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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BLISS is ignorance.
A very "Dennis Miller" rant (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't have called it "contrarian", as I personally agree with most of what he was saying, and I know a lot of people who work with me would as well.
What I found interesting was his comparisons of both Microsoft and of the Linux community as a whole. Granted, they were both skewed to the extremes, but I did notice something that I think applied to most people.
I consider myself a relative above-average user. I understand how to set things up, and general low-level techie questions about certain things are no problem, but anything more technical than that confuses me, and what's scary is that the average user is worse.
However, the average computer user really doesn't have a choice between the two. Microsoft runs most all the software (both apps and games) that anyone is familiar with. Sure, there is FreeCiv, the now-defunct Loki, StarOffice, and so forth, but in the end, it comes down to brand names, and people don't know Red Hat, or StarOffice, or anything. They know Windows and Office.
The other side of the story is that most Linux users I know are extreme power-users. They tend to get so wrapped up in their exploits of compiling the latest distros that they tend to talk over everyone's (including myself) head. Even though computers are complicated by nature, that's not what sells, nor will it ever sell. Look how complicated the RIAA/MPAA is trying to make digital downloads. They're getting no where fast that way.The only other thing that this article brought to mind was a question about what the Linux community wants to do with Linux. Say it upseats Windows. Say it takes over on both the server and the desktop. Say that 95% of all computers now run some distro of Linux...
Haven't we then just painted ourselves into the same corner that Microsoft is in, and wouldn't Linux receive the same amount of critisism for a variety of other things?
Just a thought. I'm sure it's been mentioned on here.....but just in case.....and I knew I was going somewhere with this......oh well.
OT: Jesus vs. the moneylenders (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know Mr. Sterlings' theological leanings but this part of his speech struck me as interesting.
I read a some writings by a Biblical scholar Hyam Maccoby (who incidentally is Jewish) which argue quite convincingly--to me anyway, though as I'm a Hindu that may not mean much--that Jesus far from being a rebel against the establishment was a mainstream Jewish Pharisee. The view we have of him today and for that matter the entire religion of Christianity, was largely the invention of St. Paul
Judaism has never been a particularly otherworldly religion and even ascetic sects like the Essenes were not against commercial activity. The whole reason there were moneylenders in the temple in the first place is that Jews were required to make donation on certain occasions such as the birth of a firstborn son (pidyon haben) and pay taxes for the upkeep of the temple. The moneylenders changed secular coinage into special temple shekels. So it seems pretty unlikely that Jesus the Pharisee would be aghast at such activity.
Another theory is that the High Priest and his followers were Saducees (a rival sect) and collaborators with the Romans. The crime of the moneylenders was supporting foreign occupation and as "King of the Jews" Jesus would want to have none of that.
By this reading, Jesus's political views were more Peoples Front of Judea (or Judean Peoples Front) than Bolshevik.
Contrarian? To what? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Slashdot really does want to post a contrarian view to open source, it seems to me that a suitable article ought to be found.
The benefit of this forum is that it allows a diverse group of opinions to be expressed. That all goes for naught, however, if the subject matter is not worthy of the discussion.
A solidly written article that runs counter to the open source viewpoint could stimulate not only a great discussion, it could also help to hone the arguments that folks would use in their support of open source.
Re:I can relate to the speaker. (Score:3, Interesting)
A simple question would be one thing, a simple question repeated over and over again by the same person could be seen as a sign of insanity. I.e.
3 a : extreme folly or unreasonableness b : something utterly foolish or unreasonable
*taken from websters*
The folly being, the user just relies on the support personal to do the thinking for them on the most basic of computer functions.
Take for example, someone that asks too many questions about M$ office suites.
There are many small schools out there inside of places like staples that can provide the *proper* enviroment for training in these softwares. Yet most people tend to rely on their internal support staff for things like changing the color and size of fonts.
Since learning is important to a support person, and not a user, then wouldn't the support persons time be better spent learning how to lessen their own load? Simple things like having time set aside to lay out templates, use the answer wizard for office installs to create better automated installs (with said included templates) Create documentation (which is useless because lazy people would rather ask questions)
Thing you don't realize is if you quit wasting all the admins time on your patheticly stupid simple questions, he, she, they would have more time to make your life easier and simpler.
I've yet to walk into a company who's management want's to take this type of proactive support because most upper management relies very heavily on this "just in time" support model. It sucks, I've been through it enough. I think the whole MS product line is a complete waste of time for IT departments because ultimately it is the users and upper management that fuck it up... Not the admins.
So next time you ask your sysadmin a stupid word question, better hope it's not me, cause i'm a 190lb lean mean gorrilla now that I go out and exercise daily. We'll see who tosses who out the window OK?
--toq
Not a great Sterling rap... here's a better one: (Score:5, Interesting)
By all means, read it for fun... e.g. note Sterling's attempt at categorizing proprietary software company strategies as relationship headgames, where Linux comes in as this weird hippie chick that likes doing geeky guys... just don't expect too much of it.
Sometimes I think Slashdot may have painted itself into a corner... they ended up running a link to *this* Sterling rap, because it's about the sterotypic concerns of slashdot, not because it's a particularly interesting one. Try this one: Without Vision, The People Perish [well.com]. There's at least a chance that he's on to something there.
Re:mussolini (Score:3, Interesting)
Or perhaps he was simply more knowledgable about history than the average usenet poster/slashdot reader: Fascism wasn't limited to just Germany then, and though it is largely absent from Germany today, it is most definitely not absent from the world now.
Don't kill the messenger (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the people here, esp. the coders, didn't like the message because it involved so many threads that they can usually ignore. The idea that the inequity of software relationships can be seen from a much larger perspective, and somehow tie in with all of this messy political stuff, like diamond miners in South Africa... well, it's just frightening. Coders aren't diamond miners, after all! We're powerful important people. We aren't used by the man! The man loves us.. he gives us better TV to watch and dental plans.
Just this weekend on
Bruce Sterling hit the nail right on the head. The geeks, he is telling us, along with everyone else are going to have to become dissidents, and then activists.
Because this is a real time of reckoning about freedom and how we may want to change the way we govern ourselves; we all should be prepared. Bruce Sterling's speech is a humorously contrarian introduction, aimed at geeks. But don't stop there.
Go and eat at an urban McDonalds, get a copy of US News & World Report, watch some MTV skin-flick or FOX News, or try not using your ss# for a while, or try tracking your vote to any actual political action (or comparing your vote to a company dollar), and top it all off with a visit to the local garbage dump, 'cause it's gonna smell better there.
Then go and read the commons article. Then read opensecrets.org, or cryptome.org, or the books "Understanding Power" (Chomsky) or "Empire" (Hardt & Negri) or the Declaration of Independence. Not that you have to sign-up with any political party, but these things will change your mind about how the world works, and your role in it.
At the end of doing all of this myself, I didn't needed to be preached to anymore. It's not just the software debate. It's not just the music debate. It's not just the accounting debate. It's the way of the world that is systematically confused. "The American Dream": this Ad sponsored by Pepsi and Brittney Spears' bouncing boobs. Is this really what it's supposed to be like?
I'm reading all I can and planning for a better way of life.
Re:Stupidest speach ever (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Actually, I think the speech was more of a Rorschach test. He basically repeated all the arguments and open source cliches that you hear bandied about on Slashdot all the time, like "information wants to be free" and "Microsoft is a monopoly" and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", all the time subtlely poking fun at each of them. Since he talked about everything, and you only remember one thing, the speech works like a Rorschach test for what you were focusing on. You didn't even notice that he wasn't even arguing for or against anything in particular. I, for one, thought the first half of the speech was very entertaining, although the second half was boring and I scanned over most of it.
-a
Re:points of substance (Score:3, Interesting)
"Eventually, Raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar.' The paper drew its name from Raymond's central analogy. GNU programs were 'cathedrals,' impressive, centrally planned monuments to the hacker ethic, built to stand the test of time. Linux, on the other hand, was more like 'a great babbling bazaar,' a software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of the Internet."
Since we all know now that any successful software project on the medium or large scale requires centralized control, and that Linux and Mozilla are examples of that, it doesn't seem much is left of Raymond's metaphor. You can no more build a serious program without making a plan and enforcing it than you could build a house that way.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org