On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 13:05:12 -0500 (CDT), Kendall Clark wrote: > >>> their computers; or giving away your code to the world at large >>> to read, study, and learn from, and then assembling that code >>> into operating systems that are challenging but give users a >>> tremendous amount of power. >> >> we were talking, in general, about "geeks". i felt that >> this characterization of geeks (as opposed to peter's >> claim that geeks are "condescending") was a little over >> the top and generously one-sided. giving away code is for >> other people who know what the hell code is and what to do >> with it. ferchrisakes. > > Despite being the occasion for Kelley's sociological points re: > geeks, I agree with much of what she's said. But in the interests > of getting at a broader evaluation of the free software movement, > I have a few comments. > > It is wrong to say that the code that geeks give away is *just* > for "other people who know what the hell code is and what to do > with it." prolly. i suspect even kelley is using a "free" browser. but i am sure that she meant something completely different. > In other words, it may be that geeks go on and on about their > giveaways because, by comparison to monopolizing tendencies in the > IT world, they do seem a refreshing change of pace. Compared to > the kind of giveaways that are standard in academia and and other > professionals (for example, pro bono legal work), their claims > *are* overblown. overblown in the sense that free software is gonna led the revolution. but apparently not overblown to the degree that such claims were necessary to get big corporations to adopt and use it. aren't all salesman's claims overblown? On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 11:31:24 -0400, kelley wrote: > > the point, again, isn't *about* individual open source types or just a point here: are you interchanging open source and free source code? > their motivations or even their self-understandings. its an > argument lefties are having over what open source might represent > or signify. still not having seen any of these claims, i am having difficulty understanding just what they are (outside of the salesmanship of raymond, et al), or what they may "represent or signify." still... i still don't understand why you are focused on the sleight of hand rather than the *thing* itself. the net is just a tool. it's revolutionary impact is no more profound than the invention of the stirup, which some people have argued had quite an effect on the world. now we can wax eloquent about the stirup or internet all we want, but what really matters is how we use the tool, not the tool itself. (now, i will note that we didn't credential stirup use, but...) On Mon, 18 Sep 2000 04:15:33 -0400, kelley wrote: > > btw, i suppose that the reason why esr isn't taken seriously ac is > the reason why that faction, the "other" open source, won in the > duke out over the name, yes? there you go again! (insert stupid ascii expression here) one of the things that i forget about in trying to understand how you look at all this is that you keep trying to reduce all of this to one kind of thing. (which is why i queried above.) there are a bunch of things that roughly fall under the category of free software movement besides "open source." open source really specifies certain kinds of projects that meet a specific criteria. but the concept as it appears to be used here falls into a much broader category, one that includes not only the bsd license (in addition to the gnu license specified above), but also the kind of cooperative ventures *at a distance* that the internet has spawned. to be fair, stallman makes the same mistake, prolly most people do... it seems to me that the claims made about "open source" or "free software" are more appropriately claims about the revolutionary impact of the net itself *cough**cough* and the way that it can change the nature of work. here, i don't just mean distributed work, but also the collaborative nature of the work done over and about the net. my point being that this *name* over which you sarcastically express concern doesn't mean what raymond wants it to mean. it seems to cover everything, not as a brand name, but in common usage. do i care? On Tue, 19 Sep 2000 15:17:21 +0200 (SAST), Peter van Heusden wrote: > >> I hadn't realised esr had affected the outsiders' perceptions of >> open source to the degree you indicate. I had considered him >> inconsequential. > > Eric S. Raymond inconsequential? I'm sorry, Matt, but where have > you been over the last few years? 5 years ago no one had ever > heard of 'open source' software - we all called it 'free software' > and the model was essentially the GNU GPL license. Eric Raymond's > work in getting the idea of 'open source' adopted - and remember, > this was an effort which explicitely linked to getting 'free > software' a toehold in industry - made a huge impact. i know i addressed part of this earlier, and jfnoonan made a similar (if somewhat historically inaccurate) point, but it seems to me that you are merely restating the point matt and i had already made. matt called him a media whore, i said he was a pimp. you two call him a salesman. we don't disagree that raymond is a salesman, i think we just have a different idea about the import of salesmen! On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:23:24 -0400, kelley wrote: > > since hippies were never especially radical and since they quickly > were co-opted then this ain't doing much for your case. hmmm, kel, i was saying that the internet was more diverse than just cyberlibertarians. alluding to its hippie traditions proves *exactly* my point. now what point did you think i was making??? > hippies were, ultimately, rather mainstream and so are > hackers/geeks/wotevAyawannacallem no dissent there. hackers are getting to be mainstream, no question about it. one day soon, we will all be hackers, or we will be burger flippers. again, that *was* my point... On Thu, 21 Sep 2000 10:14:59 +0200 (SAST), Peter van Heusden wrote: > >> i know i answered this previously, but i gave it some more >> thought. perhaps matt's and my dismissal is because we are >> looking at this from the perspective of people writing code and >> not the end-user. if eric has been useful as a marketing >> tool, then there is nothing wrong with that. i *don't* see his >> influence on geekdom, though. the corporate (and political) >> structure is another matter... > > I'm trying to get a grip on your 'people writing code' vs. 'end > user' distinction - since I'm both: I use other people's code, and > I write my own (which I give away when I can). ok, let me try to take another whack at this. "The `open source' label itself came out of a strategy session held on February 3rd 1998 in Palo Alto, California. The people present included Todd Anderson, Chris Peterson (of the Foresight Institute), John `maddog' Hall and Larry Augustin (both of Linux International), Sam Ockman (of the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group), and Eric Raymond. "We were reacting to the Netscape's announcement that it planned to give away the source of its browser. One of us (Raymond) had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan the release and followon actions. We realized that the Netscape announcement had created a precious window of time within which we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what we have to teach about the superiority of an open development process. "We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with `free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape. We brainstormed about tactics and a new label. `Open source', contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing we came up with. "Over the next week we worked on spreading the word. Linus Torvalds gave us an all-important imprimatur :-) the following day. Bruce Perens got involved early, offering to trademark `open source' and host this web site. Phil Hughes offered us a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman flirted with adopting the term, then changed his mind." now that we have gotten the history out of the way, free software, the cooperative work ethic and their relation to the hacker ethos (which is how kel lured *me* into the debate) already existed prior to the point of the open source declaration. the open source movement sits on top of these pre-existing foundations, characterizing merely a single variant. the problem i see is that microsoft has so conditioned the population that we have forgotten our free software legacy. in the early days, programmers always shared source code -- and they expected what they wrote to be scrutinized and revised. thousands of programmers contributed individual utilities, ported software to additional platforms, and did whatever it took to make the software meet their own unique needs. it was not about self-interest ("i have the biggest ____") or about altruism. it was about needs. if you needed something, you built it. microsoft's argument (see the 1976 docs) was based on the isolated computer (or *personal* computer). gates felt that since the altair was not a networked environment, the rules of the network (read, the hacker ethos) did not apply. well, many people bought into the microsoft corporate culture -- but everything is networked now. do you think raymond is doing anything more than trying to pimp out the return to the natural network environment? raymond is trying to sell coders on his open source movement by appealing to their greed. there are, no doubt, some takers to this, but i am sorry, folks, raymond came in on the wrong side of the tech market for this one to work. there are a *lot* more coders contributing to open source in their free time than not. i don't think many of them are working on the greed-based motivations that raymond (or kel) suggest. > The reason that I still think that ESR is relevant both sides of > the process is that the impact of Eric Raymond's work - > making 'open source' acceptable to the corporate world - reflected > back on the coding community in terms of added respect and power. 5 > years ago 'free software' developers were, in my experience, very > much backroom people working on 'infrastructure' projects whose > value didn't come from the software itself, but rather supported > some other value generating function (e.g. university network > management software wasn't intended to be sold as software, but > rather to support the 'core business' of the university). five years ago, you have a lot more "hackers" writing free software for both their own personal use as well as distributed usage then you had writing code for microsoft. (indeed, microsoft only employs 5,000 *coders.* the rest of its work-base is basically help-desk and sales.) you *see* microsoft and realize it is big. you don't see the contributors to free software unless you actually use their products. take a look, sometime, i think you will be truly impressed at the number of free source code out there. people assumed that software for fee would be better supported because corporate managers confused paying for computers with paying for software, and they confused the support staff of ibm for the help- desk of microsoft. (haven't you been burned enough?) it didn't make the sales claims real, it just made them wide spread. i am educated as a physicist, and yet all i seem to have ever done is code. i write alot of code for other scientists (and now i demand to be named in their grant proposals -- got to secure that income!), so i have never fit into the traditional categories of programmers. *my* experience is that free software developers have been out front a lot more than you suggest! > When 'open source' software became a viable way of developing and > releasing 'front room' software - i.e. software which fronts a > compony and is intended not so much for in house users but for > 'customers' - the social status and power of 'geeks' changed. well, see, part of my problem is that i don't see how the social status and power of "geeks" has risen. hackers are now demonized in the media and treated with contempt by law enforcement at all levels. there may be scene whores and hangers-on, but there aren't nearly enough to justify this illusive "power status" that people seem to suggest. the concept that someone will hack great code or break into a site and make a reputation and/or living for themselves is more myth than reality. not that hacker/coders wouldn't like to have this "power status" that you seem to suggest. they aren't stupid! > ESR helped convince business to put money into developing such > software - so even if his contribution in terms of lines of code, > or coding practices, etc. has not been immense, his impact on the > field has been significant. as a salesman. he allows you to justify something that you should never have had to justify. he has renormalized the place that microsoft so diligently undermined. but i don't see him having any impact on those people who actually are writing the code. you know when coders start to think about people like raymond? after they have already hacked the code and put it to bed. > To put it simply - if ESR has been useful as a marketing tool, > don't you think that the success of this marketing has impacted on > the 'open source' developers? yes, in that very limited fashion. raymond has sold corporations on the quality of the code. but *if* the market was efficient, we wouldn't have needed that salesmanship in the first place, would we? so what did we learn today? that people *do* believe the commercials! ac ''' (0 0) ----oOO----(_)--------- | truth is the | | daugther of debate | -----------------oOO--- |__|__| || || ooO Ooo ------------------------------------------------------------ AUSI.COM at http://ausi.com for FREE EMAIL, News, OLYMPICS, info about AUSTRALIA