geek

Peter van Heusden pvh at egenetics.com
Wed Sep 13 01:15:11 PDT 2000


On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, kelley wrote:
>
> giving away code, as far as i can tell, is all about showing everyone how
> big your dick is. it is a competition, one upmanship. not much about
> sharing and caring in that practice, if you ask me. it's about how big a
> MAN you are for sharing. with the emphasis on "voluntary giving" and being
> in position to be able to do so w/o much reflexivity on how one got
> there. who's the 3133+ H4x0R d00d???!! :)
>
> what else explains the why open source isn't really open source? eh?

Sometimes this is the case, but other times the pressure is from the point of view of wanting to work in a field that stays interesting. If you enjoy fiddling with computers - to the extent that your work is your hobby as well - you want to be able to fiddle with as much source code, as many cool ideas, as possible. I know I'd rather be building infrastructure on top of Bonobo and GNOME, where I can dig at will into the source code, than on top of COM and Windows, where I'll end up screaming in frustration at another untraceable bug.

Once you've tasted the freedom of open source development in an environment like a university, you don't want to 'grow up' and enter the corporate 'real world' very much.

Of course, the lack of reflexivity is a big thing - but then, that's at least as common in the 'closed source' community as in the open source one. And in my experience, that lack is pretty solidly there amongst all levels of computer people, not just coders.

Peter P.S. I know a lot of geeks who have no time for the 'elite' posturing. People who use numbers as letters, in my experience, aren't particularly good coders. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list