By Max Van Kleek
"You're in the midst of nowhere
a droplet in a mist,
you musta typed in something weird
this URL, it don't exist."
- userfriendly.org 404 Error Page
No comic strip has risen to as great a success as User Friendly within
the Open Source software/Linux communities. It "caught the wave"
of the Open Source movement at its inception in 1997, and rose at
the time of the movement's maximum momentum. Throughout its existence,
it has captured and portrayed attitudes, scenarios, and stereotypes
of the period, particularly those associated with members of a technology-related
startup with its sordid cast of characters. It is irreverent, most
of all towards large corporate monopolies, and pokes fun at pretty
much every operating-system and computer-related stereotype it can
find.
Storylines in User Friendly revolve around human-human and computer-human
conspiracies, operating system wars, monopolistic companies, and evil
plots by various members of the cast against one another. The User
Friendly cast includes a large array of characters, from Dust Puppy,
a quantum-anomoly born inside a neglected old server machine, Erwin,
a clever Artificial Intelligence frequently embodied in an old SGI
workstation ("an O2 Toaster"), to quirky system administrators
and a generic-cast of clueless sales associates, marketing people,
and product managers. Unlike the comic strip's influence and predecessor,
Dilbert, User Friendly makes no concessions as far as remaining trademark-neutral
or unbiased, regularly openly naming and slamming Intel, Microsoft,
IBM and others.
Like most online comics, User Friendly.com features a daily comic
("the daily static"); but in a format that differs from
most others. Beneath the comic strip image is a forum, where people
can append to an ever-growing list of reactions, side jokes, and other
comments people have about the strip. This is most directly reminiscent
of the Slashdot news articles, which are heralded as "echoing
the voice of the people" by listing readers' comments directly
below each piece.
Last year, User Friendly experienced its most success, as it surprised
and delighted many dedicated O'Reilly customers by releasing its second
volume, under the publisher's renowned "in a nutshell" series,
under the title "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell". This book,
sporting the same style cover as the remainder of the in a Nutshell
series, features an enlarged image of Dust Puppy in the place where
the other (serious) volumes featured woodcarvings of exotic animals,
such as various lemurs and rare tigers. User Friendly also launched
their Job search engine, "Geekfinder", and redesigned their
web site to support a "Community Calendar for Geek events from
around the world." On its mainpage, the User Friendly website
now sports a poignant quote by Eric S. Raymond, the author of the
Open Source treatise, The Cathederal and the Bazaar, explaining User
Friendly's success as an indicator of the health of the open source
community:
"One of the characteristics of healthy cultures is that they
can poke fun at themselves. I guess the hacker culture is in good
health, because User Friendly is hilarious. Its irreverence, sophisticated
in-jokes and surrealistic edge are a rocket straight out of the
Internet's collective unconscious."
By the success of User Friendly has enjoyed, the hacker culture seems
very healthy indeed.