Linux Runs Almost Everything, But They Almost Never Tell You This (No Marketing Budget)
Only about 1% (or at most 2%) of the Linux Foundation's budget goes to or gets spent towards Linux goals; a lot is routed towards Bill Gates and Microsoft promotion
Next week (April 1) will be exactly one year since we started our ritual (so-called 'ritual') of going out for coffee every week. We chat for 3+ hours and then get back home. We just find it refreshing, especially on sunny days.
Yesterday we went out for coffee and when the machine was doing some advanced maintenance and probably a reboot cycle (not a mere self-wash cycle) I noticed that it ran Android and thus Linux. "How cool is that?" I thought... Linux was making our drinks.
Cool? Meh. It's 2025. It was maybe exciting in 2005. Now? More of the same.
That point could be expanded, a friend has told me, as some readers aren't "old enough to remember" (as the banter/saying goes). In 2006 Novell colluded with Microsoft around software patents and many of us were truly worried about the very survival of GNU/Linux as a free platform; remember it was the same year as Windows Vista (after XP had become very dominant) and only a few years after the SCO case began. Oracle 'forked' or decided to stick a 'soft fork' (dagger?) in Red Hat around the same time. Many of us were in the mindset of fighting for the survival of Free software, especially echoing Richard Stallman's concerns about Microsoft, Novell, and software patents. We no longer write about Novell, but we're still writing a lot about software patents. The problem did not go away.
Linux, as pointed out earlier today, basically runs the world now. Well, the digital stuff in the world (but a lot of stuff is digital now, even planes and cars).
Mind you, more things becoming "digital" is not necessarily a good thing, but that's a subject for another post. Jeff Geerling has just published "I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud"; he says: "If you have a cloud app, that means there's a cloud service that has to be running. That costs money to maintain."
My mom still uses the same dishwasher she got 35 years ago. What sort of "cloud" or "app" lasts this long?
Years ago I noticed that even the parcels we send are managed by Linux. The label-printing machine runs Android and the back end is GNU/Linux. Yes, GNU; unless or until the British Army in "Ubuntu" clothing changes that.
Those sorts of things are hardly even worth mentioning anymore. They're considered almost banal. Maybe that's a good thing, but why does the Linux Foundation not devote any money to promotion of what it is called after? Why did it kill the site Linux.com and turn it into its own spamfarm*? See below. █
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* Someone has said "it'd be good to also mention the activities which the Linux Foundation should be engaged in doing instead of spamfarming", so here's a list of options:
- Sponsor git hosting or VPS, as FreeDesktop.org was desperate for it lately (it wasn't alone) because of Equinix Metal sunsetting
- Advertise the fact that GNU/Linux as a desktop (or laptop) platform is worth trying
- Work with OEMs to make GNU/Linux more readily available from store shelves
- Support distros financially
- Rehire Linux.com writer and editors to make more original stories about GNU/Linux
- Speak out about why Microsoft and Windows are bad; the media almost quit talking about that (Microsoft pays advertising money to keep it that way)