Mediocracy™

There’s a point in this rant (referenced by Chlorus) where the poor sod, knowing that he is about to call down a shit-storm upon his head, loses all control of his spelling and repeats the word “mediocrecy.”

Contrary to supposition, a lot of us grammar/spelling nazis are very much in favour of language abuse, so long as it is creative. And here, I think, we have a superb example. I assume he means “mediocrity,” although there’s a lot to be said for the (non-existent) word “mediocracy.”

Mediocracy basically defines the Linux desktop; I’d even go so far as to include the server (YMMV). It’s related to StartFromScratch™ and WorksForMe™ and rather a lot of other TMs.

The Linux community has spent twenty years proudly patching together something that almost looks like it might eventually work, when viewed from exactly the right angle. Central bits of the system are almost impressive, although not quite. I am, for instance, a big fan of gcc, even with all the issues and the crummy libraries. It’s almost there … and will always be almost there. Mediocracy, you see.

Consider some of the bona-fide successes of the Linux world. The Apache server, for example — it took the world by storm back in the ’90s, and it’s still very usable if you don’t mind the arcane configuration and the total lack of up-to-date features. Firefox — with slightly more professional direction over the last five years, it could have been a world-beater. At the moment it’s basically second from last in the sack race.

And yet Apple, not a company willing to be associated with the mediocre, can essentially build a software ecosystem in one and a half years based on nothing much more than a BSD kernel and a proper video (etc) stack.

Somewhere in all that “Cathedral and the Bazaar” nonsense a lot of not quite brilliant enough self-appointed leaders seeped in to FOSS, and the result? The result is Mediocracy™.