Linus says Linux is fun

tknockers writes "News.com has a story about how Linus describes Linux as being "fun". He even goes on to say that in 150 years our lives will only be motivated by fear of boredom. "

Comments

linux is a pain in my ass, its great : )

[Anonymous Coward]

linux is great, but it is not always fun, many times i'd rather be playing starcraft [which i have working flawlessly with wine (well as flawlessly as can be expected)] or fallout/2fallout2 then struggling with the syntax of a cryptic config file, that i'd wager few really care to understand. In truth linux is a pain in the ass, but the rewards are great. I am a 2nd year computer science student in Maine and its insight into the x86 architecture and into c/c++ that linux provides are very useful.

the Linux people are more open than the Windows people (asking questions, etc.) Many people who use linux are arseholes, just as many windows users are. In my experience, University HelpDesk, Macintosh users are the worst of them all.

you can learn how it works easily I'm not so sure about this. linux is quite a beast. The only reason you can learn how it works more quickly than windows/mac is that you can never really learn how they work internally without source code. Linux is the only software that i feel i know internally and it was not easy to come to that understanding. the linux kernel is hundreds of thousands of seemingly endless lines of code.

I agree that we will all seek fun things, but the majority of the world cares very little about programing, except that the program does infact work. If linux does achieve world domination, many people will have the same working knowledge of it that they do of windows, that is: there is a desktop, i click and double click, maybe i even drap and drop a little... source code? what's that?

Re:linux is a pain in my ass, its great : )

[Peter Amstutz]

playing starcraft [which i have working flawlessly with wine (well as flawlessly as can be expected)]

What versions of Wine/Starcraft are you using? I finally got wine running SC (actually SC/Brood War) a few weeks ago but it was incredibly unstable - I managed to make it through the first few terran missions by saving every 5 minutes so I could restore my game when it inevitably locked up and I had to bail out with alt-sysRq-k...

Re:linux is a pain in my ass, its great : )

[gavinhall]

Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:

I agree with most of your post (except for the Mac people being the worst...;) but that's just my experience. I think UNIX (not LINUX) users are the worst in terms of arrogance and arsholiness...haha did I make that up or did Beavis and Butthead beat me to it?)

I like messing with LINUX but somtimes it's just too frustrating. For example, I'm trying to install it on an old 486 at home -- this being my 4th Linux installation -- and it just keeps crapping out during the installation. At different times and I can't figure it out. I think I'll just give up on it.

But I guess my point is that although it's a great OS, it is not ready for prime time and probably won't be. At least until someone perfects a stable GUI...at least as stable as Windows (an oxymoron if I ever saw one...that's a scary thought, to want something to be as stable as Windows.) As the previous poster says, lusers just want to point and click and couldn't give a rat's ass about Open Source and programming and kernels etc. which I think is really sad, imagine how great software and OSes could be if everyone cared about this stuff. It would be freakin' awesome, but all the companies just pander to the lowest common denominator.

Oh wel, Ce'st la vie.
----
"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."

Are fun things the only things worth doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question many you have to ask is: Are there tasks which exist which are wholly worth doing, and neccessary for society to function, yet no one finds them interesting or fun?

How about proper documentation and user interface coding for Linux apps? (half serious) Certainly no robot is going to do that. Better examples are perhaps things like taking out the garbage, policing high schools, and having sex with your wife.

I get a little antsy when I read about the wonders of this wonderful star-trek like society where everyone does what's fun, no one hates their job, and boredom is the only enemy.

You know, everything ceases to be fun and interesting after awhile. What happens then? You just abandon your task and leave everyone who depended on you wanting? Where's responsibility?

Let's say you found the ZNOME project, an extension to GNOME. It's the hottest thing, and you are one of the hottest coders, the lead maintainer, and pretty much responsible for the success of the project and its management.
Then, you decide you are bored of it, and quit all of a sudden? Sure, other people can take your place, but you still do damage in your wake. If Linus, Miguel, Rasterman, etc all totally abandoned their projects to get more interesting research jobs, would none of you feel let down or complain?

There comes a point in every project, like after 80% of it is done, and that last 20% of polish seems to be like the last mile in a marathon. It's boring sometimes, it hurts, you wish you could do something else.

Are we heading to a society where no on can be depended on to finish a task because it might become boring, irritating, or uninteresting?

Perhaps this is the WHOLE ESSENCE OF Open Source.
I get a flash of energy, I feel like coding up the 513th CD Player applet, this time using GTK and XML for some strange reason. I get it 70% done to where it's workable, but then I get bored and release it without documentation or any usability and hope someone else is interested enough to finish the work for me?

It seems like the MTV Attention Deficit Order society to me.

Re:Ransom Services?

[whoop]

I'm picturing an eBay for kidnappers.

Re:Technology and ideology.

[Luis Casillas]

I'd say most of the third world is up to their neck in trouble, but it's not because of exploitation or pauperization. Overpopulation, instability of governament and tradition in civil war are much more severe causes for poverty.

This is completely wrong.

First of all, one of the major causes for instability and "civil wars" on third world countries is the intervention of former colonial powers. You know, like the US arming guerrillas to overthrow a government that puts its people's interests above those of US corporations. Or supporting a brutal, murderous dictatorship because it supports corporations robbing the people. Can you say Guatemala, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Indonesia, etc.?

Also, the industrialized nations put great economic pressure on the third world. Suppose you are the president of a third world republic, and you want to develop your country. You need capital to do this, which you lack. So you turn to the financial institutions of the industrialized world for help (World Bank, International Money Fund, etc.). They might offer you money, if they like you, but, you have to comply with several conditions: you have to set up a "free market economy", eliminating governmental subsidies, opening up you country's economy to external investors, and eliminating tariff protections for your country's products.

Which means that foreign investors get the upper hand at every stage--- they have more capital than local investors, and there are no compensating government subsidies for the locals, so they get beat on investments; since you have no import tariffs, your local products can't compete against those from first world companies (which are frequently subsidized by governments). The outcome is all too familiar.

The exploitation is clearly still there.

---

Re: Technology and ideology.

[Luis Casillas]

100-\infty% is a better estimate. The factory wouldn't be here and the prospective employees, lacking the money for the overseas trip, would need to find employment in the local economy.

Well, if the industrialized countries didn't try so goddamned hard to undermine the local economies, maybe this would be an argument.

But, as it stands, this argument loses legitimacy with every dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) spent by the first-world on guerrillas, dictators, bribes, and economic advantages.

---

First world and third world (long)

[Luis Casillas]

Today, despite having been, arguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _its_ patron state!

MYou are taking my logic backwards ("p implies q" does not imply "q implies p"). I don't hold that if an economy is subsidized, it will bloom. I only hold that subsidies are an advantage many US corporations have, that is systematically denied to count ries that wish to receive economic aid.

Today, despite having been, a rguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _ its_ patron state!

I think the fact the US came out on top, and not, say, Brazil, is due mainly to historical reasons. (Anyway, the fact the West ern world came out on top could very well be an historical accident. What if the Persians had beat the Greeks? What is Charles Martel (?) had not beat the Moors in France in 753 A.D.?)

However, this is not what I set out to do. I set out to explain why the Western powers stay on top, not why they came to be on top. My position is that there is a strong economic and militaty pressure to keep them down.

Let's examine current "exploitation", though. Suppose the US corporation Giganticorp sets up a factory in Malaysia, paying its workers X amount per hour, to make products which are then shipped back to the US. It's not clear precisely who loses here. Giganticorp pays less for manufacturing than it would for a US factory; these profits are passed either to the consumer in the form of lower costs, or the stockholders. The workers have a job that they would presumably not have otherwise; this money passes from the US economy into the Malaysian economy. The Malaysian government probably takes its share in taxes too. Plus, of course, there are all the associated costs and the jobs those create: electricity, shipping, etc. It's not clear who is being "exploited" here.

It is clear who is getting exploited. Those who are doing most of the work for the least pay.

(And yet somehow the Western world is po rtrayed as the one getting rich off this.)

This is not a "portrait"; this is a fact. How much money do you think corporations get out of the goods produced in the third world? How much stays in the local economy?

But then we have to ask why it is that the workers take the jobs. Is it unreasonable to assume that they regard the jobs as preferable to whatever else they have an opportunity to do?

What about the opportunities that the industrial powers have systematically tried to kill for third world workers? Like, union organization, popular democratic movements, and so on. The industrialized nations have a long story of attacking these movements in the third world, by means of tactics like supporting oppressive dictatorships, by terrorism, or by infiltrating popular movements.

Thus you are taking "opportunities" in a much too narrow sense here. If you mean "opportunities" as in the choices they have within the political and economical circumstances the first world countries actively attemp to restrict them to, well, then the "opportunities" (a horrible euphemism here, I think: working for 15 cents an hour, 12-14 hours a day, at some menial job, making some american executive earn millions a year, and missing out on chances to work to improve living conditions for their own country) are preferable. However, when you step out of that narrow view, you realize that these people's real opportunities are squashed by the power of a ruthless economical elite at every step of their lives.

This is perhaps the most irritating thing about Western liberalism in this area: it reduces the people it supposedly is the most concerned about, the "exploited" workers, to the level of children or morons, portraying them not as rational human beings making choices, but as objects used by Westerners. (Interesting that it always requires Westerners to "save" the people, no matter what the problem or the time...)

I don't see where my argument is reducing them to children or morons. I just argued that current first world economic, military and politic policies are directed towards keeping the third world poor, so that the industrial economic elite can profit. This has nothing to do with the great talents of third world people.

And I don't necessarily ask anyone to "save" the third world. I ask, as a minimum, not to screw them over. That's very different.

If the working conditions are frankly _abusive_, or the workers are forcibly prevented from organizing, yes, this is a problem - _but then the issue of First World/Third World is a red herring_. These things would be abuses wherever they occurred; there's nothing about the FW/TW relationship that makes these abuses peculiar to that relationship. If the government of Malaysia is corrupt and permits or even commits abuses against the workers, for the sake of having Giganticorp remain there, then yes, this is a Bad Thing - but again, it's nothing inherent to the relationship.

The possibility to abuse is inherent to the relationship. The power to abuse is inherent to the relationship, that's why. These relationships were set up by force, and are kept as they are by force, be it exerted by explicit means (shooting union leaders) or implicit (threats of firing workers, depriving them oif their means for subsistence).

You talk about laboral abuses as if something incidental when they occur in third world countries (they can, and do occur, in the first world). Then, why is it that the industrial powers, and in particular the US, support governments that permit and encourage such abuses, and attack those who resist them? Think Guatemala, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua.

Three hundred years ago, life expectancy in the US was much lower than it is today, formal education much rarer, and the nation in general less wealthy. Is the argument that we became so by "exploiting" others?

In great part, yes. The native americans were forcefully expelled from their lands, which, in the case of the south, were planted by black slaves.

The US is also a militaristic power that derives great riches from the sales of military equipment. More often than not, to third world nations with questionable human rights records.

But of course, history is always more complex than that.

---

Technology and ideology.

[Luis Casillas]

This technocratic ideology ("a future world where everyone dedicates themselves to having fun") is quite sadly not questioned by most of the people who post here.

I would have to point out to everyone that, hey, there's a world outside the industrialized nations (hell, considering the /. demographics, outside the USA, I'd say). Where do third world countries fit into this whole story?

The economical abundance of the industrialized countries, and the concommitant techonological advances, like it or not have been built on the exploitation and pauperization of the third world.

The driving motor for technological advance, in general (apart from the possible intentions of individual inventors) has not been a desire to make people have more time for entertainment, but rather to diminish the wage costs of production. Yes, the reason the money for developing and building industrial robots has appeared is not because the industry wants laid-off workers to have fun in the free time the robots create for them...

And don't get me started in the american "entertainment" industry.

All this is just an egotistical "I just wanna have fun" fantasy, with no concern for reality. In fact, I think that a society where everyone could just have fun would take a lot of work to set up and maintain, and not the kind of work doable by a machine. Yeah, for example, can anyone here volunteer to learn Yoruba and translate all the Linux documentation into it, so Yoruba speakers get the same opportunities for fun we do? Care to coordinate the translations for the thousands of langauges found in the world? Hell, for that matter, care to coordinate translations of all documentation in your system for all languages spoken in the USA?

BTW, try reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, you might find it interesting. It describes a society somewhat along "entertainment" lines (although people still work).

---

Re: Technology and ideology.

[pingouin]

I'd say most of the third world is up to their neck in trouble, but it's not because of exploitation or pauperization. Overpopulation, instability of governament and tradition in civil war are much more severe causes for poverty.

Exploitation and pauperization were their starting points, even before most of those countries were independent. If there's overpopulation and instability (this latter point I dispute, since those countries that have attracted Western corporations have made it their mission to be stable -- By Any Means Necessary, if you get my drift), it comes as a result of the exploitation and pauperization. If you're reasonably happy about your day-to-day existence, you have no interest in fighting a civil war or joining a revolution. There's legitimate cause to blame a lot of African countries for being their own worst enemies, but in many parts of the Third World, the blame can be equally shared between their governments, Western governments (especially the US), and the Disneys and Nikes of the world, who make a handful of Third World people rich (and it's amazing how many of them seem to be connected in some way to their government) at the expense of millions of people making 15 an hour.

To get a little closer the original idea: I think the wealth of this planet will stay unevenly distributed, there is no way to lift a country to higher a higher standard of living from outside.

OTOH this doesn't mean it's not our duty to try to help and at least not knowingly rob other countries.

If you have labels on your belongings that say "Made in Indonesia", "Made in China", or even, in some cases, "Made in USA" (for garments made in places like the Northern Marianas commonwealth), then you are, in effect, robbing those countries. You're getting a Free Lunch in terms of labor costs, and the wealth tends to trickle into the hands of the (Western and Japanese) shareholders of the corporations who manufacture their goods at these sweatshops. Millions of people are working their asses off all around the Third World, but are getting paid 1-10% of what they would be paid if they were sitting in a factory in the First World; they are being robbed by us. On top of that, they're being robbed of years from their lives; the hazardous working conditions will surely shorten the life expectancies of many.

If we would insist on applying Western labor standards (fair wages, unionizing rights, collective bargaining, worker safety) to the rest of the world, maybe we'd see some positive changes; it's not a magic bullet, but it's a step in the right direction. If we stop seeing these people as less-than-human (by being complicit in their wage-slavery), maybe the pauperization and instability will start to recede. But too many powerful people (and us, the consumers and shareholders) have a vested interest in the Third World being the Lowest Common Denominator; in the end, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot -- we may all be dragged down to that Lowest Common Denominator, with all the overpopulation and instability that seems to come with it.

--

Re:Technology and ideology.

[pirkka]

The economical abundance of the industrialized countries, and the concommitant techonological advances, like it or not have been built on the exploitation and pauperization of the third world.

Well I'm ready to concede that during imperialism the 3rd world got screwd, but what about today?

I'd say most of the third world is up to their neck in trouble, but it's not because of exploitation or pauperization. Overpopulation, instability of governament and tradition in civil war are much more severe causes for poverty.

To get a little closer the original idea: I think the wealth of this planet will stay unevenly distributed, there is no way to lift a country to higher a higher standard of living from outside.

OTOH this doesn't mean it's not our duty to try to help and at least not knowingly rob other countries.

--
Pirkka

Re: Technology and ideology.

[rp]

"Millions of people are
working their asses off all around the Third World, but are getting
paid 1-10% of what they would be paid if they were sitting in a
factory in the First World."
100-\infty% is a better estimate. The factory wouldn't be here and the prospective employees, lacking the money for the overseas trip, would need to find employment in the local economy.
How is this relevant to Linux?
Can local communities in 3rd world countries benefit from Linux because it makes computing power and network connectivity more affordable?
Could Unix prompts have any long-term effects on the local economy?
(I'm only half joking.)

NT = less fun

[Skyshadow]

Hell, I've turned down jobs because they promised to be *less fun* than the one I have now; money
isn't everything, especially if you hate your job the way I hated my last one. I mean, just
imagine admining NT -- getting paged at night two or three times a week 'cause IIS died, etc.

Even in the job I'm in now, which is at a mostly-NT shop, I'll only work on projects that
are based around Linux or some other stable operating system. I want to do cool things, not
put out a bunch of fires!

Linux restores the good 'ol days where the OS didn't try to keep you from working.

----

Re:NT = less fun

[COLUG]

>...imagine admining NT -- getting paged at night two or three times a week 'cause IIS died, etc.

I do Linux, AIX, HPUX, and Solaris admin at work. We have slightly more *nix boxes (~30) than NT boxes.

I am the ONLY *nix admin to FOUR NT admins. I have been paged three times in the last six months and two of those pages were NT problems.

Re:NT = less fun

[COLUG]

I should have added that the NT admins get more pages in an afternoon than I get every six months!

No Boredom in the Future

[Aaron M. Renn]

Linus doesn't explicitly state that we'll all have so much free time in the future that we'll be bored. And that's a good thing too because it's not true. If we look back at the labor saving devices invented in the last 200 years, it boggles the mind. Yet today we still mostly work for a living. Many people work longer hours than ever as companies shed as many employees as the possibly can. The fact is that labor saving devices don't exist in a vacuum. They are part of the fabric of our society. Computerization both changes society and is moulded by society.

I highly recommend the essay Speeding Towards Meaninglessness: Why Labor Saving Devices Don't Save Time. It's part of Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE site, which I've recommended on this forum before. Steve is a pseudo-luddite and an enviro-weenie who worships primitive cultures, but he and his contributors do have a lot to add to our understanding of the affect of technology on human existencs.

Re: No Boredom in the Future

[Jonas �berg]

Very interesting and enlightning article you point us to there, Aaron. I had missed it before but it was well worth reading.

it was good.

[gavinhall]

Posted by k150:

you gave a good summary of the seminar/lecture/panel...

i went with some friends b/c i saw a poster that said "linus torvalds to speak today, pauley ballroom, 1pm"... and we got to listen to a bunch of other people before him ;) but i like that linus, unlike g4Ý3Z or mr inventor/vp, made useful points.. about society. i did not mind at all that technology wasn't covered. my was the nokia guy with overhead presentation longwinded! i fell asleep. i am a polisci major anyway.


k

In 150 years...

[pingouin]

...most of us will be dead :)

I think something in the California water must have gotten to Linus. I'm worried about the future of the kernel.

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
-- Henry David Thoreau (from Walden), 1854

Meet the new future, same as the old future.

--

Re:In 150 years...

[craw]

Nice quote. I wonder if they still "force" kids to read Walden. I would also guess that more ppl know the source of your sig.:)

Here's another quote.

"Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of those sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research."
--Aristotle

Re:In 150 years...

[Jaeden]

Answer to your question == yes "they" do
In fact, my assignment is due on Monday =(

as for my quote:

"What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad."
- Dave Barry

-jaeden

You misunderstand...

[pingouin]

Although menial jobs and the lower class have always existed, as more and more things are automated, it's likely that the menial jobs will slowly shift towards entertainment. They would still be considered "lower class" but would be orientated towards providing entertainment to others. As the cost of providing survival becomes proportionaly less, the amount of "work" needed to earn a living is likely to decrease and be replaced with less boring "work".

Arguably, the recent trend is toward an increase in the percentages of the lower class; manufacturing jobs get shifted from the First World to the Third World, creating an overall erosion in per-hour earnings for many, many people, offset by the creation of a relative handful of middle/upper class incomes in the emerging economies. It ultimately results in a shrinkage (per 1,000 population) in the audiences for entertainers to entertain.

This apparently means we'll have eleventy-gazillion bad pop singers in this Grand Future. The notion that "entertainin' th' rich folks" is some sort of great improvement is neither true nor a new concept. Some slaves were entertainers in the US, IIRC; a step up from menial labor, but at the end of the day, you're still a slave.

Alongside this, the history of modern professional sport has its roots in "entertainin' massa'n'his friends" (the 20th Century racial slur "lawn jockey" has its roots in those horrid statues "commemorating" those early athletes); post-slavery, many boxers, basketball players, baseball players, etc, found sports a better gig than working in the coalmines, but the pay wasn't all that good -- you still had to get a job in the offseason, and you still were quite likely to be poor after your sports career was over. Back to the coalmines, if some serious sports injury didn't preclude that... It wasn't until the latter half of this century that athletes could even begin to think of sports as a lucrative career, and that really didn't come to fruition until the last 25 years.

And that lucrativeness comes, in part, from the exclusivity -- there's no way that eleventy-gazillion goaltenders will be a workable possibility, just as there can't be 17,305 songs or movies in the Top Ten.

And if you think entertainment is "fun", you try working roomfuls of middle-aged, middle-class drunks (or their equally putrid offspring) for a living.

Maybe we can have a dozen restaurants at every street corner. And, of course, that will trigger a growth industry in teaching people how to say "Would you like more coffee, sir?"

Let a thousand theme parks bloom...

In this sort of future, I see an increase in guerrillas, both in the First and Third World; no matter how many ways you find to say "Let Them Eat Cake", the result is you're pissing off more and more people. Beware the Critical Mass(es).

Linus is a great hacker, but a lousy futurist; of course, I won't be able to prove it for another 150 years.

--

Sex isn't "need" - it's "entertainment"!

[Paul Crowley]

Good sex and good conversation should do more than fulfill a social need, it should be fun. If you start to think about sex as something you do because you have to get laid from time to time, you'll be less likely to experiment and you won't get as much out of it.
--

sexual perversion

[jabbo]

is a whole hell of a lot more useful than Quake skills, to be quite frank. Hell, you can pimp your kinks out a lot easier than Quake skills.

I liked those Romans, they had their priorities straight. OTOH most people seem to think of programming as something twisted and perverted (witness VB "programmers") so maybe we can just lump real programming in there with hot wax and ball gags ;-P.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta...

Re:sexual perversion

[Mazurbul]

Incidentally, the Romans are extinct.

I'm not bored

[sterwill]

If we look back at the labor saving devices invented in the last 200 years, it boggles the mind. Yet today we still mostly work for a living. Many people work longer hours than ever as companies shed as many employees as the possibly can.

Perhaps you missed the subtle effects of these time-saving devices. Often the invention of these devices can be directly linked to modern happiness. For example, computers (the modern, analog and digital kind) crunched numbers for munitions trajectories. In this century, computers also carried out various encryption and decryption duties for governmental war efforts.

How does this affect me now, half a decade after the primary concerns which prompted the development of these devices have evaporated? I, and millions of others, have the opportunity to take a "job" in an industry which offers exciting things. I enjoy my work; it certainly doesn't bore me. That's what those archaic devices provided me.

Re:boredom

[demon]

What's wrong with decadence and sexual perversion? ;)

In related news . . .

[Q*bert]

Madonna today announced that sex is fun, and noted chef Paul Purdom, taking his queue from Madonna and Linus, affirmed his conviction that eating is fun. Journalists and sociologists everywhere were stunned by the news. "So this explains why people spend so much time hacking, eating, and doing the nasty with each other!" said noted techno-journalist Jon Katz. "I knew there had to be some kind of motivator." Katz added that he doesn't understand why people don't spend more time "doing the nasty" with robots, since he considers this activity to be fun, as well.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:boredom

[Q*bert]

Yeah, I really worry about that 3% of our society that's unemployed at a given time, too. What a bunch of bums! Why don't they get useful jobs administering Web servers?

Note HEAVY sarcasm
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:We DO have a Caesar..

[Q*bert]

Actually, by the reasoning of the person who started this thread, Linus would clearly be our Caesar. Here we are following him with utmost devotion as he leads the way to a degenerate, entertainment-based lifestyle. Soon we'll all do nothing but write code and administer computers, and throw wild parties where we lie around watching entertaining spectacles and overeating and vomiting.

Actually, that pretty well describes my present life, except for the vomiting part. See? The degeneration is already upon us! Oh me, oh my. I never knew so much hard work would lead to degeneracy.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:reading between the lines.

[Q*bert]

There may be a group of people that seek more money, and will sacrifice personal satisfaction at the job to get it.

That's cool; we need a certain number of managers, accountants, construction workers, and so on. There are construction workers out there who are getting paid more than I (a 22-year-old system administrator in a college town, granted) make. My tai chi instructor is one. ;)
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:boredom

[dattaway]

Lead plumbing may have destroyed the Roman empire.

17 inch particle accelerators and bad ergonomics may destroy us as our "information society" (from Al Gore buzzword bingo) enslaves us in a pattern of BSOD reinforced behavior.

Linux and wearable computers will save the world. :)

Re:boredom

[AMK]

A. Trevor Hodge, who's apparently an expert on Roman architecture, once pointed out that the story of the Romans being poisoned because of lead water pipes was bogus. The Romans built aqueducts to bring water from mountain springs into their cities, and from the aqueducts lead pipes carried water into homes. However, the Romans didn't have faucets; water simply flowed continuously from its outlets in the home. Lead only accumulates in water significantly if the water is standing still, so lead-laced water wasn't a problem for the Romans.

Wine jugs coated with lead-based glazes, on the other hand...

intrinsic interest

[Quazi]

That creativity article you mentioned brings up a darn good point..

Humans are at the mercy of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle! If you try to ask someone philosophically why they act the way they do, they'll slightly change the way they act to accomodate this new-found knowledge (they now know more about why they act the way they do). Their position stays the same (right where you stopped them to ask them the question), but their actions change.

It's a slight deviation from the conclusion that this article was taking, but it works once you think about it!

Re:Linus Pauling

[Jonathan]

Right! He won the Nobel Peace prize. But lots of people had already made the obvious observation that above ground nuclear testing causes fallout. Pauling used his status as a famous scientist to get governments to listen to him, while the same governments wouldn't listen to (less famous) people more qualified on the results of nuclear testing.

Re:Linus - not God

[Jonathan]

Well, I've never quite understood why people treat the opinion of experts as more than cocktail party chatter when they talk about matters beyond their field of expertise. For example, pacifists love to quote Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling as if the fact that these great scientists were pacifists meant something. As far as I can tell, neither relativity nor the nature of the chemical bond has any bearing on the subject.

Of course everyone talks about matters beyond their training. Linus (Torvalds, that is, Pauling is dead) has a perfect right to chatter about anything at all if he so wishes. But just because he's one hell of a programmer doesn't give him magical insights into other affairs.

Linus Pauling

[foog]

Linus Pauling is a poor example for your argument; he did after all win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards nuclear disarmament as well as his Nodel Prize in Chemistry for working out the structure of proteins.

Linux not fun?

[fireproof]

On the other hand, I've always thought of Linux as a fun OS. Yeah, BeOS is pretty cool, but I'd rather play with Linux. I think it's the ability to tinker with the source code that attracts me.

In fact, I was just telling my supervisor how much fun Linux is. I even came in on my day of to upgrade a kernel -- off the clock! (I sure wouldn't volunteer to install an NT Service Pack this way, though . . .)

Of course, we all are entitled to our own opinion. If you think BeOS or MacOS or whatever is fun, more power to ya!

Lead

[Mr Z]

At least we don't have lead plumbing for bringing us drinking water. :-)

(Of course, I can't pronounce half the ingredients in half my meals these days... Maybe I should start shopping at Whole Foods or something.)

--Joe

--

Re:$100K+

[enterfornone]

I think my jobs sux. I do a good enough job to stop me from getting fired, but that's about it. Linus isn't saying EVERYONE has a job they love, he's saying people do a better job when it's something they love.

Email.

[thinker]

He gave an example of how a good technology such
as email introduced in the wrong way to a society
can be turned in the wrong direction easily.

What was the example?

---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,

Re:Email.

[meese]

His example was that (although I don't know if it is true) is that in Bogota, since there is a very clearly defined economic class divide, the poor are using email to send randsom notes to the rich requesting money for the return of the rich they kidnap. He said there are even services that will do this.

reading between the lines.

[Signal 11]

One might argue that if people are no longer struggling to survive and as such they will gravitate towards "non-boring" jobs... then you might arrive at the conclusion that open-source is the first of a long series of social changes which will be taking place in both mainstream, and computing culture.

However, the fundamental logic flaw here is.. event A is not linked to event B. People may not be dependent on "surviving" with a job.. but that does not necessarily mean that as a result, they will seek out non-boring jobs. There may be a group of people that seek more money, and will sacrifice personal satisfaction at the job to get it.

Linus makes a good point, but don't take it at face value.

--

The story behind the Success.

[Accipiter]

BERKELEY, California--Linux has been successful because it's the product of programmers looking for entertainment and society rather than money, Linux founder Linus Torvalds said today.

'nuff said. If the project was motivated by the Mighty Buck, it would never have gotten to where it is today. Linus started developing Linux because he didn't want to pay the insane prices for a UNIX system.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:A little bit of truth is a dangerous thing.

[Midnight Coder]

I'm sorry but this article, and the philosophy it espouses is dangerous.

It's okay when read in a reflective mood, "just to keep things in perspective". But taking it serious would be foolish.

Primitive cultures were and are NOT peaceful idyllic communities.

They are disease ridden hell pits of starvation and oppression. Take some time and look into the conditions in which lower class India live. The cow dung used to cook emits poison toxins which slowly kill as they heat. Furthermore if you want to see real inquity, between sexes and ages that's your place.

I'll take this 'hi-tech' society anyday. Where I can seek out the few like minded people that exist in this world, where I can spend hours everyday experimenting and creating, exercising my mind. After considering the alternatives I think it's a pretty good way to live.

Re:Ransom Services?

[hpp]

Well, read Jack Vance's "The Demon Princes",
which has exactly that - a hostage interchange which auctions off hostages if the ransom isn't being paid in time...

more to the panel

[meese]

There was quite a bit more to the panel than you gather from the news.com article. Linus spent much of his time providing examples for "Linus's Law" which said that the only three things that motivate people are 1. Survival (food, shelter, etc...), 2. Social Needs (communication, relationships, sex), and 3. Entertainment. He then pointed out how many things move from a survival stage, to social, and then eventually entertainment, as do societies (e.g. the romans). He said something like "First you worry about surviving, then about your social communications with others, and then you end up partying all night." But he wasn't the only interesting one on the panel - there were a few others including Prof. Castells who talked about the need for worrying about the application for technology both in schools and in society at large, instead of just dumping it there and expecting the best to come out of it. He gave an example of how a good technology such as email introduced in the wrong way to a society can be turned in the wrong direction easily. He also stressed that schools shouldn't just be wired, but provide a system for using the internet that they're connected to. Overall an interesting talk, but its focus was more on society than on technology, and my feeling was that there were a lot of folks there just for Linus's talk.

"The Romans are extinct" ?!?

[CRConrad]

Yeah, right.

Rome is full of them, bonehead!

Actually, ITALY is full of them.

Sheesh...

Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.

Re:Linus wasn't the first --- absolutly correct

[orabidoo]

colour me unconvinced. this "Hierarchy of Needs" seems to mean that in advanced societies people give more of their attention to the "higher" levels. as far as i can see, this is 1) not quite true, and 2) not the same as what Linus is saying. switching from "looking for food & sex" to "looking for entertainment" (even assuming the switch is made; i'm extremely doubtful about the sex part) doesn't actually go up in any way, unless the entertainment itself is "up there". now, in Linus' case it is, because Linus is a hacker and hackers will consider "entertainment" things that they actually ifnd interesting. but that's not what is being sold as "entertainment" out there. in an "entertainment" society, people will (and do) mostly relieve their boredom with time wasters, not with meaningful thought/exploration/discipline/etc. technology makes life easier, but I don't see it making society any wiser (and complexity does not equal wisdom).

Re:Money == Entertainment

[orabidoo]

staying within your argument: you're willing to do uninteresting work for more money so you can work less hours and then entertain yourself more. but then look at the average quality of your life: a nasty part and a good part doesn't make a very good average. OTOH, a job that you reasonably enjoy, and still makes you enough $$ to leave you time to get "entertained", you probably could get a better average that way. from there we can add two things: 1) that you probably don't need as much money as you think you do, if you start looking at where it actually goes, and at whether some of these forms of "entertainment" are actually worth it, and 2) that there are other (and even more rewarding) things to do with your time than getting "entertained".

Re:Robots

[DavidTC]

Yeah, that's in the books.

The way around it is to have 'more important' people give the robot an order not to obey other people when those people tell it to destroy itself. If you have a hierarchy of people, it works pretty well.

As for Asimov, well, he was a sci-fi writer. And about 100 other kinds too. :)

Seriously, if you haven't seen a book by him, then...well...I don't believe you. He wrote something like 200 of them. :)

We DO have a Caesar..

[ToastyKen]

>>You should be on the lookout for a Caesar if you want to draw parallels
Gee, what did Caeser do? Overreach his military power and spread his standing army out all over the map?
Any government we know doing that? Nah.... :P

Re:boredom

[cody]

Historians have found that the lead water pipes the Romans used also contributed quite a bit to the downfall, seeing as how it made everyone freakin' insane.

Its the other way around.

[FallLine]

Europe and other third world countries have more 'make work' than we have in the US. Their state welfare programs are far larger, and they only aggravate unemployment problems. In France and Germany for example, there are many employment laws that make it difficult to fire an employee. As a result, the employeer thinks twice before hiring a potential employee. This has a large impact on small businesses.

Fun!

[Amnesiak]

I'm installing Linux for the first time this coming week... I hope I can wholeheartedly agree with Linus. : ) -am

Re:boredom

[Amnesiak]

Playing quake is fine by me.

Noooo save me from the BOREdom!

[MikeFM]

Boredom is the worst thing. I can take stress, lack of sleep, pain, whatever.. but not being bored. I hate being bored. Working this boring job annoys me because it uses enough of my attention span to make it hard to just sit and think but not enough to interest me. It doesn't pay to well either. Hey somebody offer me twice the money to play w/ Linux all day! Please! I'm actually thinking of quitting this techie job to go work at a pizza place because I like making pizza. Anybody need a code hacking pizza guy who has read Snow Crash and the Diamond Age way to much? :) If required I can learn to use swords too.

Re:Robots

[jago]

365 books (I think).
One for every day of the year...
:)

Re:Linux? Fun?

[Rayban]

Probably not... then it would be Windows.

:P

Linux? Fun?

[Rayban]

I don't know about you, but I find there are other drawing factors to Linux:

- it's interesting to learn
- the Linux people are more open than the Windows people (asking questions, etc.)
- you can learn how it works easily
- and dammit, I guess it is fun to use :)

Re:Linux? Fun?

[Jonas �berg]

If it wasn't interesting to learn, the people weren't more open than the proprietary followers and if it wasn't easy to learn how it worked, would it still be fun?

Einstein - Pacifist

[Captain Teflon]

You shouldn't shortchange Einstein in the pacifism stakes either. He recognised that his work in some way contributed to the development of nuclear weapons, and urged Roosevelt or Truman (can't remember which) to step up the effort to develop the Big One before the Axis powers did. Perhaps this isn't an act of pacifism, but then again it may well have led to the lesser of two evils.

Einstein was placed in a position where he was forced to consider the enormous implications (killing tens of thousands of Japanese) of his work and take some responsibility for it. This position gave him more than a little authority and credibility to speak on such subjects IMHO.

Linus - not God

[Captain Teflon]

Linus is an UberHacker and deserves his place among the elite of 1990's info tech.

Where sociology is concerned, he's an amateur. His "insights" aren't exactly revelatory.

People are still working in jobs they hate to feed their kids. The world's still full of hate, war, and suffering.

Many rock stars freely dispense social and political opinions. Too many people lap thes up uncritically.

I'll listen to Linus talk about computers until the sun goes red giant. But when he ends up on the Tonight show dispensing opinions about other stuff, I'm reaching for the remote.

Re:boredom

[kertaamo]

But lead water pipes may have been a problem for the British !
My family home was built in 1867. During some renovations in 1995 we were still removing old lead water pipes from the building , even today it is a lead pipe that gets the water into the house!

Re:boredom

[fordp]

The roman civilization had also become mostly a welfare state. Things like the coliseum were built to give the mostly unemployed citzenship something to do.

Of course we may not be as far from that as most would like to think.

Re:Money == Entertainment

[blaine]

The point is more that if given the choice between two jobs, and assuming both pay well enough that you aren't struggling financially, a lot of people would much rather have an interesting job for less pay than an uninteresting job for more pay. If I am going to work 8-5 every day, I'd rather get paid enough to live and be happy and have an interesting job than be paid an enormous sum of money to do some inane task. Why? Because generally you are going to be working the same amount (most people don't get paid by the hour, unless I'm missing something [at least after college they don't]). Why not do something interesting?

Reminds me of Dilbert. Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, Ruler of all Heck offers Dilbert two choices: He can be fabulously high-paid, but at the end of the day, all of his work will be burned in front of him, or he can be poor the rest of his life, but his work will be useful and benefit mankind. I'd probably pick the second myself. [Of course, for Dilbert, either is more preferable, seeing as currently he is paid almost nothing and his work is ignored/thrown out].

Linus wasn't the first

[Straker Skunk]

Linus's Law (as you describe it, anyway) is just a simplifed version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I don't remember how it goes exactly, but at the bottom you have survival (food, sex, etc.), a couple steps up you have emotional security, and then at the very top there's self-actualization. There's five levels in all, but the others escape me at this moment :-]

I have to agree, things may very well be moving toward the higher, more interesting levels. The way I see it, technology can either 1) make us into more productive workers, and/or 2) ease the drudgery of life to let us focus more energy on fun things (like Linux!)

From the Industrial Revolution to now, it's been #1 for the most part-- but maybe, just maybe, the tables are turning . . . .

Re:Linus wasn't the first

[quax]

I am certain Linus knows this, but it is something else to give a list of references at a discussion panel.

Do you know the quote: "No though worth thinking hasn't be thought before - including this one."

I am to lazy to find out who said this first, I think some old greek philosopher xxx B.C.

Re:Linus wasn't the first

[quax]

Well, actually whoever it was said "No though t worth ... etc."

Quoting is such a hard exercise *sigh*

Linus is *as always* :-) incredibly insightfull

[quax]

What we see is a historic paradigm shift in the allocation of resources. A developer of free software is not motivated by money. My sole motivation is certainly not money (even though I am attending business school). The current monetary driven economic models can not capture this.

But don't despair a model called "attention economy" is underway (guess what, they won't teach you that at business school, but you can learn about it on the Web at http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/6097/1. html)

In my country (Germany) and in most of Europe I see a society emerge that is primarily motivated by having fun. And by the way: Being creative, learning cool technology and discover scientific insights is big fun!

Re:Do Janitors think their job is interesting?

[quax]

Their jobs are not going to exist until eternity.

Many things done here by humans are done by machines in my country e.g. trash cans in the village my parents live in have to be put on the street in a certain angle when the trash pick-up truck comes, because a robot arm is picking it up.

A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in computer science (he's from Poland originally) couldn't believe his eyes when we passed a construction crew here in NY state, because there were two guys who's only job was obviously to hold up a sign and serve as provisional traffic light. Even in socialistic Poland they had real provisional traffic lights doing this laughable job.

That is part of the reason why unemployment is higher in Europe, and without a welfare system it would result in social unrest.

Re: He's right...

[Jonas �berg]

I'm in the process of turning down a similar jobb. For me, it would also pay twice as much as I make now. It would even let me work with GNU/Linux, but.. it just doesn't interest me. So why do it?

Entertainment and creativity

[Jonas �berg]

In the article, Linus says that "if you're not interested in doing something, you probably won't do it." This is something I definitly can relate to. It's even one of the reasons I'm getting out of the company I work for now.

I believe we see this in quite a lot of modern companies where you try to create a fun and creative atmosphere instead of the standard cubicle 8am-5pm workdays.

You can't buy creativity for money. On a related note, I'd like to mention ``Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain'' which was written by Alfie Kohn for the Boston Globe. Even if it's more than ten years old, it is worth reading.

I read that in a comic book..

[dayeight]

..about comic books. Scott McCloud's excellent _Understanding Comics_ also contains a history of art in general, and goes through the three things humans do. With cavemen. Good book, sure amazon or whatnot has it.

Re:boredom

[McFarlane]

That is a good point. And I also think you have to take into account what sort of "fun" one is talking about.

Linus was talking about the fun of a challenge. Something many of us are familiar with by using-learning/helping to build open source s/w. Although I'm sure we could all name a whole whack of other examples (like learning history!). I think this is "good fun" which makes one grow and (usually) develop relationships with other "good fun" sorts of people.

The other type of fun is passive - a life revolving around the modern colleseum - mindless television and blockbuster hollywood movies and little else. If people end up getting all their fun from these "bad fun" activites I think this can be... problematic.

(?)

Just a theory off the top of my head. Feel free to tear it apart.

Re:Linus wasn't the first --- absolutly correct

[McFarlane]

Here's the "I feel lucky" link from Google for this hierarchy of needs thing:

Google Link

BNW

[The Iconoclast]

I love BNW, read it back in High School, scares the sh*t out of me. Aldous Huxley wan't too far off, and he wrote the thing in '32. 1984 was scary, but it wan't too much on target, the whole Totalitarian-Communisim winning thing was wrong (a good guess, but wrong).

BNW, however, sees the end of us beeing based upon capitalism and consumption. I think of how the "castes" are provided with "entertainment" and something inside me SCREAMS middle-class suburbia and mass-consumption/mass-media. Think 20-20, America's Funniest Videos, McDonald's, the latest greatest summer "blockbuster," or latest Hit-Of-The-Minute pop music crap.

*shudder*

-- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."

Re:BNW

[fornix]

BNW, however, sees the end of us beeing based upon capitalism and consumption

Don't forget drug addiction. Take your soma, it will help you relax.

It is, as usual, even more complicated than that

[hello_c]

Some pre-technological communities had (fewer have) remarkably high average standards of living - I am blanking out on the names, but as an anthro prof pointed out, the bones left behind do tell you how old people got and whether they died of malnutrition or violence.

But idyllic peaceful cultures are almost certainly on good cropland, and can't defend themselves well against unpleasant invaders.

Robots

[fornix]

I can see his point ... to an extent. This is somewhat near sighted. What does Linus propose? If janitors, bus drivers and the people who work and McDonalds don't think their jobs are interesting they will quite? Because by then people will be more interested in being entertained than staying alive or getting food?

I can't speak for all of these people, but I do believe that they probably do not really find their jobs interesting. What, you ask, can we do about uninteresting repetitive manual labor type jobs? Robots. No wages, no healthcare benefits to pay, work incessantly without complaints, doing exactly as they are told. Nobody should have to work a job that a robot can do unless they are particularly interested.

What makes you think that our society is any better than ancient societies?

We will have robots!

This isn't going to last forever. Some other civilization, thousands, even hundreds, of years later will be completly different ... and they won't have Linux ( ... pitty).

You speak of the coming age of robots, who will one day no longer have a need for humans. Will their positron brains run Linux?

Re:Robots

[evbergen]

Unless those robots have the three (four) laws that Asimov envisions
(I wonder from who else you got that 'positron' idea ;-), which are:
1. Do not harm any human, either by direct action or by neglegence;
2. Obey any human, except if the resulting action would violate law 1;
3. Protect yourself, except if the resulting actions would violate either law 1 or 2.

Asimov really goes to great depths exploring possible future societies that have this kind of robots; from their inception, people struggling to accept them, their
odd behaviour, etc. But to stay on topic, he also wrote a book (it's called Children of the Sun, or something) about
a society in which these robots are ubiquituous and the problems it has, i.e. decadency, people less and less able to communicate directly or perform tasks themselves, etc.
Really worth reading!

Re:Robots

[Silex]

Unless those robots have the three (four) laws that Asimov envisions (I wonder from who else you got that 'positron' idea ;-), which are:

1. Do not harm any human, either by direct action or by neglegence;
2. Obey any human, except if the resulting action would violate law 1;
3. Protect yourself, except if the resulting actions would violate either law 1 or 2.

Okay ... big loop hole here. Let's say I tell a robot to destroy itself ... it MUST do so, due to rule 2. Rule 3 says to protect itself, but rule 2 can override rule 3. So basically you'de have people walking by and saying "kill yourself" to robots and watching them blow up. What logic!

who IS Asimov, anyway?

He's right...

[schon]

Linux does make computing (on a PC at least,) fun..
It's fun to learn about something that works properly..

"You'll take a job that doesn't pay as well
because it's more interesting," Torvalds said.

A perfect example.. I've turned down two jobs that pay
twice what I'm getting now, simply because they didn't interest
me,( and I wouldn't get to use Linux all the time :o)

s/fun/satisfying/

[SpinyNorman]

Everyone's actions are driven by satisfaction - just that different people enjoy different things. You may enjoy getting the guts of the worlds 513th CD player to work, someone else may enjoy addign the chrome, and someone else writing the documentation.

Note also that pleasure is a complicated many faceted thing... Helping others may appear to be altruistic, but people only do it because it makes them feel good. Finishing the last 10% if a project may be a grind, but many people do it because of the satisfaction of completion/whatever - maybe the source of pleasure is different from then first 90%, but it's still pleasure driven.

Certainly open source projects may seem more haphazard than things we are forced to do professionally, but the level of effort/completion put into them is really globally optimized!... If the 70% complete status of a project sufficiently annoys someone, then it will rise to the level where completing it is becomes the most satisfying thing they cad do - and they will do it.

BTW, do you _really_ think a robot could replace you in having sex with your wife? Sounds like you need to use a little imagination or whipped cream! ;-)

Re:Linus wasn't the first --- absolutly correct

[Silex]

You're right. I was thinking the same thing. I learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in 7th Grade. When diagramed, you have a triangle, split horizontally into several sections. The base of the triangle (the largest section) is food, then second is reproduction, third is something, fourth is soomething and fifth (as you said) is self-actualization. Now doesn't this contradict what Linus said about the future and what people will concentrate on? I'm hoping that people won't be THAT stupid as to not even realize what their needs and prioraties are. I think all this popularity is getting the Linus' head ... "Linus' Law" ??? give a break.

The REAL future

[Silex]

I think (or at least hope) that the future will be something like that portrayed in the book "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. Giant superpowers like the US will break up into hundreds of commercially owned states. Each state has its citizens, who pay that state's owner ... in return, the state gives them what they want. Don't like what your state's giving you? Go become a citizen of another state ... provided you can afford to. This way, everyone will be more or less happy, because it's TOTALY decentralized government. Maybe not as SAFE as current government ... but a happier place for those who can afford to enter the preferable states.

Do Janitors think their job is interesting?

[Silex]

I can see his point ... to an extent. This is somewhat near sighted. What does Linus propose? If janitors, bus drivers and the people who work and McDonalds don't think their jobs are interesting they will quite? Because by then people will be more interested in being entertained than staying alive or getting food?

Perhaps you propose that such classes will not exsist in future times. This too could be quite near sighted. Society has exsisted for thousands and thousands of years, and there have always been lower class workers who didn't work for 'fun', but rather out of need. What makes you think that our society is any better than ancient societies? It's not technology, I'll give you that much. Ancient civilizations have accomplished things which we cannot even begin explain, despite our 'more sophisticated' way of doing things.

The computer, the Internet ... it's all a phase in the greater picture. This isn't going to last forever. Some other civilization, thousands, even hundreds, of years later will be completly different ... and they won't have Linux ( ... pitty).

boredom

[Mazurbul]

Our culture is heading the way of the Romans, we need to adopt useful hobbies instead of becoming decadent and sexually perverted. I think we should all play quake. That will keep us from being bored :-)

Re:boredom

[EEEthan]

The Romans 'failed' many other reasons than 'having fun,' mostly the problems they had with successions in the empire, and the destabilization that came from the constant struggles for power. If we learn history, we won't have to repeat it. The US may have a similar fate to the romans, but we're a lot more like Republican Rome now. You should be on the lookout for a Caesar if you want to draw parallels...we're not quite to the downfall of the empire yet, in my opinion.

decadence and sexual perversion

[Mazurbul]

When a society is decadent and sexually perverse, it sends out a really big signal to allthe barbarians in the world that says "Come, take my money, rape my woman, and kill me slowly."
Also, sometimes, it causes fire to come down from heaven and turn everyone into molten lava (i.e. Soddom and Gomorrah (spelling?)).
Other than that, I guess nothing is wrong with it.

Linus short sighted for some people

[malice95]

While I think Linus has some amazing talents his
quotes about a entertainment oriented society are
short sighted. There will always be ditch diggers in the world. And people who just plain enjoy ditch digging. I Do unix sysadmin work. I love my job, but some days I long for a simpler more mindless job. Like fry guy:) But, then I look at all the fun things I want to do with my life.
Just learned to scuba dive, want to learn how to fly a plane, helicopter, climb a mountain..etc. All of these things cost big bucks and can only be done by someone with a high paying job. So I will always stick in the technology fields to make the money necessary to enjoy my life. Like the article said.. Money cant buy happiness but those who say that usually dont have any. Conviently i have found a job I like and pays well, but if it didnt
I could see myself taking another more boring job to make the money necessary to enjoy my free time more. Work is a way for me to enjoy my free time.. It just so happens that i enjoy work as well. Lots of other people arent so lucky.

Boredom

[parvati]

Frankly, I think my life is already motivated by a fear of boredom.

for some people indeed

[tukka]

It has pretty much been observed here that there will always be people (in this age, and in those to come) who will work out of necessity and survival... we're nowhere close to a utopian sort of "entertainment society" that Linus envisions for us in 150 years or so. There are still plenty of problems in the world for us to deal with... overpopulation, pollution, war, hate, ect. Marx's ideal of "ultimate communism" was for every individual in the society to do whatever work they wanted, almost spontaneously. So a person could one week be a painter, and the next a journalist, and then after that be a plumber, and pursue whatever whims, fancies, or passions that they may have at the time. Linus seems to think, that somehow, we will achieve something like this state of society, where we will do what we do in pursuit of 'entertainment'... where we will do things because of the challenge, or the fun, and that the other needs of society will somehow be fulfilled with a minimal percentage of the population toiling with jobs and lives they are not really happy with. After all, there are plenty of jobs that I can think of where it is difficult for me imagine many people thinking of them as highly fulfilling, challenging, and fun. Maybe technology will get rid of all these unpopular occupations, but I sincerely doubt it... at least for a good long while (longer perhaps than the human race will be able to sustain itself without destroying itself.)

Also, as has been pretty much observed, many people do not need to enjoy or have a real passion for their jobs. People are willing to do something they do not particularly enjoy for a living, in exchange for the net result of having more freedom intellectually, finanically, or in deciding in how to spend one's time.

Finally I'd like to add that Linux is not fun for everybody. Linus seems to be saying that Linux is fun for programmers, which I wouldn't personally disagree with, but for the average person, I think it needs to be understood, playing around with a complex OS (as great as the OS may be) is not their idea of fun. ;) It has nothing to do with not being intelligent, or even with not being interested in the technical functioning of computers. I've been using PCs since the age of 9, and have a fairly respectable degree of experience using/troubleshooting/maintaining them (probably not nearly as much as the average slashdot reader, but probably more than the average C|Net reader) and I have to say that my experiences with Linux have been anything but fun. I've had a great deal of difficultly getting all the elements of a what I'd call a 'functional' computer working under Linux on my PC, and for some reason (which I'm sure is my fault,) Linux is able 10 times more unstable for me than Windows 95 is (lockups nearly every session.) Right now I just have been unable to muster the discipline to make a great effort to understand Linux. I defintely need to buy another Linux book (lost the one I had) and make friends with a Linux guru or two before I move on... and even then, I'm not optimistic (as I once was) that learning Linux will be a bright and fun experience. Meanwhile, using Windows, for me, is a pretty entertaining experience.

BTW, sorry for the length of this post. I'm not very good at being concise, which is one reason (of a few) reasons I'm very shy about posting here. :)