Experience would dictate, having seen 99 white swans, that all swans are white. Experience is of course a ridiculous guide for making future predictions: One event can change your experience in a way that the preceding events could not possibly have foretold. The 100th swan, the black swan, gives lie to the statement that all swans are white; suddenly only most swans are white, or at the very least most swans in the observed sample are white.

Ubuntu is our Free Software black swan. How do we explain its sudden, rapid rise to international Linux stardom? How do we explain its overwhelming success in that domain?

Well, we don’t. You can attempt to apply narrative to Ubuntu’s sudden critical mass, but it doesn’t work. Ubuntu was there at the right time (whatever that means) with the right feature set (not much different from others) and the right community (a little less technical than others, perhaps, but not much) and the right backing from Canonical (though other Linux distros have their own sugar daddies).

All of those statements don’t really explain how Ubuntu came to dominate Linux mindshare. In fact, I don’t think there’s any real way to make a narrative out of it. The reality is probably more like the Linux community tinkered and hacked and scratched the itch and tried things until one of those things really worked. This is a signal, to me at least, that the Linux community is growing up: We now have, like any other domain, a winner-takes-almost-all distribution. For good or for bad, this is how these things seem to go.

I think sometimes that the world is like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course there seems to be some correlation between hard work and success: Those people who work harder are likely to try more things. But you can work and work and work and work (look at Debian and Fedora and Gentoo and Linspire and a hundred others) and not have someone else steal and eat your cake.

You draw your own lesson. Does Ubuntu deserve to be where it is right now? Sure. Maybe if you’re working on another distro it seems a bit unfair. But even the words “deserve” and “fair” imply you believe there’s some kind of narrative going on. I disagree. There’s no narrative. There’s a metanarrative, and that’s what matters.