Linux and Free Software Challenge Microsoft's Papal Status
Author: Thomas
Translated by: lily
In 1517, Martin Luther set off the Protestant Reformation, asserting that no secular power had the right to intervene between the individual and God. Likewise, 500 years later, Linus Torvalds insists that no one should come between us and the CPU. A digital reformation is inevitable.
In Luther's time, the Roman Catholic Church had nearly monopolized the faith, culture, and spiritual life of the people of Europe. But the source of spirituality came from the Bible, which lay beyond the educational level of ordinary people. In the sixteenth century, the Bible was written in Latin, and only clergy and a small number of upper-class people understood that language. It was rarely translated into common speech.
Without question, this situation was very favorable to the Church. Rome had successfully turned God's commands into a powerful economic force. The power of the Church gradually swelled. It even went further and became a center of benefit for the Roman Curia: if one could satisfy the tastes of the Roman Curia, the punishments of purgatory could actually be replaced by purchasing "indulgences."
No one likes being exploited
Whenever a power-abusing elite monopolizes some necessity of life and demands an outrageous price for it, people will eventually weigh for themselves whether the price/performance ratio is reasonable. Whether it is salvation or operating system source code, when things go too far, people will find another way to solve the problem.
Martin Luther was an ordinary Catholic priest far from Rome. He eventually challenged the authority of the whole church doctrine and papal system, but his reform began simply by questioning the church's practice of replacing salvation with indulgences. Such egalitarian and anti-authoritarian habits of thought finally led him to more general claims, for example: that individual conscience was above papal authority; that Christians in different places should have freedom of belief; and that the Bible should be translated into languages ordinary people could understand, so they could speak directly with God.
More importantly, Luther wanted to return the power of the Church to the broad masses of people who ought to have it. He stripped away the special status of the clergy, declaring that a priest was "an ordinary clergyman, unable to perform any special duty." In his theory, the preacher's special power to administer the sacraments was also removed. He believed that "both wine and bread should be given to the people."
Linus Torvalds is similar in this respect; he is a reformer of the information age. Like Luther, his journey began in an age when the clergy had become the modern computer scientists, and he too was at the University of Helsinki, far from the spheres of power of Redmond (where Microsoft is headquartered) and Silicon Valley. Like Luther, he had a sacred and eccentric idea: to remove all the bureaucratic middlemen and establish a direct connection between ordinary people and a higher power—their computers.
In order to eliminate the distinction between programmers and users, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in developing their own computing environment. Just as Luther wanted to transform the whole sacramental ritual—wine, bread, and translated scripture—so that ordinary people could use it, Linus hoped to remove the privilege developers had in accessing the operating system, insisting that the entire operating system source code should be made freely available to every ordinary person on the platform.
Just as in 1521, this basic idea changed the world with the advent of Linux—Torvalds's free UNIX-like operating system developed for Intel computers—which, compared with other systems, is regarded as the greatest threat to the existing powers of the digital world. It is neat and elegant, and free; compared with Microsoft NT, its networking is considered better and it is less prone to crashes. The source code and development environment are all included. If you wish or need to, you can freely trim it, add to it, subtract from it, or extend it as you please. Why? Because Torvalds wants to give the power to you. Because Torvalds's God, like Luther's, wants to know you so well that you can call him by name.
Pope Microsoft doesn't find this amusing at all.
"Fanatical Linux believers" subvert the old rules
Bill Gates has tightly grasped the most important text in the lives of nearly every computer user on earth—the operating system—and this has already brought him enormous wealth. Like any ruler in the territory of the Roman Church, he likes things the way he wants them. He likes to keep the rules of the game unchanged—rules made by him, and ensured to keep being written by him. The only thing that can threaten his kingdom is someone coming forward to question and change those rules—in short, to propose reform.
Pope Gates I has always dominated the game of "I make the operating system, you give me money." Until now, this has been the only game in the castle. But how should he respond to people like Torvalds who say, "Here is a good operating system, along with the source code—let's have a bright tomorrow"? No more commercial motive, no more iron-fisted control over source code, no more divide between programmer and user. In the new game, you are God.
Luther's reform not only won approval and gratitude across Europe, it also gained the support of the Saxon upper class, who had grown very tired of the church's harsh taxes and arrogant church bureaucrats. Like their Saxon ancestors, the princes of the twentieth-century digital world—the technology leaders of the Fortune 500 companies—have also grown somewhat weary of paying tribute to Redmond and preserving the gloom of Microsoft's technologism. They will do their utmost to seek credible alternatives. Just as Luther once was, Torvalds is the darling of anyone who hates the Pope of Rome—and at that time many people hated the Pope of Rome. Linux is already running on many machines, and support for it continues to grow daily.
Historical records show the truly fanatical tidal wave that arose during Luther's reform. In fact, Luther's later years were spent devoting a great deal of energy to calming the growing fanaticism of his followers, almost as much as he spent defending his ideas against slander from the Roman Church. Torvalds's followers show the traits of loyal adherents. They distrust authority, but the memory of oppression is also vivid in their minds, so they display a slight ideological zeal as well. This unrestrained zeal led Luther's faithful followers to plan more radical expansions of their reform, such as the "terrible massacres." We can only hope that Linux believers will have a sound and restrained plan of action.
I was fortunate enough to attend a recent meeting of a Linux user group in Silicon Valley called "SVLUG." This group meets on the first Wednesday of every month, and Cisco voluntarily hosts the gathering. That seemed sufficient enough—until I realized that Cisco's headquarters were the size of a medium-sized town. Although Cisco is laid out like a maze, it was not very hard for me to find SVLUG. After wandering through the parking area for about two minutes, I saw a young man wearing a T-shirt that said "Crazy LINUX Believer." I thought, what perfect timing, and followed him into a huge Cisco conference hall. I found a sense of familiarity from long ago. Three to four hundred smart, unworldly young people shared the same faith, almost as fanatically as their predecessors had been about the first home computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had seen a fanatic group of this scale twenty years ago. In some ways it seemed to restore the susceptibility of childhood, and interestingly, it reminded me why I first came to love computers. My mind went blank for at least a few minutes. The atmosphere was colored as if it were underground work—mockery of subversives, secret signals, and revolutionary vocabulary. Anti-Mocrosoft rhetoric was not merely an attitude but already out in the open, as if a heavy burden had been placed on the shoulders of every member of the organization.
I wondered whether Linux gatherings all over the world were this fanatical and energetic. I imagined that as one got farther from Silicon Valley, it would be hard to find such zeal and such organization, and that this could only exist in the greatest region of digital wealth on earth.
Yet reality does not seem to be like that. For example, the Linux user group in Denmark is actually even larger than SVLUG. Like Luther's reform, Torvalds's reform seems to be spreading even faster—perhaps because people there can gain more benefit from a redistribution of power.
Of course, Luther's Pope of Rome—or the ideas he left behind—still exists. But he certainly can no longer attack heresy as madly as he once did. If the present reform follows the same pattern, then Linus's Pope will also have to take a serious look at his power.
Excerpted from：http://www.oso.com.cn
Author: Thomas
Translated by: lily
In 1517, Martin Luther set off the Protestant Reformation, asserting that no secular power had the right to intervene between the individual and God. Likewise, 500 years later, Linus Torvalds insists that no one should come between us and the CPU. A digital reformation is inevitable.
In Luther's time, the Roman Catholic Church had nearly monopolized the faith, culture, and spiritual life of the people of Europe. But the source of spirituality came from the Bible, which lay beyond the educational level of ordinary people. In the sixteenth century, the Bible was written in Latin, and only clergy and a small number of upper-class people understood that language. It was rarely translated into common speech.
Without question, this situation was very favorable to the Church. Rome had successfully turned God's commands into a powerful economic force. The power of the Church gradually swelled. It even went further and became a center of benefit for the Roman Curia: if one could satisfy the tastes of the Roman Curia, the punishments of purgatory could actually be replaced by purchasing "indulgences."
No one likes being exploited
Whenever a power-abusing elite monopolizes some necessity of life and demands an outrageous price for it, people will eventually weigh for themselves whether the price/performance ratio is reasonable. Whether it is salvation or operating system source code, when things go too far, people will find another way to solve the problem.
Martin Luther was an ordinary Catholic priest far from Rome. He eventually challenged the authority of the whole church doctrine and papal system, but his reform began simply by questioning the church's practice of replacing salvation with indulgences. Such egalitarian and anti-authoritarian habits of thought finally led him to more general claims, for example: that individual conscience was above papal authority; that Christians in different places should have freedom of belief; and that the Bible should be translated into languages ordinary people could understand, so they could speak directly with God.
More importantly, Luther wanted to return the power of the Church to the broad masses of people who ought to have it. He stripped away the special status of the clergy, declaring that a priest was "an ordinary clergyman, unable to perform any special duty." In his theory, the preacher's special power to administer the sacraments was also removed. He believed that "both wine and bread should be given to the people."
Linus Torvalds is similar in this respect; he is a reformer of the information age. Like Luther, his journey began in an age when the clergy had become the modern computer scientists, and he too was at the University of Helsinki, far from the spheres of power of Redmond (where Microsoft is headquartered) and Silicon Valley. Like Luther, he had a sacred and eccentric idea: to remove all the bureaucratic middlemen and establish a direct connection between ordinary people and a higher power—their computers.
In order to eliminate the distinction between programmers and users, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in developing their own computing environment. Just as Luther wanted to transform the whole sacramental ritual—wine, bread, and translated scripture—so that ordinary people could use it, Linus hoped to remove the privilege developers had in accessing the operating system, insisting that the entire operating system source code should be made freely available to every ordinary person on the platform.
Just as in 1521, this basic idea changed the world with the advent of Linux—Torvalds's free UNIX-like operating system developed for Intel computers—which, compared with other systems, is regarded as the greatest threat to the existing powers of the digital world. It is neat and elegant, and free; compared with Microsoft NT, its networking is considered better and it is less prone to crashes. The source code and development environment are all included. If you wish or need to, you can freely trim it, add to it, subtract from it, or extend it as you please. Why? Because Torvalds wants to give the power to you. Because Torvalds's God, like Luther's, wants to know you so well that you can call him by name.
Pope Microsoft doesn't find this amusing at all.
"Fanatical Linux believers" subvert the old rules
Bill Gates has tightly grasped the most important text in the lives of nearly every computer user on earth—the operating system—and this has already brought him enormous wealth. Like any ruler in the territory of the Roman Church, he likes things the way he wants them. He likes to keep the rules of the game unchanged—rules made by him, and ensured to keep being written by him. The only thing that can threaten his kingdom is someone coming forward to question and change those rules—in short, to propose reform.
Pope Gates I has always dominated the game of "I make the operating system, you give me money." Until now, this has been the only game in the castle. But how should he respond to people like Torvalds who say, "Here is a good operating system, along with the source code—let's have a bright tomorrow"? No more commercial motive, no more iron-fisted control over source code, no more divide between programmer and user. In the new game, you are God.
Luther's reform not only won approval and gratitude across Europe, it also gained the support of the Saxon upper class, who had grown very tired of the church's harsh taxes and arrogant church bureaucrats. Like their Saxon ancestors, the princes of the twentieth-century digital world—the technology leaders of the Fortune 500 companies—have also grown somewhat weary of paying tribute to Redmond and preserving the gloom of Microsoft's technologism. They will do their utmost to seek credible alternatives. Just as Luther once was, Torvalds is the darling of anyone who hates the Pope of Rome—and at that time many people hated the Pope of Rome. Linux is already running on many machines, and support for it continues to grow daily.
Historical records show the truly fanatical tidal wave that arose during Luther's reform. In fact, Luther's later years were spent devoting a great deal of energy to calming the growing fanaticism of his followers, almost as much as he spent defending his ideas against slander from the Roman Church. Torvalds's followers show the traits of loyal adherents. They distrust authority, but the memory of oppression is also vivid in their minds, so they display a slight ideological zeal as well. This unrestrained zeal led Luther's faithful followers to plan more radical expansions of their reform, such as the "terrible massacres." We can only hope that Linux believers will have a sound and restrained plan of action.
I was fortunate enough to attend a recent meeting of a Linux user group in Silicon Valley called "SVLUG." This group meets on the first Wednesday of every month, and Cisco voluntarily hosts the gathering. That seemed sufficient enough—until I realized that Cisco's headquarters were the size of a medium-sized town. Although Cisco is laid out like a maze, it was not very hard for me to find SVLUG. After wandering through the parking area for about two minutes, I saw a young man wearing a T-shirt that said "Crazy LINUX Believer." I thought, what perfect timing, and followed him into a huge Cisco conference hall. I found a sense of familiarity from long ago. Three to four hundred smart, unworldly young people shared the same faith, almost as fanatically as their predecessors had been about the first home computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had seen a fanatic group of this scale twenty years ago. In some ways it seemed to restore the susceptibility of childhood, and interestingly, it reminded me why I first came to love computers. My mind went blank for at least a few minutes. The atmosphere was colored as if it were underground work—mockery of subversives, secret signals, and revolutionary vocabulary. Anti-Mocrosoft rhetoric was not merely an attitude but already out in the open, as if a heavy burden had been placed on the shoulders of every member of the organization.
I wondered whether Linux gatherings all over the world were this fanatical and energetic. I imagined that as one got farther from Silicon Valley, it would be hard to find such zeal and such organization, and that this could only exist in the greatest region of digital wealth on earth.
Yet reality does not seem to be like that. For example, the Linux user group in Denmark is actually even larger than SVLUG. Like Luther's reform, Torvalds's reform seems to be spreading even faster—perhaps because people there can gain more benefit from a redistribution of power.
Of course, Luther's Pope of Rome—or the ideas he left behind—still exists. But he certainly can no longer attack heresy as madly as he once did. If the present reform follows the same pattern, then Linus's Pope will also have to take a serious look at his power.
Excerpted from：http://www.oso.com.cn
我完全同意设想建立DOS组织“DOS联盟” ，也就是说和Wengier、以及“起步”站长莫老师等DOS战友一起来建立这个“DOS联盟”，以发展我国自主OS（操作系统）的高度去完成我们共同的愿望。
------党委书记
------党委书记
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