Ubuntu and the French Revolution: A Study

In my other life, I spend a lot of time studying the French Revolution.  Unsurprisingly, that pursuit rarely intersects with my interest in Ubuntu.  The one connection that I can draw between revolutionary France and the free-software community, however, is their shared obsession with ideological evangelism, or spreading their own supposed freedoms to the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world likes it or not.  Indeed, the goal of bringing Linux to every desktop is rarely questioned.  But is it really the right strategy?

After deposing (and eventually killing) Louis XVI, the French National Convention wasn’t content simply to enjoy its new-found republican liberties and live happily ever after.  Instead, it set out to ‘liberate’ its neighbors by eradicating monarchy throughout Europe.  This policy engendered a long series of crippling wars that arguably didn’t end until the final defeat of Napoleon I in 1815, by which point French armies had swept clear across Europe, from Spain to Moscow, all in the name (if not in the practice) of spreading liberté, égalité and fraternité.

Linux at the end of a bayonet?

Linux users, to some extent, are the same way.  We’re not happy merely to enjoy our own freedom to use computers as we like, unencumbered by the repression of proprietary platforms.  Rather, we feel compelled to spread the liberty to those around us, too.

This involves expending our precious resources on long wars of attrition against Microsoft, Apple and friends, whose simple existence we perceive as a threat to our ‘revolution’.   But instead of sending thousands of angry emails to an uniformed television-news reporter, for example, wouldn’t we be better off spending our time and energy making Linux better, and not merely more popular?

Also like the revolutionary leaders of France, who famously decreed a take-no-prisoners policy, free-software advocates often fail to distinguish between hostile enemies and innocents caught in the middle.  Some people may be too ignorant to understand or appreciate Linux, but that doesn’t mean they’re in Microsoft’s pocket.  Do they really deserve attacks on their dignity and privacy?

I’d be a hypocrite to pretend that I haven’t done my own share of evangelizing for Ubuntu or denigrating proprietary software.  Those are both healthy activities, and there’s nothing wrong with publicizing free software or criticizing Microsoft when it deserves it.

But pushing Linux onto the personal computers of the world shouldn’t be the free-software community’s first priority.  Rather, making a great operating system populated with useful and intuitive applications should be at the top of the list.  And the number of people using Ubuntu, willingly or not, is hardly the most accurate gauge of its value.

Two decades of foreign war achieved nothing for the French republic and its successors.  By the time of Waterloo in 1815, France had degenerated into one-man rule, lost hundreds of thousands of its citizens and was territorially smaller than in the days of the ancien régime.

Free-software advocates will hopefully learn faster than the French that hostility and aggression are not the keys to success–and indeed that success is not contingent on the size of Ubuntu’s user-base.  We need to focus on creating the best operating system, not destroying all the other ones or spreading Linux at the end of a bayonet.

After all, as Maximilien Robespierre pointedly observed, “No one likes armed missionaries.”

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