Books on FOSS (was Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Purer Than Thou)

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Wed Jan 24 19:40:25 PST 2007


On 1/24/07, Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> FOSS says, "open the damn box and find out what's
> going on!" You don't have to re-engineer the box if
> you haven't the knack or the inclination or the time
> but for god's sake you should at least bother to spare
> a thought for what the box does - where it came from,
> how it got into your life, what impact it has on your
> situation and prospects.

Interesting point, it reminds me of an anecdote... Stallman said about secretaries: "They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program."

I love traditions like Lisp, which invite the user into the system, but provide her with sane defaults if she's not interested. "Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms..." Perlis's quote fits in really nicely with Alan Kay's talk, "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet," which elaborates on the concept.

Yeah, I think there should be a level of understanding, like wood comes from trees, much energy comes from oil, corporations are psychopaths...

Tayssir



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