Slashdot Mirror

Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of "black boxes", these make it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to elucidate elementary mechanisms or be detailed enough to realistically validate the model. Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."

What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess :-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.

But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be:
1. Pissing off software designers
2. Losing the Supreme Court case too.
3. ???
4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity
(my half-ironic site on that: http://artificialscarcity.com/ )

Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.

Maybe this discussion is an example of?
"When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.

If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example:
http://piwik.org/blog/2008/01/...
"Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
Easy to use ; single

See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel Voyage from Yesteryear. Or any of my own numerous postings.

Some related ideas by me on moving towards post-scarcity:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
http://www.artificialscarcity....

Not enough time right now to respond to all the great things people are discussing here. Glad to see so many posts on this topic. And the original topic by an investor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Or:
http://www.disinfo.com/2013/01/is-sowing-artificial-scarcity-the-future-of-business/
http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

Or:
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1998/no-1124-april-1998/artificial-scarcity
"Technological capacity to produce enough to satisfy everyone's needs already exists globally and has done so for many decades. Yet needs continue to remain unmet on a massive scale. Why? Quite simply because scarcity is a functional requirement of capitalism itself."

This web page includes suggestion by me on ways to transcend artificial scarcity as the basis of our modern economy:
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

Anyway, it was a great video as piece of performance art related to the idea, which also connects to "planned obsolescence" or even, to a lesser extent, "fashion".

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

Interesting post. Ideas for supporting alternatives from my: http://artificialscarcity.com/

There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:

* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");

[And as has been pointed out to me since, there probably always a fifth economy based around "theft" or "conquest".]

Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.

Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions -- including humanism -- about moving beyond materialistic values.

So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:

* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income. [One tax funding that basic income can be to tax patents and copyrights annually based on a self-assessed buyout value that would put them immediately into the public domain.]

"It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting."

So true. Something I posted in 2001:
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gnu.misc.discuss/30tDY9VE92Y
"My question is: should software tools, protocols, and standards play a role in easing this required "due diligence" license management work (at least as far as copyright alone is concerned)?"

Also, where I hypothesized millions of US citizens arrested over copyright, same as now for marijuana: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

I'm thinking more and more that it is just not possible for anyone to really prove they have a legal right to have proprietary content on some specific device when you look really hard at it. Bills of sale might be forged, to begin with, so what does showing one prove? And if you not going to jail depends on some third party verifying something over and over, good luck. And many proprietary licenses are violated often if you have too many copies (including on backup media), so you really can never 100% prove you have right to the software on a device because there might be copies elsewhere, and how do you prove you don't have extra copies somewhere? A very problematical situation if someone really pushes things...

Also, border searches now occur a hundred miles or so inside the actual US border, so most US Americans (who are mostly bi-coastal) can in theory be searched at any time this way by warrant-less border-related searches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Since, as above, people can't really prove they have legal access to anything they paid for, that makes almost everyone in the USA effectively a felon who can be arrested tomorrow by the border police if someone with some power wants to push the point. So, using only freely-licensed information might just become the safest option, even if that might also not be good enough (how do you known a statement about something being under a free license is really valid?). We'll see how all this "artificial scarcity" plays out...
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

This book has a section on why goods with low incremental costs for distribution should be free according to the authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better

A "basic income" could fund creators rather than copyright monopolies...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/code_pr.html

As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity".
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

Mod parent up. And see also my: http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

"Tell some high-quality F/OSS dev to make a kickstarter project then and stop whining about it here."

The problem is that the social dynamics of Kickstarter don't work very well for F/OSS, given that pledges are generally tightly tied to specific rewards (and pledges are amplified by the project creating "artificial scarcity").

The big issue is that people need to wake up to the notion that they are supporting and even creating "artificial scarcity" with how they spend their time and money. Related by me: http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

Then we could pass laws against business models based on artificial scarcity? http://artificialscarcity.com/

Great points. In general the idea of "artificial scarcity" through patents and copyrights is becoming immoral in the 21st century, IMHO. Richard Stallman talks about how copyright was not such a bad bargain when copies were hard to make. Now that copies are easy to make, copyright makes a lot less sense. Patents are a somewhat different issue because they are shorter, and 3D printers are still under initial development, but some of the same logic applies. In general, we need to stop funding creation of digital works through a lottery model of success (a few big winners). And as people point out, copyrights and patents are now slowing down innovation. Who can make a cell phone when it infringes on 200,000 patents? Who has time to negotiate that? We need to move beyond that model, A basic income can support inventors, as can a gift economy, or better government planning, or inventors printing consumer good for themselves via 3D printing or advanced robots. A different world is increasingly possible. A related site I made: http://artificialscarcity.com/

... an unfortunate business model for the 21st century and all our tools of abundance... http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

Very interesting summary of the ethics surrounding dealing with artificial scarcity. Thanks.

I have a related site: http://artificialscarcity.com/

Still, even with 3D printers some things may remain scarce on Earth, like land area for solar panels. Though it is not clear how scarce land will be or if it matters relative to people's needs and wants. But there is also space, where one can set up big mirrors to collect energy.

Another natural scarcity might be a nice housing location with good views which might be "scarce" depending on how we set up our landscapes and housing. Still, one can set up an equitable system with a basic income (perhaps also with employment income for takss no one wants to volunteer to do) to somehow ration those things which remain naturally scarce.

I agree with you that issues of transition might be rough. See James P. Hogan's writings like "Voyage from Yesteryear".

Ass I see it now, there have always been a mix of five types of economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). The balance shifts with technological and social changes.
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
   

Just posted here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8d32987e3767c868#

So, is this going to make an Android phone an important part of a lot of open source hardware projects (including RepRap perhaps)?

Note also:
    http://faircompanies.com/diy/view/make-your-own-open-source-android-smartphone/
"Flow DIY is an open source hardware platform so anyone can make a smartphone with the Android operating system and the exact capabilities one is looking for. Its components as well as the final creation by the user are open source, a first step toward the generalization of DIY devices. Interest is growing in personalizing not only software and web applications, but in everyday devices. A legion of DIYers are demanding tools to create increasingly more sophisticated devices. ..."

As I've said elsewhere, with the turnover rate of Smartphones, in two or three years, today's generation of smartphones will be free-as-in-discarded. :-) So, it can make sense to build stuff for them, especially since if they are free-as-in-discarded-beer then they can be free for kids to use for educational things (like instead of the OLPC XO-1). Reference:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html

That's one reason I started working on Android software (and under a three-years-and-its-free-under-the-GPL model that I am still conflicted
about).
    http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

Still, sadly my Google Developer Smartphone died several after I got it and I never got around to sending it in for replacement, so I guess there is an amount of old phones that will not be usable for similar reasons (but I doubt that will be the majority). Also, as people have pointed out, the Smartphone batteries tend to go, making them less useful as they age (although I guess you could hack in some alternative power if you were motivated).

Still, I'd suggest that if one is making an open manufacturing project that requires computing, integrating an Android Smartphone might be an interesting idea.

http://www.artificialscarcity.com/ more and more...
(my site. :-)

Alternatives:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4f49f5fc25b8b3e9
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

We need to transition to a model where enterprise is more and more about dealing with real scarcities (either local or global).

...as a business model: http://artificialscarcity.com/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
(my writings)

My site on the problem: http://artificialscarcity.com/

Alternative solutions collected by me: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives