Plausible deniability. The famous "Halloween" memos notwithstanding, that's what Linux represents to Microsoft, filling the role once occupied by MacOS. When the Department of Justice snaps on the floodlights in the henhouse to discover Microsoft in there, with its fur matted crimson with feathers and tendons and beaks dripping from its fangs and claws, the company can point to the penguin in the corner, sitting there quietly reading its back-issues of Dr. Dobbs' Journal, unmolested. "Yes, officer," Microsoft can say, after finishing the mouthful it had been working on before being interrupted, "a most awful thing, all of these other creatures which couldn't survive in a free-marketplace...but this work, surely it's no work of ours." And then on it can feast, after quickly bitching about how the chickens interfered with its ongoing commitment to delivering quality solutions which served the end-user. So long as the penguin doesn't put up too much interference with its dealings with the chickens, Microsoft will barely pay it any attention.

Ah, the end-user. Well, to the end-user (a term which is generally pronounced with the same level of respect with which hotel desk clerks refer to me as "sir") Linux represents nothing at all. It's all too easy for us to forget how different the needs and wants of the average human are as regards computers and operating systems. Face it: for the average person, the complex process of

1) Set channel.
2) Set the time to begin recording.
3) Set the time to stop recording.
4) Insert a blank tape and turn VCR off.

...is far too hoary a procedure to even contemplate; ask me, some time, to tell you the story of the aunt who decided to plug her VCR into a lamp timer and leave it with a toothpick jammed into its "Record" button rather than learn how to work its onscreen programming system, and you'll walk away convinced that until a four-click foolproof universal install of Linux is possible, Linux will continue to evade the radar of a larger marketplace. Ditto for popular application suites and the security blanket they represent. How wonderful it would be if truly open system and application software became the norm...but show me someone who seriously believes that Linux represents a challenge to a commercial OS, and I'll show you someone who voted for H. Ross Perot.

But to the real geek culture, Linux means a restoration of our collective self-worth.

1) It restores the cosmic balance which was permanently knocked out of whack by the advent of the Web and user-friendly Internet tools: now, our lives hitherto spent dedicated to the acquisition of arcane skills and world-hostile knowledge are once again actually useful. We've got something we can lord over the Normals. We can get Linux up and running; they can't.

2) It speaks to our fundamental desire to be able to say that we're doing something Just To See If It Can Be Done, that we're writing and distributing our work for free, because That's Just The Kind Of Guys (and Gals) We Are, peace, love, and Granola to all.

Yet...

3) It lets us achieve (2) while quietly making ourselves a prime boatload of cash. The software and the updates and the drivers are free. My time to come over and get it running on your servers? The tee-shirt I'm wearing dates back to the US Festival, but you'll notice I arrived here in a Lexus. See point (1).

To an old codger like me, who came of age under the Reagan administration, Linux means the kids are safe.

Windows -- and even MacOS, to an extent -- worried me. The culture they created and the way the definition of computing has been warped over the years to accommodate the current majority of users who really aren't terribly interested in the machines themselves. When we were kids, we were in the guts of hardware and software up to our elbows. We had the complete source code to the Apple II's firmware. We programmed in assembly language and wrote added new graphics-handling routines to the OS, as it were. Has there been a decline in what computers can offer a kid today? Does the hardware and software help encourage the next great programmer, the next great engineer, to understand the music of the digital realm?

Or, as I fear, are they just being trained to become Good Little Consumers? To sit down, shut up, and buy, buy, buy in response to any system problem?

Linux offers another way out. Like the Invisible Woman and Invisible Man plastic model kits, all of Linux's guts and organs are available for inspection, whether to educate, illuminate, inspire, or titillate: it's the kid's choice, and giving kids freedom to explore is critical.

And what does Linux mean to us as Macintosh users?

Oddly enough, Linux is even less a threat to Apple than it is to Microsoft. Linux is successfully competing against Windows NT. Linux can't erode share of a product that Apple doesn't have (yet).

Besides, when we use Linux, it comes from a different set of emotions. By and large, owners of Intel boxes install Linux at least partly to strike back at Dad. NT has problems? Microsoft won't fix them? To hell with it, then!

We, on the other hand, use Linux to enhance our arrogance about our choice of platform. We don't choose between a primary operating system and an alternative. We don't use MacOS because we have to. We use it because we want to, and because it's flexible enough to allow us to run Linux, or Windows, or practically anything else alongside.

To me? What does Linux mean to me?

I'm still working on that one. Primarily it's just another little world to mess around in. Partially it's to have a dedicated net-box which pushes its hardware to its potential. And at least partially because if I don't have this PowerPC tasked to a specific purpose, I'll leave myself wide-open to being shamed into giving it to a niece or nephew. Onward.