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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. "
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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?
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.
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).
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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.
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.
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=8^
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
æeee!
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.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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.
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.
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!
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?
... 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).
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