Blogs

Happy Birthday Linux

By Doc Searls 

Linux turns 25 today. That's four years older than Linus was when he invented it. That means Linus has spent more of his life with Linux than he did without it. more>>

A New Project for Linux at 25

By Doc Searls 

John McPhee says his books on geology could all be compressed to a single statement: the summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. We can do the same for Linux with this one: microsoft.com is hosted on Linux. more>>

Doing for User Space What We Did for Kernel Space

By Doc Searls 

I believe the best and worst thing about Linux is its hard distinction between kernel space and user space. more>>

Hugh MacLeod's illustration of the Internet

The Giant Zero, Part 0.x

By Doc Searls 
The first time I floated the "giant zero" metaphor for the Internet, was in my October 2007 "SuitWatch" newsletter for Linux Journal. more>>

What's Our Next Fight?

By Doc Searls 

We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom.

Linux turns 25 in August 2016. Linux Journal turned 21 in April 2016. (Issue #1 was April 1994, the month Linux hit version 1.0.) We're a generation into the history of our cause, but the fight isn't there anymore, because we won. Our cause has achieved its effects. more>>

Privacy and the New Math

By Doc Searls and T.Rob Wyatt 

Among the countless essays and posts I've read on the fight over crypto that's been going on between Apple and the FBI, one by the title above by T.Rob Wyatt in Medium stood out so well that I asked if he'd like to help me adapt it into an article for Linux Jou more>>

What's the Kernel Space of Democracy?

By Doc Searls 

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.—Winston Churchill more>>

To Appreciate a Life

By Doc Searls 

Over dinner a few years ago, Kevin Kelly told me neither of us would be remembered a thousand years from now—nor would our work, even though we both (especially he) enjoyed a measure of celebrity, our bylines on books and magazine mastheads. Death, rot and other forms of change would erase nearly everybody while altering nearly everything. more>>

Giving Silos Their Due

By Doc Searls 

Two things I got way wrong, way back. more>>

What We Can Do with Ad Blocking's Leverage

By Doc Searls 

"Never waste a crisis," Rahm Emanuel is said to have said. And publishers — including Linux Journal — have one now. more>>

Can We Save Wireless from Regulators?

By Doc Searls 

Linux was born and grew within an ecosystem of norms, not laws. Those norms were those of programming (C), operating systems (*NIX), command shells (bash, etc.), e-mail (SMTP, etc.) licenses (GPL, etc.) and Internet protocols (TCP/IP and the rest). more>>

Dealing with Boundary Issues

By Doc Searls 

The other evening a bunch of us were sitting in a friend's living room while a series of photos scrolled across her TV. The photos were a screen saver served up by her new Apple TV box. Some of the pictures were of people, birds, flowers, cats and other typical stuff. more>>

The True Internet of Things

By Doc Searls 

Before the Internet there were just nets, and they didn't get along. Each was a country or a city-state of its own, with hard boundaries that could not be crossed—or could be crossed only if the owners of the networks created closed and silo'd ways of doing it. more>>

Three More Lessons

By Doc Searls 

[In June 2015, I gave a commencement address to the graduating class of High Mowing School in New Hampshire. I wrote many drafts for the talk, all toward extemporizing the final thing. My experience with Linux and open-source hackers had an influence on it and gets credit as well. That's why I'm sharing the last of those drafts here. more>>

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