
Linux vs. Bullshit - Mithrandir
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-vs-bullshit
======
dap
I found this article confusing because the introduction -- the title, the
SunOS history, the Longfellow quote, and Morton's quote -- all suggest a self-
righteous position around technical integrity and engineering choices. (Such a
position would be poorly-founded anyway, since economics are a crucial part of
engineering, even engineering that starts from a principle of technical
integrity above all else. Besides that, various sources peg the percentage of
Linux kernel contributions coming from commercial entities upwards of 75% --
which is a great thing, but can hardly be said to be free of commercial
influence.)

The meat outlines some good points about modern advertising, but I don't get
what it has to do with Linux. (Which "Linux" is this? The system? The
community? Something else?)

It's also wrong to say that software systems don't lie: that's what virtual
memory _is_ , for example. Obviously educated people know the truth, but
there's a real sense in which the system is presenting one thing as though
it's really another, when the system is actually just going through great
pains to make things look that way. This is often a good thing in software,
unless the system gets caught in the lie (e.g., when it has to page things out
or deploy the OOM killer), at which point real people are often surprised at
what was going on all along.

~~~
brownbat
Yeah, the organization's a mess, but there are some gems in there, like:

> Trader Joe's [in avoiding loyalty programs, coupons, and retailer trade
> fairs] spares itself the cognitive overhead required to rationalize
> complicating the living shit out of everything

Should have maybe been broken into a series of two paragraph articles.

~~~
radley
This was a really bad example. Trader Joe's repackages (almost) everything
under their own brand so you can't recognize and buy the product elsewhere. So
technically it's (almost) all BS.

~~~
coolgeek
You've got this backwards. TJ sells name brand products at a discount that can
be fairly steep. The product manufacturers are incentivized to camouflage this
(via the TJ label) so as not to cannibalize their higher margin brand name
sales.

~~~
snowwrestler
This is what Trade Joe's says, but our experience is that the bill is higher
at TJ's than at, say, Walmart or Safeway, for the same shopping list.

------
Amadou
I really appreciate this article. Searls has put to words a concept that has
long bothered me on an intuitive level. Namely that all of these bullshit
marketing techniques create a cognitive load that is not in proportion to any
value that I as a customer receive from them.

I think it is self-evident that when it comes to matters of taste there is no
really "right" answer, but these middle-men are all about muddying the waters
for the (short term) benefit of their clients at my personal expense. That is
really in contradiction to the premise of a market-based economy - that every
transaction benefits both sides. These techniques are all about shifting as
much of the benefit to the seller rather than improving the outcomes for both
participants.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> Namely that all of these bullshit marketing techniques create a cognitive
> load that is not in proportion to any value that I as a customer receive
> from them.

The problem is that companies don't exist in a vacuum, and soon as one adopts
these marketing techniques, everybody has to adopt to "stay competitive", even
though they end up wasting money _and_ bullshitting the customer. It's a
prisoner's dilemma.

That's one reason why advertising makes so much money. Advertising is one of
the rare industries that generates demand for itself.

~~~
gingerlime
> The problem is that companies don't exist in a vacuum, and soon as one
> adopts these marketing techniques, everybody has to adopt to "stay
> competitive"

I was wondering the same thing, although Searls takes an example of Trader
Joe's and tries to illustrate how avoiding marketing actually helps this
business. I'm not from the US, so have never heard of Trader Joe's. I can't
help but wonder how competitive it is compared to other businesses who do
employ those huge marketing / big data operations. I am also curious how the
customer experience itself differs between companies in this market.

~~~
jbarham
> I'm not from the US, so have never heard of Trader Joe's.

Probably most Americans haven't heard of Trader Joe's since most of its stores
are in Southern California.

But it's a really cool grocery chain, and I say that as someone who generally
hates shopping. Still one of the things we miss most about California since we
moved to Australia.

~~~
nkurz
_Probably most Americans haven 't heard of Trader Joe's since most of its
stores are in Southern California._

You must have blinked! They started there, but have expanded rapidly across
the US in recent years. They now have 400+ stores in 35 states:
[http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/locations/all-
llocations.pdf](http://www.traderjoes.com/pdf/locations/all-llocations.pdf)

------
javert
I read the article, and I don't see what the thesis is.

The article is disorganized. You can't tell where it's going, and when it gets
there, you can't tell where you are.

It also seems to contain a lot of pretentious pseudo-intellectual posturing.

Maybe I'm missing something, though. Someone feel free to enlighten me.

EDIT: Also, I should state that I find the scatalogical references to be
vulgar, juvenile, and a big turn-off.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
The thesis is that things like Linux belong to a category of human endeavours
that are opposite in nature to most of what regular consumers are exposed to
nowadays. Furthermore, it analyses the increasingly strong "economy of
bullshit" that we live under.

It's hard to avoid the scatological references without diluting the message.
When I read "bullshit" for the first time, I knew immediately what the author
meant. Had he said "intentional misrepresentation and/or exaggeration of facts
for the purpose of personal gain", the whole thing would be harder to read.
And the author even bothered to explain the analogy.

I don't think pseudo-intellectual posturing is a problem here. The author is
quoting philosophers, but he does that in a way that is relevant to the main
thesis. I understand that a lot of people groan the moment they see a
reference to Philosophy. Philosophers might be to blame for that, but let's
not throw away the baby with the bath water.

I would make the opposite accusation towards many articles we see on HN these
days: they are too simplistic, too conformist and lack deep thinking.

~~~
aquayellow
>The thesis is that things like Linux belong to a category of >human
endeavours that are opposite in nature to most of what >regular consumers are
exposed to nowadays

But this is true for any open source project, why just Linux ? That said, I
feel Linux too can't escape the "economy of bullshit" \- commercial companies
have interest and contribute to different parts of the Linux kernel for a
reason. Heck even MS works on the hyper-v code base, not for the betterment of
Linux but for the good of their own product. The "enterprise focus" of LKML
activity is proof enough.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> But this is true for any open source project

Not in my opinion. In my opinion, Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu and many others are self-
destructing in an effort to imitate Apple's design without understanding it,
and generating a good amount of bullshit in the process.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting that companies==bullshit. There's
nothing wrong with smart employees of big companies contributing to the
kernel. In many cases it's mutually beneficial so it's the rational thing to
do. On the other hand, it seems to be very hard to create a big corporation
without letting bullshit fester. Linux is not controlled by the sort of people
that thrive on bullshit. But could it fall under their control in the future?
Sure.

~~~
educating
> Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu and many others are self-destructing in an effort to
> imitate Apple's design without understanding it

I'd go so far to say that the desktop App Store is a BAD idea.

1\. It was meant to make mobile _more_ free, and now makes desktops _less_
free.

It was born out of things like Brew on the old, old cellular market. Mobile
content used to be as free as a concentration camp, and in order to appease
them, Apple said "we'll do your content management for you". That was a huge
deal step forward, but it obviously wasn't enough or people wouldn't jailbreak
their phones.

2\. It is not sustainable over the long haul.

Centralized app management is not a long-sustainable model for the desktop, or
anything for that matter. You cannot continue to micromanage that much
software without things eventually deteriorating. Apps require maintenance or
removed as hardware and the OS changes.

3\. The user experience sucks.

It puts all the installed apps in its own area (LaunchPad) in addition to the
AppStore app where you see what you bought, and both in addition to the
previously widely known Applications directory/folder. That's just stupid. Why
do people want to emulate that mess?

3\. But it survives for now because it is profitable.

I've bought more apps in OS X using the App Store than I would have in a store
or via some other online delivery mechanism or Amazon, etc.

But, _none_ of all of that would have been as terrible, if it hadn't spread to
Ubuntu. Seeing similar there was a huge WTF moment.

------
keithpeter
_" We now know that the Feds and marketing mills are both harvesting massive
amounts of personal data without revealing to us what they know, and that the
two are actually in cahoots, at least some of the time. This is especially
vexing, because the feds should be the ones protecting us from bad actors,
rather than bad actors themselves."_

This quote nails it for me. The _waste_ involved with universal surveillance.

Further down this discussion, some participants are arguing about terminology
('Linux' or 'GNU/Linux') which is the other side of the free software/open
source process...

I was previously unaware of the work of Harry Frankfurt, and the original
journal version of the _On Bullshit_ essay is available online as a .pdf.
There goes the morning...

------
GhotiFish

      "To be fair, both the DAA and the IAB would like 
       advertising to be as wrought as possible, and for 
       consumers to appreciate the good intentions and effects 
       of their business. I know that because I've talked to 
       them about it. Those organizations see themselves, 
       correctly, as advocates for good behavior in a business 
       rife with the opposite. "
    

this paragraph stuck with me. I rigorously ad block, on everything. I make
sure my relatives have PVR's and I train them to pause and skip effectively so
that they never see advertisements. I install ad block on not just my
computer, but my families as well. I actively avoid content that has
advertisements in it (I don't play free to play games, for example).

I do all this for two reasons.

1\. I don't trust them. I honestly believe that if an advertisement ever
states anything, the opposite is likely to be true. eg. "Our product helps you
lose weight!" I am now convinced this product makes you gain weight.

2\. I fear that advertisements really alter the way I perceive the world. part
of that fear discussed here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y695/el...](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y695/eli5_why_does_cocacola_still_advertise/)

I worry that advertisements gradually change the people that watch them.

but the paragraph mentioned above gave me pause. I can't help but feel, if
there were advertisements that didn't lie or actively mislead, that didn't
have a terrible and dishonest history, that didn't exist purely as a form of
mass manipulation, that I would be more amenable to them.

Of course, that will NEVER happen _EVER_.

so I will continue to block them at every vector. Maybe when the advertising
industry is completely squeltched, desperate, and trying to claw itself from
its own dug grave, will they play by the users rules. I wouldn't hold your
breath.

~~~
droidist2
I don't like ads and prefer content without them, however I've never thought
that the act of avoiding them was taking a stand or anything like that. It's
interesting though to hear someone's justification for it. What are your
thoughts on pirating content? I would guess you also hold some strong views on
the righteousness of that.

~~~
GhotiFish
pirating content really helps to prevent free software from being adopted.
So... I guess that would be considered pretty righteous, right?

*edit: clarity.

or were you thinking along the lines media piracy?

I have no justifications or rationalizations there. There's a giant
bureaucracy that will never move, and never let me watch their content. So
more or less, I don't.

------
millstone
> Linux doesn't lie

Until you ask it to allocate some memory.

~~~
Qantourisc
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory

But be warned, a lot of applications also lie on how much memory they need.

~~~
andreasvc
It's mostly about copy-on-write memory due to forks.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Great article. It can expand further than Linux and turn into a piece of it's
own. Bullshitting is the disease of the decade.

------
liveoneggs
linux development is majorly funded by those same old school (with some new
entries) companies with the same agenda of pushing linux in a friendly
direction.

the "community" has long since ceased to be what most people think it is.

~~~
Roboprog
Absolutely, most of the work being done is for self serving reasons, which
happen to be shared by a number of organizations.

Due to the GPL "infection", though, the bullshit can only go so far. If it
went _too_ far, somebody would make a "ReDoIx" fork/distribution from the
unbroken parts, and build something that people could tolerate.

I started with Slackware Linux in the mid 90s, jumped to RedHat for a while,
couldn't figure out what to make of "Fedora", so I jumped to Ubuntu. While
both my current and previous employer use RedHat in production (the previous
employer _was_ on Debian until being acquired by BigCo), I have no problem
with jumping again when something better comes around.

I guess business-to-business supported software has to come with a certain
level of bullshit or FUD.

------
educating
Things I think are bullshit:

1\. Ubuntu's decision to include ads

Linux got a real black eye from that imo, and turned me off of the normal
Ubuntu distro for the forseeable future. Even for my lightweight distro I use
Mint XCFE now just to stay the hell away from an organization that would do
that.

2\. Corporate Linux

I liked RedHat in 1997-98, but they went corporate quickly, and since then I
personally don't like paying anyone for Linux. I want to support the hacker
ethos that made Linux great, not some big corporate head.

------
jhspaybar
I don't use Adblock. I could, obviously. All my friends and coworkers seem to.
Honestly, the main reason I don't is because I want to support Google. Sure,
they're only a large portion if ads, not all of them, but given the insane
amount of value they provide to me, I'd feel downright guilty not allowing
them to make money off of me.

~~~
barking
Do you click them?

If not then google aren't making money.

If yes then you might have to feel guilty about robbing small businesses to
make money for google.

------
quadrangle
Yup, I use the Trader Joe's analogy too. I love them. There's no contrived
nonsense. It's so refreshing. It's so obvious how all the rest are
manipulative bullshitters. Hooray for integrity. Why they hell do 70% of
GNU/Linux users still not use AdBlock????

------
gibbitz
I am a developer who works in advertising and I can say this article is
bullshit (different agenda, but bullshit just the same).

Most of the literature out there makes the marketing world out to be the NSA.
The truth is there are some very easy ways to control the ads you see on your
screen if you take the time to understand how it works. Basically, not logging
into Google while searching and periodically clearing your cookies will keep
your searches for sex toys from showing you ads for butt-plugs. Most of this
information is stored in cookies, except for when dealing with companies with
large stakes in advertising that have user accounts where they can store your
history with their service (Google). I find storing search information
connected to a user in a database to be invasive so I don't log into Google. I
have little reason to log into Google and do so very infrequently. If your
argument for logging in is gmail, just don't use the web client. Cookies are
protected by domain so the only visibility into the ads you're delivered via a
cookied ad network is via your eyeballs.

Many of the technologies listed in the article are hair splitting variants and
some are not advertising at all (Web Analytics are used mainly to determine
where people go and what they are interested in in your website to drive
changes that benefit users and keep your website profitable, whether that be
through ad placement or order form flow). Additionally, ad buying for
newspapers and television are only slightly less complicated and involve only
slightly fewer middle men than internet advertising and these days those are
considered "traditional" advertising media. CRM is listed here as well, which
is basically the online equivalent of leaving your business card at someone's
office and is mostly used by companies as an alternative to cold calling.

Much of the diversity listed here is about monetization. IE, does the
publisher get paid for impressions (views of the ad) or clicks, or completed
tasks (sign-ups, orders, etc). This is better for the advertisers because they
can pay only for effective ad placements, and puts a lot of focus then on how
the ads are placed effectively (so those who display them can make money from
those who traffic them). Without going into it too deeply, this is how money
from a company (like Aspen Solutions, who's ads I see on the article page for
example) trickles down to linuxjournal.com to pay their staff and hosting
bills. If you prefer paywalls on your news outlets and blogs or are willing to
pay Google for access to their search database (or worse need to log in so
they can collect data about your searches to sell to parties undisclosed), I'm
sure that could be arranged, but I will go on avoiding traps and diverting my
eyes because I understand that this is the middle-ground. At some point you
have to accept that the services we enjoy on the internet are built by people
with families that like to eat and your selfish desire for public search
privacy and screens uncluttered by advertising are secondary to their well
being. Are there people making a lot of money off of advertising? Yes, but
much fewer than make money off of professional sports which is also funded by
advertising and gets a hell of a lot less negative press.

~~~
ChuckMcM
And this: _" The truth is there are some very easy ways to control the ads you
see on your screen if you take the time to understand how it works."_

Is the entire problem. One of Searl's points is that cognitive overload
results in abuse. Let me create a straw man and see if it works as
illustration.

I've got a restaurant and on a white board I write a word, then when the
waitstaff says that word, customers merely have to lay their heads on the
table, because those that don't will be slapped. Periodically, and without
sound, I will erase the word on the board and replace it with a new one.

Now eating at this restaurant is a lot harder because while I'm eating I have
to keep an eye on the white board and duck when I hear the word that is
written on it, and still eat.

You've increased the "cognitive load" of eating artificially. So something
that I would give my whole attention too now only gets 80% or less because
this other distraction. The alternative is to eat while being slapped. Which
ruins the entire experience.

As more and more of our activities involve tools or products that can be
remotely controlled, people exploiting that control to inject advertising
impute a tax on our usage which is not appreciated.

~~~
marshray
I like the way he makes it sound like the issue here is that I want to easily
"control the ads you see on your screen" in order to hide my perversions from
family members and shoulder-surfers.

Yes, I believe this person is in advertising.

------
BruceIV
Minor point: could the prevalence of ad-blocking on Linux be mostly because
ad-blocking makes the Web significantly faster because Flash is dog-slow on
Linux, rather than any particular philosophical objection to ads?

~~~
WildUtah
Could be, but careful observation and personal research has revealed that
Flash runs dog slow in OS/X and Windows also.

------
chatman
"GNU/Linux" is the OS, "Linux" is just the kernel. The GNU project is
responsible for many of the crucial parts responsible for making a complete
OS, save for the kernel. Abbreviating the OS with "Linux", for the sake of
convenience, should be avoided in order to give the GNU project its due
credit.

~~~
tzs
That's not how OS naming works.

Historically, naming rights for an OS go to whoever actually puts together and
distributes the complete system. For instance, if a workstation company
licensed Unix from AT&T and ported it to their workstation, they got to name
that OS whatever they wanted. A couple examples of this were Uniplus+, which
was UniSoft's Unix, and 386/ix, which was Interactive System Corporation's
Unix. Both were Unix systems--they used a Unix kernel and Unix utilities--but
that wasn't their names. Half the fun working at a Unix workstation company in
the early '80s was thinking of a neat name for your Unix port. :-)

For the complete systems distributed by Canonical, Red Hat, and the like, they
are the ones who get to name the operating systems that they distribute.
Ubuntu calls their OS the "Ubuntu operating system". Red Hat calls their OS
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux".

Yes, they are _also_ GNU systems, but if we want to be historically accurate,
the most correct way to view this would be to view "GNU system" and
"GNU/Linux" as specifications for a specific Unix-like userspace and for an OS
that runs the GNU system on a Linux kernel, respectively. The Ubuntu operating
system complies with the GNU system specification and is a GNU/Linux system,
but it is _named_ Ubuntu operating system.

~~~
aninhumer
While this inversion of the usual prescriptivist argument for "GNU/Linux" is
amusing and interesting, I feel it's worth stating the more general objection
as well:

It's called Linux because we call it Linux. That is how language works. It
doesn't matter about the official name or the etymology, if the population
typically uses a certain term for something, that is the "correct" term.

Now there are lots of arguments for preferring an atypical term in some
situations. Official names in more formal contexts, genderless nouns to avoid
excluding people, and indeed "GNU/Linux" to promote the GNU project. But these
are _choices_ we make, and are not something to be forced on people who don't
necessarily agree with the reasoning behind them.

~~~
chatman
No one is forcing anyone. It is just a courtesy, not a binding, to acknowledge
the group who built the OS ground up.

The GNU project had built all pieces of the OS, before convincing Linus
Torvalds to release his proprietary kernel code in the GPL license.

~~~
tzs
The Linux kernel was never proprietary.

~~~
chatman
From
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux),
here is the relevant part:

"Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a
small number of C files under _a license prohibiting commercial distribution_
to its state in 2009 of over 370 megabytes of source under the GNU General
Public License."

~~~
Shamanmuni
OK, technically correct, but access to source code and a restriction on
commercial distribution is not what people usually associate with propietary
software. When you say propietary what most of us think is Linus releasing
binary-only versions of Linux in 1991, which is false. I think "almost free
software" is a much more accurate description, and a lot less flamey.

And by the way, the GPL was first written in 1989, so you could hardly argue
that in 1991 many people understood how free software should work or which are
the longterm consequences of using a certain license for your hobby project.
Cut Linus some slack, he released source code and eventually used the GPL,
right?

------
kulinilesh456
Linux doesn't lie, any more than gravity lies, or geology lies, or atmosphere
lies. Like those other natural things, Linux has no guile, no agenda beyond
supporting the entirety of use-space.

