Why why why why?

Why? This is a question many people try to answer in the last days. Most of them tried it by submitting articles, and some of the news systems these days published it.
Most of the articles dealt with topics around Linux and tried to explain why Linux won’t do it in the long term. Like “Why Desktop Linux Will Not Take off, and Why You Don’t Want It to” or “Why Ubuntu Got It All Wrong”. Others like “The Portland project: No silver bullet for hairy problem of multiple desktops” had at elast no “Why” in their title, but the result was the same. In the blogger world you also find professionals searching for answers – some of them even try to bring it to a (strange) point: “Linux’ achilles heel: fonts”.

Whenever I read such dump I’m really tempted to post answers, to discuss every single aspect, to show where the situation is described wrong, where the situation is different, and so on. You know, the usual stuff:

• There are quite a lot of experts paid to make Linux more xyz, so this will change soon and not stay like this as you claim.
• How does Apple fit in your comparison, with its similar technical base?
• If you think a perfect-working-Wine-version/stable-proprietary-kernel-API is all Linux needs – then why do you use Linux, and not Windows?
• Get your facts right, the main claims xyz are plain wrong.
• The parallel existence of Qt and Gtk (read: GNOME and KDE) is not a problem. If there is a problem, then the common base – which is improving right now. It gets better and better literally every day.
• No average user (one of the >80% mass) cares about that fact xyz.
• Most people working on Linux do not work for free, in fact most of them have quite good jobs.
• Open Source software like Apache is very successful, so being Open Source cannot be the problem.
• And so on…

Actually you can take this list and apply it in random order to a random “Why Linux will not…” article, I bet you will be quite lucky in most times.

However, I do not answer to such junk because it is exactly that: junk. And I have better thinks to do with my time then to answer random junk popping up again and again. You can’t fight it, at least not with arguing, because for two Myths you kill three more will step up – and if you kill them, the old two ones will be raised again by someone new.
So, don’t fight it as long as you do not have too much time.

But, I have a character which makes it difficult to stand too much junk – therefore I’m always tempted to start a discussion with such authors. So I try to help myself with a fact which will apply to all of these texts, and which is correct in any case and every time:

This what we see these days, the whole Open Source movement, is something the world has not seen before. It is entirely new. And no one, really no one, has just the slightest idea how it will develop, and which forces will be unleashed. So: all these guys are just betting – they have no idea at all. Like you and me. That’s all.

So, next time I see such an article I will just think “Ha, we’ll see, no one knows.” – and will not upset by such junk. Next time. This time I wrote this blog article. At least better than answering “yapoj”, yet another post of junk.