Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Linux

by Michael J. Jordan, Managing Editor

May 24, 2007

Browsing around Digg the other day, I saw one of these terrible articles about Linux. I hate to even mention these pieces of internet litter because I'd really like to avoid giving them more legitimacy than they deserve. It's one of those pieces that includes a variation on the expression '[n] Reasons' in the title, where 'n' is the number of arguments the author came up with before he ran out of ideas. Digg users must like these '[n] Reasons' entitled pieces, as they seem to proliferate so much over there.

It was written by one Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (who I will refer to from here on as Mr. [n]-Hughes to save space) and was posted as a 'blog' entry on one of the many Ziff-Davis websites. I read it and quickly deemed it as not being worthy of mention, as the arguments it uses are more suited to Linux distributions of 1998 than those of today. Don Parris has an excellent article at LXer.com refuting most of it, so I won't repeat what he says here. Suffice it to say that Mr. [n]-Hughes' piece reads like a 'Greatest Hits of FUD'. In fact, as I read it, I could imagine hearing the announcer from the old K-Tel commercials saying: And who can forget these classics .... All that was missing was the short clips of music.

Though I and every other Linux enthusiast equipped with a functioning brain would quickly dismiss this article and move on, the Slashdot community and its collective gray matter found it fit to include on its front page. For some, getting prime time on Slashdot is the Nobel Prize of Geekdom and it was handed to Mr. [n]-Hughes yesterday.

His proverbial 15 minutes of fame awoke my curiosity and I had a look at our database of over 11,000 news stories and found that we had never posted one by Mr. [n]-Hughes. That set off a few alarm bells for me. How does one land a gig at ZDNet and then get on Slashdot from out of nowhere?

The only explanation I can come up with is that the more well-known pundits who have tried to trot out these old arguments before have failed pretty miserably. It seems that somebody is now calling up the benchwarmers of the League of Windows Fans to give it a whirl. Now, it's no secret that Microsoft is shelling out cash for bloggers to diss Free and Open Source software. Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame is one of them. I used to be a semi-regular reader of his blog until he went over to the dark side. Whether Mr. [n]-Hughes is also on the Microsoft payroll is something only he would know.

Regardless of who's being paid how much to say what, we need to be extremely vigilant and monitor closely what is published out there against Linux, Free Software and Open Source. We need to expose shills, FUDsters and frauds for what they really are. But simply defending ourselves is not enough. We also need to go on the counter attack. We need to de-legitimize both messenger and the message. With Mr. [n]-Hughes, this isn't hard at all.

For example, he has a blog called 'PC Doctor'. One of his recent posts is about anti-virus programs for Windows. In it, he talks about how various offerings stack up against the 606,901 known viruses and other nasty things out there. 606,901 types of malware!! To me, that is an outrageous situation from a user perspective. And we get not a comment about that from our Windows expert. According to him, people are terrified of the command line - but having to deal with over six hundred thousand threats to your machine on a daily basis is apparently not a big deal if you're living in Windows Land. "5 Reasons" not to use Linux? How about "606,901 Reasons" not to use Windows!

I'll just leave you with this gem from his FAQ:

Why do you rarely talk about anything Mac/Linux/etc ...
I only talk about things that I know. 'Nuff said!

Nuff said, indeed.

Michael J. Jordan is Managing Editor of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**linux.org