
But it became something bigger. Much bigger. Today, that open source operating system—Linux—is one of the most important pieces of computer software in the world. Chances are, you use it every day.
http://www.wired.com/2016/08/linux-took-web-now-taking-world/
Back in the 90s I played around with Linux in my spare time because it was not taken seriously at all by businesses for years. When I would bring up Linux at work as a solution for some of our projects, my boss literally laughed and said, "Linux is amateur hour and it will never beat Microsoft!" That same manager allowed me to proof-of-concept our first Linux project about three years later. Sun Microsystems and Solaris got mostly pushed out of our datacenters and Linux took its place.The rest, as they say, is history :) History that is still being written, of course, but Linux rules the internet and business today even if its not penetrated as far into the desktop space.
GNU, Apache, OpenSource, CopyLeft instead of copyright have muscled the 100% closed, proprietary market out of the way and given individuals unprecedented power never before seen in the world. It is proof that centralized controllers and gatekeepers are losing and their days are coming to an end. People want to be free!
The same revolution is taking place in the realm of currency and money and governance and every other facet of society right now. The understanding that information should flow freely AND that all relationships between people should be voluntary is breaking out all over! It has taken Linux 25 years to get this far and I am content that voluntaryism's victory is also on the horizon though it is probably as difficult to envision for some people now as it was for my manager to envision in 1998 what Linux would become.
Hear, hear! Well said. Humans are bad at conceiving exponential growth because it's not something we have evolved hardware for because we did not encounter it in nature. The exponential growth we are just a couple decades away from in terms of superintelligence and automation is going to radically reshape our world. Closed, archaic systems like government can not evolve quick enough to survive. What took 25 years for linux will take a fraction of the time for the technologies coming and the freedom they will unleash.
And that is exactly what I hope for as well, that the transformation of which I speak will happen even faster! These are exciting times, for sure.
I discovered Linux back in 1995. At the time, I was working for a datacenter that used SGI Irix, and I had a similar conversation with my manager about using GNU/Linux instead of SGI's proprietary offering. She said, "we don't want to because we need a company to be accountable, which offers service, et al." At the time, there really wasn't too much in the space (I think RedHat showed up a few years later).
It is interesting to see how far it has come. Right now, I'm using Firefox under Ubuntu Linux to compose this comment. My Android phone is running embedded Linux. As you say, it's all over the place!
A few years later I wound up reading Eric S. Raymonds' "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and was blown away by the concept of open source in general. Up to that point, I kept running into naysayers, who maintained that open source was inherently insecure and there is no way one could make money with it.
Here, Raymond turns those specious arguments on their respective sides:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
How well I remember the first time I read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" :-) The ideas were right! I went through a similar experience promoting Linux that I am now promoting voluntaryism: a lot of people don't get it and they laugh at it because it is so different to what they are used to. Its given me even more courage and a hopeful attitude because I've been through this before. Freedom is popular! Whatever gives us more of it wins, it is only just a matter of time.
We are addressing the same topic, from different angles... your article gives me hope, and more confidence in what I said here: https://steemit.com/police/@ericbelsey/avoiding-the-seemingly-pending-civil-war
And I'm reading your comment on Ubuntu Touch on my phone 😁
This is an analogy that had never occurred to me. People think voluntaryism is some niche thing that will never catch on because it lacks visibility - they don't know how many voluntaryists there are. People think Linux is a niche thing because so few home computers are running it and they think that's all that counts.
Hey Tom, open source, Linux, and Voluntaryism are my favorites! I hope you are right!
I first got into Linux about ten years ago, but I couldn't understand how the development model could even work. The whole "Free Open Source Software" thing, with people volunteering to perform development work, just seemed too much like socialism, which of course has always been an abject failure.
Now though, I understand that the FOSS movement is more like an extended form of capitalism. Everybody who works on it is doing so for self-interest, even if it's just to get some street cred as a programmer in order to prepare for a high-paying career. (I even profit from it myself, due to my business as a Linux trainer.)
I've never been a huge fan of Microsoft, partly because of their unethical business practices and partly because they've never had the best products. In the pre-Linux era, I tried out Windows 3.1 when I finally got a computer that could run a GUI-based operating system. I was so unimpressed that I went out and bought a copy of OS/2, and never looked back. Nowadays, I'm forced to use Windows for some things. But, most of my computing needs are met with Linux, which I'm using right now.
funny how we get to some stage, and we´re all just collectively ready for the next thing, like voluntarism. I hear Linux is a good thing from people who know about such things but I can not remain awake until the end of the sentence to find out why, usually.
You did a good job, Tom kept me awake all the way to the end