Welcome to our Jihad

[Tom Cross <tomc@kendeco.com>]

Found this on Slashdot in response to MS's confirmation of the Holloween
document.  I thought it was rather good and wouldn't want anyone to miss
it.


 Welcome to our Jihad


A few years ago, I was in the Army, and one of my duties was to run a
Basic Training course for new recruits.

One night, I was giving the kids a lecture on the Geneva Convention -
pretty dry stuff, really. But when I got to the portion on "The Rights of
POWs" I got a reaction I didn't expect. 

I was reading off the list of things that the Convention requires be given
to POWs, and with every item read, one recruit in the back would start
giggling. By the time I got to "sports equipment" he was laughing openly,
having abandoned all efforts at controlling it. 

When I asked him what was so funny, he asked me why we were required to
provide the enemy with so many amenities and creature comforts when they
had recently been trying very hard to kill us. 

It's a good question, and I had to go into a history lesson to answer it. 

At the end of WWI, when the Americans joined the war, the German Army had
had a pretty rough time of it for some time. Food supplies were low, and
morale was down. The Americans though, with their Generals behind them
(General Motors, General Electric, and General Foods) were fresh, well
fed, and (relatively) happy. 

German POWs were treated very well (in accordance with the Convention) and
to your average German soldier, an American POW camp was a vacation
resort. 

The end result of this was that when German fathers sent their sons out to
do battle in WWII, the advice they gave was similar to "Keep your head
down, don't volenteer for anything, and surrender to the first American
you see" 

On the flip side of this, shortly after the D-Day Invasion, a Hitler Youth
Division (don't get this wrong - in 1940 they'd been "Youth", in 1944 they
were fanatical adults) was personally ordered by Hitler to throw a
Canadian unit back into the sea.

They couldn't, but did manage to take 200 prisoners - and in sheer
frustration, they killed the prisoners. 

Word got back to the Canadians, and that unit was "marked" No quarter was
ever given from that time forward, and the Hitler Youth unit was
slaughtered almost to the last man. 

The message is clear. You treat POWs well, in the hope that they will
treat your prisoners well, and to encourage surrender. In contrast, should
you treat your prisoners badly, the enemy will fight longer and harder. 

So what does this have to do with Linux, and the October Suprise? 

Ladies and Gents, we are at war, make no doubt about it. We have
progressed from a group of hackers happily hacking for the sheer joy of
it, to a threat to the biggest, most powerful, richest, and most ruthless
power in the industry. The October Suprise is the red-handed evidence. 

What's more, this isn't a shooting war over turf, this is a war on
idealogical lines, on religious issues. This is a Jihad. 

The thing is, we are going to win. We are the Americans in both World Wars
- late to the fight, a little clumsy and inexperienced, weak in the
beginning, but with a massive amount of resources behind us. It may take
awhile, but nobody is capeable of bringing the amount of minds and hands
together to work on a problem that we can. 

(I offer my own observation to add to "Every successful OSS project
started out scratching someone's personal itch" and "Given enough eyes,
all bugs are shallow" I state that "Given enough time and people, all
itches will eventually get scratched" or perhaps "for every itch, there's
a scratch") 

We will, in the long run, slowly chew away at every product, every
service, every source of revenue that Microsoft has. We are the glacier
that wears away mountains.

The problem is that like all wars, and especially in Jihads, that people
get hurt. OSS spells the death of commercial software as we know it, and
there are a _lot_ of people using commercial software to put food in their
mouths. We are going to hurt these people in the short term.

The challenge for us is to uphold our own Geneva Convention.  Microsoft
may be an evil, horrible institution, but the average MicroSerf is not. 
There are a lot of intellegent people in the walls at Redmond, and if we
see the writing on the wall, surely some of them do too. 

That must mean there are some frightened and worried people in there, and
we certainly resemble the slavering barbarians at the gate sometimes.

We need to make contact with the people within the walls, to get them
working on Linux with us, to steal the troops of the enemy and make them
friends. 

We could also stand to cut back on some of the sloganing and religious
chanting. Our victory will come, in time, and Amiga-esque fanatasism only
scares the uneducated. It's the equivelent of mistreating our prisoners. 

Far better we educate (in a reasonable and rational way) than pontificate. 
Far better we teach then preach, and best of all, far better we continue
to work on Linux just like we always have. 

It is the key to our success to date - and it took Microsoft to point it
out to us again. :) 

Forza Linux!

DG 

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Tom Cross                     Voice: 320-253-1020    FAX: 320-253-6956
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