Beating software version fatigue
<p>In his latest<br />
<a href="http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&#038;CID=1051-061902B">Tech Central Station column</a>, Glenn Reynolds complains<br />
of `version fatigue&#8217;, his accumulating angst over the fact that since the<br />
emid-1980s he&#8217;s had to migrate through three word processors and several<br />
different versions of Windows.</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t fix the sad fact that every new VCR and remote control you get<br />
has a different control layout.  But if we&#8217;re talking software, baby, I have<br />
got your solution.</p>
<p>I have been using the same text editor since 1982.  I have been using the<br />
same command-line shell since 1985, and the same operating system since 1993.<br />
But that last date is actually misleading, because I still get use out of<br />
programs I wrote for the previous dialect of my OS as far back as 1982,<br />
without ever having had to alter a line.</p>
<p>The last time I had to learn a new feature set for any of the tools<br />
I regularly used was when I decided to change window systems in 1997,<br />
and that was not a vendor-forced upgrade.  Yes, that&#8217;s right; it means<br />
I&#8217;ve been getting mileage out of essentially the same user interface<br />
for five straight years.  Half a decade.</p>
<p>Does this mean I&#8217;m using software tools that were feature-frozen when<br />
dinosaurs walked the earth?  No, actually, it doesn&#8217;t.  The text editor,<br />
which is what I spend my screen time interacting with, has grown tremendously<br />
in capability over the twenty years I&#8217;ve been using it.  The shell I use<br />
has a lot of convenience features it didn&#8217;t in 1985, but I&#8217;ve only had<br />
to learn them as I chose.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t have a version-fatigue problem, and never have.  I get to<br />
use cutting-edge software tools that probably exceed in capability<br />
anything you are directly familiar with.  And I have every confidence,<br />
based on my last twenty years of experience, that my software will both<br />
continue to both offer me the innovative leading edge and remain<br />
feature-stable for the next twenty years if I so choose.</p>
<p>How do I achieve this best of both worlds?  One word: Unix.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a Unix guy.  You may have heard that I have something to do<br />
with this Linux thing, and Linux is indeed what I use today.  But<br />
Linux is only the most recent phase of a continuous engineering<br />
tradition that goes back to 1969.  In that world, we don&#8217;t have<br />
the kind of disruptive feature churn that forces people to upgrade<br />
to incompatible operating systems every 2.5 years.  Our software<br />
lifetimes are measured in <em>decades</em>. And our applications,<br />
like the Emacs text editor I use, frequently outlast the version<br />
of Unix they were born under.</p>
<p>There are a couple of intertwined reasons for this.  One is that<br />
we tend to get the technology decisions right the first time &#8212; Unix<br />
is, as Niklaus Wirth once said of Algol, &#8220;a vast improvement over<br />
most of its successors&#8221;.  Unix people confronted with Windows for<br />
the first time tend to react with slack-jawed shock that any product<br />
so successful could be such a complete design disaster.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, Unix/Linux people are not stuck with a<br />
business model that requires planned obsolescence in order to generate<br />
revenue.  Also, our engineering tradition puts a high value on open<br />
standards.  So our software tends to be forward-compatible.</p>
<p>As an example: about a year ago I changed file-system formats from<br />
ext2 to ext3.  In the Windows world, I&#8217;d have had to back up all my<br />
files, reinstall the OS, restore my files, and then spend a week<br />
hand-fixing bits of my system configuration that weren&#8217;t captured in<br />
the backups.  Instead, I ran one conversion utility.  Once.</p>
<p>Most of the consumer-level problems with computer software &#8212;<br />
crashes, bad design, version fatigue due to the perpetual upgrade<br />
treadmill &#8212; are not inherent in the technology. They are, rather,<br />
consequences of user-hostile business models.  Microsoft, and<br />
companies like them, have no incentive to solve the problems<br />
of crashes, poor security, and version fatigue.  They <em>like</em><br />
the perpetual upgrade treadmill.  It&#8217;s how they make money.</p>
<p>Want to beat software version fatigue? It&#8217;s easy, Glenn.  Take<br />
control; dump the closed-source monopolists; get off the treadmill.<br />
OpenOffice will let you keep your MS-Word documents and your Excel<br />
spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.  Join the Linux revolution,<br />
and never see a Blue Screen of Death again.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install.<br />
Answer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more<br />
than happy to help you get liberated.  Or get thee to Wal-Mart, which<br />
is now selling cheap machines with Lindows, a Linux variant tuned to<br />
look like Windows, for $299.</p>
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