What I love about open source
Let's be honest for a moment. How many of us were drawn to Linux because, in comparison with battleship grey Windows boringness and Chardonnay-sipping Mac pretension, Linux seemed... fun?
Maybe it was the wee, cuddly penguin, certainly an unusual emblem for something as serious as an operating system, let alone one that also runs phone networks, supercomputers, and NASA gadgets.
Maybe it was Linus himself, a guy who in contrast to say, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, still seems pretty normal, despite the success. The worst I can think to say about Linus, after writing about Linux since 1998, is that when he finds himself in a room of typically overweight programmers, he tries to make his own belly stick out, too, even though he's not really fat enough to pull it off effectively.
The Linux fun factor doesn't stop with its leader and logo, either. Whacky propeller-head humor seems to infuse it at every level. I'll never forget the first few times I encountered jokes in the Linux manpages. Jokes in the manpages! I just thought that was great. It definitely helped ease the pain of learning to deal with those things.
Nowadays, a lot of Linux gets funded by big companies, and people work on Linux as their job. But it definitely started out as something people did for fun, and that original Linux spirit of fun still comes through, all the time.
I ran into a great example just two days ago.
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