Contrary to what Linux Hater might think, Linux is democracy.

That’s the problem.

Let’s get some background going before I dig into this:

Even though their numbers are small, they’re all on the internets! And like 23 hrs a day! They could all unite behind a common cause, organize, work together, and …. oh wait. Ha ha. I get it now. They can’t even do that to produce a working operating system. What makes anyone think they can do it in real life?

Yes that’s right folks. Lets not kid ourselves. Linux is not a democracy. Linux is anarchy. Everyone going in their own damn directions. It’s not about working together. It’s about works for me! It’s not Yes We Can, it’s Yes I Can.

For better or worse, Linux is a working operating system in much the same way that the American government is a working, functioning governing body - for the most part, just barely. Like most government that American citizens endure, Linux consists of a loose hodgepodge of various components designed to, at least on paper, do one thing and one thing well.  Of course, just like in real, democratic government, few of those components really do anything well, and even fewer are actually designed to talk to each other.  The end result is an operating system that is as easy to use as a standard-issue democratic government bureaucracy.

But, look on the bright side - it’s free!

American civil government is, at its very core, designed to fail.  The Founding Fathers wanted the American government to do as little as possible while making sure that it could still defend the borders and keep the states from killing each other.  Consequently, the Founding Fathers gave the government some very specific powers, telling it to do a few things and do them well, which it largely does - run the military (best in the world, no matter how you look at it), keep interstate commerce functioning (reasonably successful, even if it uses the Commerce Clause to do things it shouldn’t - then again, tell me there isn’t a Luser out there who doesn’t abuse sed), and… well, that’s about it.  American government is not designed to do anything past those basic roles - consequently, what roles it’s adopted since then have been crudely bolted on to the simple and plain framework set forth over 200 years ago.  Sound familiar?  It should.  Networking, graphics, and sound were all bolted on to Unix in a similar fashion - since Linux was initially little more than another implementation of a Unix-like system, guess what it inherited?  To add insult to injury, Linux then adopted the most democratic form of software management possible.  The end result is something that should be familiar with anyone who’s bothered to deal with American government for more than about five seconds - pure, unadulterated, unmitigated mediocrity, born and raised by a series of conflicting special interest groups, each trying to make more noise than the next.

The great thing about democracy as far as politics go is that, yes, it’s mediocre, and, yes, it’s prone to failure.  However, as I’ve discussed in the past, that’s not only part of the design, that’s what makes democracy great.  The rub here, though, is that there’s a world of difference between picking an operating system and migrating to a place with a different governing style.  Migrating to another place involves making new friends, getting citizenship documentation taken care of, getting a new job or two, finding a new place to live - the process can take years.  Migrating to a new operating system, on the other hand, at least as far as a single machine goes, can take as little as a day.  Plus, the consequences of choosing a poor operating system are frequently much less dire than the consequences of being born in, say, North Korea or some other totalitarian hellhole, which changes the value proposition of “totalitarian ‘non-free’ software” vs. “democratic ‘free’ software” dramatically.

The beauty of totalitarian, dictatorial systems is that, when they’re led by small cadres with clear roles, assuming the person in charge is competent and visionary, they can achieve amazing successes, at least for a fairly short amount of time.  The reason is simple - vision. A charismatic leader can marshall resources and manpower most effectively through a totalitarian system that allows the leader to call the shots.  The smaller the system in which the leader is working in, the more successful the leader becomes - this is why Apple is considered “trendy” and “visionary” while Microsoft is considered more of a “follower” in the industry.  As Microsoft exemplifies, though, even a totalitarian system will need to delegate authority as the system grows.  Also, totalitarian systems lose power when they have to acquire necessary assets from other systems - this is why autarky (the so-called “Juche Idea“) is so popular with totalitarian systems, and also why Apple has as much power as it does compared to Microsoft, even though Apple is vastly smaller.  Consequently, a well-run totalitarian system will always out-perform even the best running democratic system - even the Founding Fathers knew this, which is why it’s legally and Constitutionally possible to suspend habeus corpus during wartime.

In the real world, when a well-run totalitarian system stops being well-run, the end result is the collapse of that totalitarian system, frequently with dire consequences for everyone living within it.  This, more often than not, leads to significant loss of money, manpower, and intellectual capital.  In the case of computer technology, however, something entirely different happens - other competing systems will step in and take customers (i.e. money and manpower) away from the poorly run totalitarian system.  Thus, each system learns from all of the previous ones, learning new technologies while also learning from the mistakes of old, all without loss of life or, usually, data.  Consequently, democracy’s greatest strength - the ability to be consistently mediocre - is eliminated since there’s no need for consistent mediocrity; consistent greatness can be achieved by simply hopping from one visionary system to the next.  Worst yet, since democratic systems tend to dilute vision as much as humanly possible (vision has the nasty habit of being unpopular at first, after all), it’s impossible for democratic systems to produce visionary, industry-leading software, except in areas that totalitarian systems have found to be uneconomically viable.

In short, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Democracy simply doesn’t work.

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