Originally posted by elanthis
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Still, I am interested in expressing my opinion here:
GNU/Linux was, in my opinion, never intended to be a "mainstream" OS and I wonder, why everyone is struggling that much to forcefully aim at this goal. As a result, GNU/Linux in many cases has fallen for corporate ideals (as you perfectly stated) and is actually being prevented from a "healthy" development.
Of course, we do have a solid user-base and developer-community, support from scientific institutions and the corporate sector, but clearly, the product of these huge efforts leave a lot to be desired, as these are divided among themselves.
The goal of creating a viable, independent GNU/Linux distribution has not yet been reached. But is it really necessary to aim at that? To really answer this question, you have to ask yourself, how "mainstream" is defined in our society. Due to the social effects of a mostly capitalistically oriented society, corporations are mostly the ones defining new values. Projects like GNU/Linux, with its ideals and democracy, might be successful on the paper, but in reality, it is not.
With the corporate sector defining new trends and society mostly aligning to them, the homogenous crowd of non-tech-savvy people defining a computer by how well they can manage their social relationships and tasks or the biggest part of youth just caring about computer games produced by big corporations is not really interested into the ideals Linux stands for. To cite Immanuel Kant in the context of his definition of enlightenment, we get to the point: "Enlightenment is the escape of human kind from his self-incurred immaturity". If the masses align to "wrong" ideals induced by the corporate sector, it is too easy to say it was their own fault doing so. The big mistake we are currently making is trying to actually adapt to the current trends and losing focus on what GNU/Linux is really about. I don't want to doom every company for influencing the development of Free Software, but in the struggle of profit, growth and existence, they do what they are obliged to do ignoring the ideals we all stand and should fight for.
What gives me confidence is the fact that our ideals and contributions to Free Software will endure, contrary to most companies which are of current relevance in the ephemeral market. History will teach us in the future as it commonly did in the past.
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