Irrelevancy

This post is brought to you by the letter F.

Jim Grisanzio (community manager for OpenSolaris) openly wonders who actually listens to buzz generated by the IT press? Certainly nobody I respect does. We don’t need someone to tell us what to believe. I will tell you who does listen to that crap, Jim: The sheep. The boring. The weak. The merely “good enough”. The uninspired. The clueless IT managers of the world who work in an environment of fear, rather than innovation and pride. I do understand, however, that Sun has to play the PR game like everyone else. At least, they do with the “traditional” offerings… For now, anyways…

Here’s the real deal, though. For OpenSolaris, the traditional IT press is completely, utterly irrelevant. Ignore the fuckers. The OpenSolaris war is going to be won or lost in the trenches. Not in the boardroom. Not on the pages of some trade rag. Success or failure has nothing to do with an analyst in NYC who couldn’t tell his asshole from an IP socket. It’s got nothing to do with the reporter looking to scoop a headline. Or the investor looking for inside information on when to short. OpenSolaris is not going to get anywhere by telling people about how good it is. It’s going to get somewhere simply by *being* that good.

To all the analysts, press, and investors that create and consume the hype and bullshit of the IT PR machine I say this: Fuck you. You’re nothing. I don’t listen to you, and neither does anyone else with the drive and talent to change the way things are. You react, I create. If this battle were in your control, most of the systems in the world would be running Windows and UNIX would already be dead. Opensource an inside joke. Linux would never have made a dent in the market. FreeBSD couldn’t possibly be taken seriously. Reality check: Apache powers nearly 70% of the websites in the whole fucking world. Solaris and Linux combined power the websites of HALF of the Fortune 500. More websites are hosted on FreeBSD than Windows. And let’s face it, Linux is goddamned everywhere.

It’s actually really simple. Open source enables spontaneous, unpredictable innovation. The kind that you can’t figure out with a market study. The kind you didn’t see coming. The kind you can’t understand unless you’re actually in there, creating it yourself. OpenSolaris is Open Source. We don’t know what it will be yet. That’s what makes it powerful. That’s what makes it dangerous. The success or failure of OpenSolaris will be in the hands of the hackers. Anyone else is irrelevant.