Many users, forums and magazines like to speak of the open source community. It’s the glue that holds free software together. Without it, we’re told, there would be no open source, no Linux and no future. Books have been written about nurturing it. Websites thrive on serving it, and its chambers are often the first port of call for many a lost Linux user. But community is a double-edged sword. For each of the hundreds of individuals who have made contributions to the Linux kernel, there are endless posts, comments and rebuttals. For every person who writes a message of help and encouragement, there are more who prefer to bicker, berate and belittle users who don’t fit their expectations of what a community should be. And, unfortunately, this is a subculture that won’t go away.
The result is that there is no real community, and this is because ‘community’ is too lose a term to describe the many different kinds of people who use open source software. It’s a word that may help the free software propaganda machine, but it doesn’t help the sustainability and growth of free software. There is no such thing as a single, homogeneous Linux group. It’s a term that implies a shared goal, when there is none. It’s a term that implies some kind of kinship, when there is none, and it’s a term that implies cooperation and cohesion, when as a community, there’s just too much conflict and disagreement for this to happen.
Instead, there are only disparate groups of individuals, businesses and enterprises, just as with any other operating system. Each group may contain those noble elements of kindness that have helped to make Linux such a success, but to describe the entire collection as a community is wrong. There’s a certain group of users, for example, that behave more like an immense flock of starlings at dusk. They fly with seemingly random abandon, casting their malevolent shadow over social networks, online forums, advocacy sites and blogs as they move together. There’s no obvious leader and no obvious motivation in their movement. Their language is filled with RTFM, STFW and LART, and it’s a community that has more in common with the partisan chatter of the 1980s computing era. It feels more ‘C64 versus Spectrum’ and ‘Atari ST versus Amiga’ than the furtherance of an open source operating system. This might be news to Windows, OS X and general PC users, who may have thought his kind of thing disappeared years ago. But it hasn’t. If you want to see an example, just ask a simple question on almost any Linux forum, or even worse, dare to state your opinion.
What’s interesting is that there seems to be a parallel between new research into how birds flock together and how this particular demographic of Linux users behave and react. This might sound crazy, but a paper published recently by researchers in the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis at York University suggested that birds react only to the seven birds closest to them and limit their processing to a very limited set of information, such as the position and heading of those birds. The flock is a community only in appearance, which would help to explain the occasional headless, and heedless, behaviour of open source commentators when they descend upon some unsuspecting subject, post or point of view.
Linux seems to have more than its fair share of zealots, and I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, many of its original users chose Linux because they were anti-something. Early on, Linux was an island for the disenfranchised. Whether this was against competition, the rising price of software or the growing uniformity in the computing industry, starting off on such a negative footing was never going to be productive. Secondly, as an underdog, Linux needs vocal supporters, and those who shout the loudest are going to get heard. This has left us with the fragmented and incongruous community we have now, and it’s counterproductive.
To become more cohesive, this non-community needs to learn to tolerate different opinions. It needs to be able to take honest and frank criticism without resorting to fanaticism. And it needs to change its attitude towards new users and the direction Linux is going. If someone can’t respond positively, maybe they shouldn’t respond at all. New users, alongside potential users, are the most vital group of all if we want Linux to grow, and its slow stagnation over the last few years is evidence that the current strategy isn’t working. Open source needs to return to its altruistic roots – to the concept of nurturing inclusion and passionate users. Only then will it become a viable alternative to the increasingly locked-down world of its alternatives. And only then, perhaps, will the various flocks of migratory communities settle on some rock and finally make a difference.