Opinion

Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Shaving

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:30:00 +0000

Learn how to embrace open standards while you remove stubble.

Freedom is powerful. When you start using free software, a whole world opens up to you, and you start viewing everything in a different light. You start noticing when vendors don't release their code or when they try to lock you in to their products with proprietary protocols. These vendor lock-in techniques aren't new or even unique to software. Companies long have tried to force customer loyalty with incompatible proprietary products that make you stay on an upgrade treadmill. Often you can apply these free software principles outside the software world, so in this article, I describe my own object lesson in vendor lock-in from the shaving industry.

When I first started shaving, I was pretty intimidated with the notion of a sharp blade against my face so I picked the easiest and least-intimidating route: electric razors. Of course, electric razors have a large up-front cost, and after some time, you have to buy replacement blades. Still, the shaves were acceptable as far as I knew, so I didn't mind much.

At some point in my shaving journey, Gillette released the Mach 3 disposable razor. For some reason, this design appealed to a lot of geeks, and I ended up hearing about it on geek-focused blogs like Slashdot back in the day. I decided to try it out, and after I got over the initial intimidation, I realized it really wasn't all that hard to shave with it, and due to the multiple blades and lubricating strip along the top, I got a much closer shave.

I was a convert. I ditched my electric razor and went all in with the Mach 3. Of course, those disposable blades had the tendency to wear out pretty quickly, along with that blue lubricating strip, so I'd find myself dropping a few bucks per blade to get refills after a few shaves. Then again, Gillette was famous for the concept of giving away the razor and making its money on the blade, so this wasn't too surprising.

We're Going to Four Blades!

The tide started turning for me a few years later when Gillette decided to deprecate the Mach 3 in favor of a new design—this time with four blades, a lubricating strip and a rubber strip along the bottom! Everyone was supposed to switch over to this new and more expensive design, but I was perfectly happy with what I was using, and the new blades were incompatible with my Mach 3 razor, so I didn't pay it much attention.

The problem was that with this new design, replacement Mach 3 blades became harder and harder to come by, and all of the blades started creeping up in price. Eventually, I couldn't buy Mach 3 blades in bulk at my local warehouse store, and finally I gave up and bought one of the even more expensive new Gillette razors. What else could I do?

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Thinking and Working Outside the Platform

Doc Searls — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 17:50:50 +0000

by Doc Searls

On the one hand, Facebook is on fire, and soon the whole surveillance economy will start burning down too (including publishers who depend on that economy no less than Facebook does).

On the same hand, lots of Linux wizards work in that economy, which is a lot larger than Facebook alone.

Also on the same hand, lots of wizards and muggles alike are wondering out loud how we can come up with alternatives to Facebook and other "social" platforms: ones that don't depend on surveillance-based advertising.

On the other hand, we can move beyond platforms. Let me explain.

See these guys?

Those are carpenters who worked for DW Griffith, the silent film maker, back around 1908. The head carpenter is the guy on the bottom right: George W. Searls, my grandfather.

In the early years of silent film, here’s what they built:

Theaters. With stage sets.

That’s because film makers in those days thought and filmed inside the box they knew, which was theater. They'd set up a camera pointed at a stage, where actors performed just like they did in theaters.

Griffith’s biggest pioneering move was to take the camera outside the theater, into streets and homes of Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the river from New York (that's where the shots above took place)—and then out to Hollywood and a West that was still wild. Look up DW Griffith silent shorts, and somewhere among the films that come up will be the steps on which Grandpa and his carpenters sat.

Those carpenters were the hackers that helped Griffith, and the whole film industry, think and build outside the theater.

In a similar way, we need the Linux geeks and allied wizards to help the tech industry think and work outside the platform.

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Learning IT Fundamentals

Kyle Rankin — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 14:42:08 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Where do IT fundamentals fit in our modern, cloud- and abstraction-driven engineering culture?

I was recently discussing the Sysadmin/DevOps/IT industry with a colleague, and we started marveling at just how few of the skills we learned when we were starting out are actually needed today. It seems like every year a tool, abstraction layer or service makes it so you no longer need to know how this or that technology works. Why compile from source when all of the software you could want is prepackaged, tested and ready to install? Why figure out how a database works when you can just point to a pre-configured database service? Why troubleshoot a malfunctioning Linux server when you can nuke it from orbit and spawn a new one and hope the problem goes away?

This is not to say that automation is bad or that abstractions are bad. When you automate repetitive tasks and make complex tasks easier, you end up being able to accomplish more with a smaller and more junior team. I'm perfectly happy to take a tested and validated upstream kernel from my distribution instead of spending hours making the same thing and hoping I remembered to include all of the right modules. Have you ever compiled a modern web browser? It's not fun. It's handy being able to automate myself out of jobs using centralized configuration management tools.

As my colleague and I were discussing the good old days, what worried us wasn't that modern technology made things easier or that past methods obsolete—learning new things is what drew us to this career in the first place—but that in many ways, modern technology has obscured so much of what's going on under the hood, we found ourselves struggling to think of how we'd advise someone new to the industry to approach a modern career in IT. The kind of opportunities for on-the-job training that taught us the fundamentals of how computers, networks and Linux worked are becoming rarer and rarer, if they exist at all.

My story into IT mirrors many of my colleagues who started their careers somewhere between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. I started out in a kind of hybrid IT and sysadmin jack-of-all-trades position for a small business. I did everything from installing and troubleshooting Windows desktops to setting up Linux file and web servers to running and crimping network wires. I also ran a Linux desktop, and in those days, it hid very little of the underpinnings from you, so you were instantly exposed to networking, software and hardware fundamentals whether you wanted them or not.

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