A Contrarian View of Open Source 262
Bruce Sterling's OSCON speech is now online - fun, light reading. And a reminder: the Global Civil Society design contest (which we mentioned before) is ending soon.
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A Contrarian View of Open Source
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The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
This gem (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, there's not even a pretense of sense there. It's purely words strung together for effect.
Stupidest speach ever (Score:3, Insightful)
It was the weirdest mish-mash of mixed up metaphors I've ever seen. Did it even have a point? Was this man high as a kite at the time he gave this speech?
If this is the best contrarian viewpoint on open source that the convention organizers could rustle up, then they're either myopic to the point of blindness or intentionally self deluded.
Why couldn't they get someone who was serious to provide the oh so important counterpoint? Someone who would actually, you know, talk about real stuff like open source economics and how I'm going to make a living if the world ever does move to 100% open source software?
What a waste of (my) 15 minutes.
It was a really funny... and scary talk (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually really loved this speech, as I think did the packed room, including larry Wall and half of his family [perl.org].
Of course it was over the top, of course it was sometimes cruel and mean to Open Source, of course it made fun of OSX, of course it compared Linux to a trailor park hippie, but it was also twice as mean to Microsoft, it raised some good points, and why couldn't we just appreciate a good rant? It was funny and hit home quite a few times.
And frankly the end of the speech, which predicts that geeks will be the next dissidents, sounds like a distinct, and scary, possibility.
Oooh! Such Criticism... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really get tired of a bunch of whiney geeks bitching because people want to sully their precious, insulated geekspace with cultural issues (outside games and anime and Libetarianism, which, for some unfathomable reason, seem to be perfectly OK). Is that the key item to being a geek? A uncontrolled but always frustrated little ego that says "Bow down before me in my magnificent geektitude and don't ever mention the outside world because I can't handle that!"? Sheesh...
Grow up.
Re:It was a really funny... and scary talk (Score:4, Insightful)
-russ
Re:Stupidest speach ever (Score:2, Insightful)
As I read and re-read the speech text, I noticed a parallelism in his metaphors. He compared Open Source with nearly everything:
Open Source And Religion
Open Source And Microsoft
Open Source And Politics
Open Source And Sex
Open Source and Noam Chomsky
The last comparison is particularly revealing, since Noam Chomsky is a linguist and political dissident. And he's an MIT professor. Perhaps the speech was more of a rhetorical homage to Chomsky rather than a relevant discourse on the state of Open Source. The title of the speech does mention contrarianism.
The problem is .... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, since the people from the USA wont come up with their own name for just themselves, the rest of the world has to do it for them, be it "USAians" or "Yanks" or "Starbucks" (I actually heard that one a while back) or "'merkins". The problem is that if you don't come up with the name yourselves there's a good chance you'll get saddled with one you don't like
Re:Stupidest speach ever (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire speech is about the economics and politics that arise from open source! First he said that traditionally, we've been working with bad metaphors. Cathedrals and bazaars make some kind of sense, but a real writer would never choose those metaphors because so many of the resonances of the symbols are just plain wrong. So he talks about closed-source software and users like it's a really bad girlfriend/boyfriend relationship - you know, where each person has something that the other one wants (hint: one of those things is wealth). Then he talks about the VALUE PROPOSITIONS that keep these bad relationships together. Go back and read those value propositions again if you seriously want to know the answer to your question. Remember that everyone has flaws, so which flaws are you willing to live with?
See if you can use your little noodle and work it out from there what he was talking about. Yes, the metaphors are free-form. That shouldn't be surprising, given that this is roughly the outline of the speech:
Man, there's not much hope left if y'all don't want to think.Re:Microsoft? As a cathedral? (Score:2, Insightful)
People can squirm, hem and haw, and pretend it's not true. The original context of the essay has nearly disappeared from the record, and I suspect Raymond wouldn't mind it gone at this point in time. But it's the plain truth.
points of substance (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source and free software are largely about their own subculture and the social aspects of that subculture rather than about software per se.
Software written by and for programmers is unlikely to have mass appeal, but it has powerful appeal to programmers.
Free software and open source will only become relevant to the average user when they start to take users' tastes and concerns into account.
The cryptic and balky nature of current open source and free software is a draw to programmers not only because it reflects their values, but because it's in such a sorry state that there is a trenchant humanitarian appeal to help out. (By implication, better software might reduce the amount of help available, and the movement might become a victim of its own success eventually.)
Another factor drawing programmers to this development model is the lack of responsibility, since they can quit at any time.
Raymond's cathedral/bazaar metaphor does not seem to apply very well, and on examination, it's unclear what he even meant by it. Microsoft is a bazaar company, not a cathedral company. So are most software makers.
People feel increasingly oppressed by commercial software, particularly Microsoft's. They are waking up to the way the software manipulates them against their own interests.
Viruses have in particular been a wake-up call.
Free software and open source are largely imitative rather than innovative, or "piratical" rather than "creative".
Free software and open source have hidden costs, including the cost of needing to become part of a particular subculture to use them effectively.
Information is not free. Information has intrinsic costs deriving from the social context of the information. Information merchants use particular strategies to make it difficult to change established relationships. Among these are restrictive contracts, brand-specific training, search costs, proprietary formats, durable purchases, and loyalty programs.
The open source and free software community is facing a social transition from a small geek subculture to a significant dissident standing. This is going to present serious challenges.
That's scarcely a complete list of the points of substance in this talk. It may not be Sterling's finest hour -- his forte is fiction, after all -- but it is by no means a bunch of insubstantial blather. In fact he touches on many neglected but important issues.
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
Re:points of substance (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the characterization of the Linux project as decentralized and self-assembling, that's been known to be false for years. Linux is tightly held by a strong central control group, in contrast with the development model expressed in Raymond's essay.
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org