[LAU] new! linuxmusicians.com

[Christian Einfeldt]

Hi,

I have been lurking on this list for sometime, and I appreciate the
educated, informed posts here.

The question of one centralized repository for all knowledge relating to
Linux versus the merits of letting 10,000 flowers bloom is a very deep issue
that our DTP community has been exploring in video through the Digital
Tipping Point video project.  I don't have any answers, and IMHO, there
probably are no answers, as this might well be one of the profound,
unsolveable questions of humanity:  order and stability leading potentially
to tyranny and stagnation versus diversity and creativity leading
potentially to chaos and wasted resources.

A long, long time ago, in the mid 1600s, Thomas Hobbes wrote a treatise
called Leviathan that still poses questions central to our discussion here.
Thomas Hobbes basically was upset by the English Civil War, which broke out
in 1642.  There was much strife and chaos as a result of the war, and in
part as a result of what he saw as the horrors of that war, Hobbes wrote
that no civil society is possible unless all citizens surrender their
independence to a strong central authority, a Leviathan.  He felt that the
rabble could not govern itself.  His most famous quote is that without a
central authority, human lives would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes#Leviathan

You could call Steve Ballmer a neo-Hobbesian, because he said that FOSS
cannot succeed because it lacks a "center of gravity."  Those words are
especially eerie when you lay them down alongside Thommy Hobbes' call for a
surrender of autonomy.  Ballmer is basically saying that we, the FOSS
rabble, cannot govern ourselves.

We must prove him wrong.

The Roman Empire imposed a tense peace on the world by virtue of their
military dominance, and likewise, Microsoft, like IBM before it, has imposed
certain standards on the computing industry.  Now is the time for us as a
global community to evolve out of the Pax Romana that Microsoft has imposed
on the computing world.

If we lack structure, we will not be able to mount an concerted effort to
break the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop.

On the other hand, our community is unlikely to tolerate another monopolist
like Microsoft, and so some of us tend to criticize popular distros like
Ubuntu as seeking to claim too much power.

We _must_ sort out these issues, and achieve the right balance between chaos
and tyranny.

I believe that one of the truly remarkable things about FOSS is that it will
be one trend that will help the entire human family learn how to balance
democracy and stability.

The particular question at hand is whether to start a new forum at
linuxmusicians.com , or whether to stay with the venerable linuxaudio.org.
I am too new to this list to suggest the correct answer, and I don't pretend
to know the answer.  But I do know that each of us should privately ask
ourselves what we can do to move the whole community forward, even if it is
maybe a short term inconvenience to ourselves.

One thing is clear to me; we must keep our discourse civil.  For example, we
cannot call Miguel de Icaza a "Microsoft shill" merely because he praised
OOXML as a "superb standard."  I personally think that Miguel should have
used his considerable influence to improve ODF, but still, we must not
descend into name-calling.

We must resolve the issue of GPL2 and GPL3 for the GNU and Linux kernel
projects respectively.

We should refrain from bitterly criticizing the open source folks if we
prefer to call it "Free Software", and vice versa; we should not bitterly
criticize Stallman for insisting that we call it GNU/Linux, even if we do
consider him to be too strident in his tone.

Our success will come down to our ability to collaborate.  Microsoft has
tons of money and a rigid command-and-control structure.  If we are to
succeed, we must strive for cohesiveness while preserving our diversity.

----

Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
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