MESSAGE
| DATE | 2019-08-27 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] The Linux Journal is dead again
|
On 8/27/19 3:18 PM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> https://www.linuxjournal.com/
>
> IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM LINUX JOURNAL, LLC:
> On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were
> laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in
> any capacity. The website will continue to stay up for the next few
> weeks, hopefully longer for archival purposes if we can make it happen.
> –Linux Journal, LLC
>
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What Linux Journal's Resurrection Taught Me about the FOSS Community
by Kyle Rankin
on April 3, 2019
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"Marley was dead, to begin with."—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
As you surely know by now, Linux Journal started in 1994, which means it
has been around for most of the Linux story. A lot has changed since
then, and it's not surprising that Linux and the Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS) community are very different today from what they were
for Linux Journal's first issue 25 years ago. The changes within the
community during this time had a direct impact on Linux Journal and
contributed to its death, making Linux Journal's story a good lens
through which to view the overall story of the FOSS community. Although
I haven't been with Linux Journal since the beginning, I was there
during the heyday, the stroke, the decline, the death and the
resurrection. This article is about that story and what it says about
how the FOSS community has changed.
It's also a pretty personal story.
A Bit about Me
Although it's true that I sometimes write about personal projects in my
articles and may disclose some personal details from time to time, I
generally try not to talk too much about my personal life, but as it's
useful to frame this story, here we go. I grew up in an era when
personal computers were quite expensive (even more so, now that I
account for inflation), and it wasn't very common to grow up with one in
your home.
In high school, I took my first computer class in BASIC programming.
This class fundamentally changed me. Early on in the class I knew that I
wanted to change any past career plans and work with computers instead.
My family noticed this change, and my grandparents and mother found the
money to buy my first computer: a Tandy 1000 RLX. Although there
certainly were flashier or more popular computers, it did come with a
hard drive (40MB!), which was still pretty novel at the time. Every time
I learned a new BASIC command in school, I would spend the following
evenings at home figuring out every way I could use that new-found
knowledge in my own software.
I never got internet access during high school (my mom saw the movie
WarGames and was worried if I had internet access, I might accidentally
trigger a house call from the FBI). This just made it all the more
exciting when I went to college and not only got a modern computer, but
also high-speed campus internet! Like most people, I was tempted to
experiment in college. In my case, in 1998 a neighbor in my dorm brought
over a series of Red Hat 5.1 floppies (the original 5.1, not RHEL) and
set up a dual-boot environment on my computer. The first install was free.
Desktop Linux in the Late 1990s
If you weren't around during the late 1990s, you may not realize just
how different Linux was back then, but hopefully a screenshot of my
desktop will help illustrate (Figure 1).
""
Figure 1. My Super-leet Desktop from 1999
I'd like to point out a few things in this image. First, check out that
leet green-on-black theme! Second, notice the GNOME foot in the top-left
corner. This was early GNOME 1, back when it used Enlightenment as its
window manager. Next, notice the top Netscape Navigator window open to
Slashdot. If you are new to the FOSS community, Slashdot was the Hacker
News of its time (or Reddit, or Digg, or Fark—depending on when you
started arguing about technology news on the internet). Check out the
specs on the server for sale in the banner ad: 266MHz processor, 32MB
RAM, 2GB storage and 2GB of bandwidth.
The window below the top Netscape window is another Netscape window with
a full chat application implemented inside the browser with Java. I know
what you are thinking: that server in the ad only had 32MB of RAM, and
you need two or three gigabytes of RAM to run a JavaScript chat
application inside a browser, but I assure you, it was possible with Java.
Back in the 1990s, you would install Linux from a set of three or four
floppy disks (unless you used SUSE, which required about a dozen). The
user interface for the install was a curses terminal console that you
would navigate with a keyboard. This install assumed that you were well
familiar with disk partitioning, OS internals, networking and Linux
overall. When you completed the install, you normally would reboot into
a console. If you wanted to get a GUI, you then needed to configure
obscure X11 configuration files by hand—that is, if your graphics
hardware worked under Linux at all.
Because of how much deep Linux knowledge you needed to install and use
Linux back then, a number of Linux Users' Groups (LUGs) sprung up around
the country. These groups would meet and share tips and overall
knowledge about Linux, and they started a new phenomenon: Installfests.
During an Installfest, new Linux users would bring their computer to the
LUG, and the experts would try to get Linux installed and working on it.
Often experienced users also would bring their own computers to get help
with that one piece of stubborn hardware they couldn't get working.
Server Linux in the Late 1990s
I started using Linux professionally in 1999. Although Linux servers
were found in office networks in the late 1990s, they weren't too common
and often were used in secret. Linux was considered a hobbyist toy with
most IT departments, and you could get in a lot of trouble for setting
up a Linux server. The problem was that Windows file servers were
notoriously unreliable, so sysadmins would install Samba servers
covertly on the network. If anyone noticed the difference, it was only
to comment on how stable the file server was.
Initially, Linux servers were selected as an improvement over the lower
stability of Windows servers or the high cost of commercial UNIX
servers. The dotcom boom caused a huge demand for websites and web
servers. The Apache web server software and its ability to host more
than one website on a piece of hardware using its new "virtual hosts"
feature saw Linux spread rapidly in the data center.
Soon dynamic and interactive websites became important, and system
administrators found that the combination of a Linux OS with an Apache
web server, MySQL database and Perl scripts (later PHP) for dynamic
content was a free, easy and stable platform for their dynamic sites.
This LAMP stack grew in popularity and continued Linux's spread beyond
web servers into the application and database tier.
Running a Linux server in the late 1990s required deep knowledge of
Linux, networking and programming. Although a few companies (such as Red
Hat) were starting to offer paid support, most of the time, support was
a combination of your own troubleshooting and research as well as
reaching out to LUGs, friends, IRC and forums.
FOSS Community in the Late 1990s
The FOSS community in the late 1990s was rooted in FOSS ideals. Just
about everyone could give you a brief history of the Free Software
movement, knew what the GNU project was, knew what the GPL was, and had
strong opinions on the difference between "Free Software" and "Open
Source Software". Most of the community also had strong opinions on
whether it should be called Linux or GNU/Linux. For many, joining the
community and using Linux and Free Software was about advancing those
movements against the threats of proprietary software.
When you consider how much technical knowledge one needed to install and
use Linux back then, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the members
of the community reflected the state of the OS—hobbyist geeks,
engineers, scientists and CS students. In short, we were nerds. Because
of the dotcom boom though, this community was starting to expand, as
people started wanting to use Linux professionally. All of these
professional newcomers created a strong demand for Linux support, and
many FOSS companies came into existence during that time to fill the demand.
If you didn't happen to be in this community during the late 1990s,
check out the 2001 documentary called Revolution OS. It does a good job
of capturing the particular flavor of the community at that time, has
interviews with the luminaries of the day and describes the beginnings
of the Free Software movement from the initial work of Richard Stallman
to the creation of Linux and all the way to Red Hat's IPO during the
dotcom boom.
My Start at Linux Journal
The next part of the story begins almost a decade later in August 2007
during the Linux World Expo conference in San Francisco. Linux Journal
had announced a writer's "happy hour" event during the conference. The
idea was to invite prospective writers to come meet the editor and pitch
article ideas.
I found out about the event and got really excited about the prospect of
writing for Linux Journal. I had published a couple books on Linux by
then that were full of different Linux tips and tricks, and my mind was
racing with all the ideas I could incorporate into articles. I was so
excited about the prospect—and so afraid that other people would get
there and somehow pitch all of the good ideas before I had a chance—that
I showed up to the event early and paced until it started.
I pitched way too many ideas. Somewhere after I pitched between six and
a dozen distinct articles and they all seemed well-received, I got a
little boost of confidence that caused me to dare pitch something more:
a monthly column. By the end of that session, all of those article ideas
turned into a column I started in January 2008: Hack and /.
FOSS Community in 2007
In many ways, this era was the golden age for Linux and FOSS. Just to
set a few historical placeholders, in 2007 Debian released version 4.0
(Etch), and Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 with
the 2.6.18-8 kernel. All of the installs were influenced by some of the
ease-of-use breakthroughs in the Corel Linux installer, and the install
process was simple and featured nice graphics that guided users through
a few basic questions. After the install, the graphics hardware and most
of the rest of the hardware on the system tended to work pretty well
unless you were using cutting-edge hardware. The Linux install process
was much simpler (and faster) than installing Windows from scratch.
Linux was now mainstream in corporate IT, and it was much rarer to meet
much resistance when you wanted to set up Linux servers, unless your
company was a 100% Windows shop. The main requirement for some
organizations was paid support, and at this point, that also was mature
and similar to support offerings from proprietary vendors. These FOSS
companies were making a lot of money, and developers were being paid to
work on Linux and FOSS full time.
While the FOSS community still had the original nerdy members and new
nerdy members continued to join, most of the growth in the community was
from professionals. Many different professional Linux and FOSS
conferences existed that were priced to attract people who could get
their company to pay for them. These new community members were more
focused on the practical benefits of Linux and FOSS (low cost,
compatibility and the ability to modify code from a FOSS project for
company use). Unlike the original community, these members were less
focused on FOSS ideals.
The Stroke
In the aughts and early teens, the overall print publishing industry
went through a number of changes. During this time, there was a large
consolidation in the bookstore industry with companies like Barnes and
Noble and Borders crowding out indie bookstores. Later in this period,
more people started to get comfortable with the idea of using a credit
card online, and competition from Amazon started to threaten even the
large bookstores. Ultimately, this led to Borders closing all of its
stores, which in turn caused a significant drop in newsstand magazine sales.
Along with those difficulties, overall publishing and distribution costs
went up. Ultimately, this combination of lower newsstand sales and
higher costs caught up with Linux Journal, and it had to face a
difficult decision: either cancel print magazines and go with a
digital-only model or close the magazine completely. On August 19, 2011,
Linux Journal announced it would cancel print magazines and be digital-only.
Suffice it to say, the response to this announcement was generally
negative. No one (especially Linux Journal) wanted to cancel print
magazines, but at least some of the readership didn't seem to understand
that the alternative was closing down altogether, and some subscribers
responded with quite a bit of anger. The responses fit into two main
categories. The print-or-die readers canceled their subscriptions with
varying levels of bitterness. The wait-and-see subscribers decided to
try reading the issues online or on their e-readers.
The Decline
For some time, things continued working. Now that Linux Journal was free
of the high costs of putting out a print magazine, belts were tightened,
and over time, finances started to stabilize. Although some people had
canceled their subscriptions, those that remained were loyal readers. We
often would hear statements from this core readership like "I have every
print issue", and "I regularly go back to my archive of issues as a
reference." That kind of support encouraged the team to focus on this
core audience in our content.
The lack of a newsstand presence meant we lost one of our main avenues
for attracting new readers to the magazine. More important, our focus on
the core audience didn't factor in that the Linux community had changed
since 1994. It wasn't just that we weren't attracting the new members in
the community, many of the long-time members of the community also had
changed through the years to view Linux and FOSS much more pragmatically
and with less idealism. This meant that we not only failed to add new
readers, we also started losing some existing readers and writers.
Death
Ultimately, we couldn't keep the lights on. Linux Journal announced that
it was shutting down on December 1, 2017. I followed up that
announcement with an emotional farewell of my own. If you read that
farewell, you'll see that somewhere in the middle it changed from a
memoir into a manifesto. My sadness at seeing something I had worked on
for ten years going away was replaced by anger that the Linux community
had seemed to lose its way. I lost my way. I took Linux and FOSS for
granted. It became clearer than ever to me that while Linux and FOSS had
won the battle over the tech giants a decade before, new ones had taken
their place in the meantime, and we were letting them win. Although I
had written and spoken about Linux and FOSS for years, and used it
personally and professionally, I felt like I hadn't done enough to
support this thing I cared about so much. The death of Linux Journal was
a major factor in my decision to put my money where my mouth was, quit
my job, and join Purism so I could work full-time helping to forward
this cause.
So yeah, I took the news pretty hard. We all took the news pretty hard,
but where I had just lost a freelance writing gig, all of the core Linux
Journal team had just lost their full-time jobs. It was a difficult
time, yet we also were flooded with so much support from you, our
readers. Some people contacted us just to tell us how much they loved
the magazine and how sorry they were to see it go. Others offered to pay
more for their subscriptions if that would somehow help. Others still
contacted us to see if they could develop a fundraising program to keep
the magazine alive. I can't stress how much this incredible outpouring
of support helped all of us during this difficult time. Thank you.
Resurrection!
We really thought we were dead. It turns out we weren't quite dead.
Shortly after we made our public announcement, London Trust Media—the
folks behind Private Internet Access (PIA), a security-focused VPN
provider—reached out to us. In a short time, they worked out a plan not
only to save Linux Journal, but to put it on a good path for future
success and growth.
While that happened, we set to work on our postmortem. We did not want
to come back to life only to make the same mistakes that put us in the
grave, so we set out to figure out what killed us, and how we could
prevent it from happening again. One major theme that continued to come
up from this soul-searching was the recognition that the FOSS community
had changed. Although the same core group was there, they accounted for
only one part of the overall community. The FOSS community of today was
different and more diverse. We needed to serve the whole community by
writing articles for our original loyal audience while also covering
what mattered to the rest of the community. To understand what the
community is like today though, you must look at what Linux and the tech
industry as a whole looks like currently.
Linux in 2019
Today, Linux has wide hardware support, and a number of vendors offer
hardware with Linux pre-installed and supported. The internet itself is
full of FOSS projects, and one of the first things people do when they
are about to start on a software project is to look on GitHub to see if
anything that meets their needs already exists. Linux absolutely
dominates the cloud in terms of numbers of VMs that run it, and much
cloud infrastructure also runs FOSS services. Linux also is in many
people's pockets and home appliances. Linux and FOSS are more ubiquitous
than ever.
Linux and FOSS also are more hidden than ever. So many of those FOSS
projects on GitHub ultimately are used as building blocks for
proprietary software. So many companies that seem to champion FOSS by
helping upstream projects they rely on also choose to keep the projects
they write themselves proprietary. Although Linux dominates the cloud,
more and more developers and system administrators who use the cloud do
so via proprietary APIs and proprietary services. New developers and
sysadmins get less exposure to Linux servers and FOSS services if they
use the cloud how the providers intended. And, while Linux runs in your
pocket and in your home, it's hidden underneath a huge layer of
proprietary applications.
For the most part, the FOSS philosophy that defined Linux in its early
days is hidden as well. Many people in the community tout FOSS only in
terms of the ability to see code or as a way to avoid writing code
themselves. It has become rarer for people to tout the importance of the
freedoms that come along with FOSS and the problems that come from
proprietary software. Indeed, most Linux application development in the
cloud these days is done on Mac or Windows machines—something that would
have been considered unthinkable in the early days of Linux.
Tech Industry in 2019
It's not just Linux that has changed since 1994, the tech industry has
changed as well. Technology is ubiquitous. Everyone interacts with
computers in some form every day, and being able to use a computer in
itself is no longer considered a special skill. That said, technology
skills across the spectrum are in high demand, and tech employees are
generally well paid. Programming has become the new shop class as a way
to provide high-school graduates with a set of skills that hopefully
will land them well paying jobs.
Technology tools also have become much more accessible and less obscure.
You no longer need to isolate yourself in a basement in front of a
computer for years to get the skills to land a good technology job. The
industry overall is starting to become more diverse, and I don't just
mean in the sense of race, gender and ethnicity. The technology industry
is also becoming more diverse culturally.
In the past, technology was largely the domain of the nerds. These days,
you're just as likely to see popular kids, jocks and MBAs using
technology and writing software. There's even a "brogrammer" designation
given to software developers who culturally are more akin to fraternity
members. Many parents who traditionally would encourage their children
to go to Ivy League schools to become doctors or lawyers are instead
encouraging them to get an MBA with a minor in software development and
create their own software startup.
This change in cultural diversity has created a culture clash that I'm
not sure people on each side truly appreciates. From the nerd
perspective, it's as though they threw a party where their friends could
come over and play Dungeons and Dragons, and suddenly a bunch of popular
kids heard there was a great party at their house, barged in, said "this
party sucks", and turned it into a kegger. They find all of the new
social pressures from the popular kids to be difficult to navigate. The
popular kids, on the other hand, find the nerds in the group incredibly
frustrating, because they don't seem to pick up on social cues and have
a hard time adapting to norms that seem like second nature to them.
FOSS Community in 2019
The FOSS community today reflects these changes in Linux and the overall
tech industry. The original FOSS community is still here, but the
professional community surrounding it has changed a great deal. Many
people within the community use Linux only professionally and don't work
on FOSS projects or use Linux after they clock out for the day. FOSS
advocates in many circumstances don't use Linux themselves, and they
often make presentations on the benefits of FOSS from proprietary
laptops running Windows or macOS. Many if not most web application
developers write their web applications intended for Linux from Windows
or macOS environments, and if they use Linux at all, it's within a VM.
It's important to stress that all of these people are contributors to
and members of the FOSS community! It's a mistake to exclude members of
the community for not behaving like the original core or not devoting
their whole lives to FOSS. The fact is that as time has gone on and the
community has grown, it has added people who simply weren't around for
the original fight of Linux and FOSS against proprietary software. They
joined the community in a world where Linux and FOSS were ubiquitous. In
a world like that, it's easy to take the original principles behind FOSS
for granted, because you haven't experienced the harm that comes from
the alternative. In other cases, people who have been members of the
community for a long time have relaxed their principles over the years
and become much more pragmatic. Their focus is more on "the right tool
for the job", and in many cases, they feel that FOSS is the right tool
for some jobs, but proprietary software is the right tool for others.
What Does It All Mean?
There are lessons and work to be done for all members of the FOSS
community today. If you are part of the original community, realize that
we have an opportunity and an obligation to pass on the lessons we have
already learned from fighting the original tech giants. Not everyone in
our community knows these lessons, and if they did, they might rethink
some of the choices they've made that you disagree with. This will work
only if you are welcoming to newcomers from all walks of life—not just
people who are nerdy like you. If you alienate them when they make early
mistakes, they will be less motivated to learn more. This means no
computer knowledge litmus tests to see if someone knows enough technical
arcana to be worthy to join the community.
This also means continuing to work on empathy and social skills.
Although it might be a challenge, we are up to the task. I don't believe
that someone who can recite the TCP handshake protocol, get into flame
wars on proper mailing list etiquette and can quote the entire Klingon
coming-of-age ceremony (in Klingon!) finds human social protocols
unknowable.
If you are a new member of the community, empathize with your nerdy
cohorts! You pride yourself on empathy and social awareness, so apply
that to the task at hand and attempt to see where your colleagues are
coming from. They come from a different culture from you with different
social norms. Show them patience as they learn the current social norms.
If you alienate them when they make early mistakes, they will be less
motivated to learn more.
I also encourage you to learn from your nerdy brothers and sisters about
the past fights with the old giants. The current tech giants are largely
playing from the same playbook, and it's incredibly valuable to know
about what can happen when a tech giant achieves complete vendor
lock-in. In addition, I encourage you to learn about all the social
principles underneath FOSS. There is much more to the FOSS movement than
your ability to see source code or even to use it in your own projects.
Learn about the "four freedoms" that form the foundation of Free
Software licenses.
Finally, I encourage everyone from all corners of the community not to
take FOSS and Linux for granted. The world of readily available code and
mostly open protocols you enjoy today isn't a given. If current trends
continue, we could be back to a world of proprietary software, vendor
lock-in and closed protocols like the world before 1994.
This new battle we find ourselves in is much more insidious. The ways
that proprietary software and protocols have spread, in particular on
mobile devices, has made it much more challenging for FOSS to win
compared to in the past. If we want to win this battle, we need the
whole community to work together toward a common goal.
Resources
Linux Journal Goes 100% Digital
Linux Journal Ceases Publication
"So Long and Thanks for All the Bash" by Kyle Rankin
Linux Journal Is Alive
Kyle Rankin is a Tech Editor and columnist at Linux Journal and the
Chief Security Officer at Purism. He is the author of Linux Hardening in
Hostile Networks, DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server
Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks
and Ubuntu Hacks, and also a contributor to a number of other O'Reilly
books. Rankin speaks frequently on security and open-source software
including at BsidesLV, O'Reilly Security Conference, OSCON, SCALE,
CactusCon, Linux World Expo and Penguicon. You can follow him at
-at-kylerankin.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
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