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Occasionally someone submits a feature that really raises my eyebrow. Jack William Bell did just that by submitting 'Open Source as an Ant Farm'. Its a really interesting piece that talks about code as art, and much more. Its quite funny, and its got a lot to think about. Click now, you won't regret it. Open Source as an Ant Farm by Jack William Bell

Where Open Source is concerned, hyperbole from the digerteratti hype meisters proliferates nearly as quickly as the hyperlinks they hype. Let's face it -- Clapton has been deposed; Linus Torvalds is now God. And those pundits shouting his divinity the loudest can^Òt even tell a stack register from a walrus. I wonder if Jesus had the same problem?

This constant lionizing of Linus is getting on my nerves. I mean, he is probably a great guy and all (if you know what I mean), but a great man? Usually you wait until people are safely dead (and unable to further embarrass themselves) before heaping those kinds of laurels on their heads. If I was he I would start worrying about that strange human proclivity for taking our living idols down a notch once in a while. Or even nailing them to a tree. Not to mention burning at the stake, drawing and quartering and satirizin g on TV.

But I knew things were getting ridiculous this last week when I saw three different weblogs pointing to the same dumb article using variations on the same dumb caption: 'Open Source as an Art Form' . I mean come on, just because a bunch of nutzoid art types gives Torvalds an award for Linux doesn't mean that an operating system or a development model is art! Yeesh!

Not that I don't think of programming as art mind you. After all I am a programmer myself and I often like to compare what I do to the creation of art. A kind of raw industrial art perpetuated underneath the digital world by Morlo cks like myself while the Eloi cavort on the surface, unaware of the immense complexity (and fragility) of their world. In other words code is art, but it is exclusionist art. No more approachable to the everyday person than a Jackson Pollock work. And twice as incomprehensible!

After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art. Not something alive and thriving. Bubbling and fermenting and making funny smells the way the process of hacking out good code does.

But, you say, it is being appreciated just as you would like! After all, isn't that what the award was all about?

Well, no frankly. Not even close. In my opinion if you can't write good code you can't appreciate good code. At the most you can only appreciate the end result, the compiled program. And, while some programs are definitely 'art' in their own right, many others cannot be described as such based on their even visible-to-the-user external features. And Linux, while a work of art in my programmer eyes, is really just a kernel. A piece of code that, if everything is working right, the user will never see directly. Some of my peers would agree with this. Some will not. As always opinions are all over the map...

One poster on Slashdot tried to have it both ways when he opined "Which part of the programming is the art? Is it the code, neatly formatted, with creative comments and clever algorithms or is it the finished product? When you look at 'art' in a museum, all you see is the finished product . . . So which is the art? The code or the program? I personally think it's the program, and beautiful programs usually have very nice/efficient/clean code."

While another lamented "When the New Yorker compares Open Source to the Algonquin roundtable, the seventh seal will be complete and Microsoft will be free to release Windows 2000."

And another asks "So how is this art going to be displayed? Will art galleries have framed printouts of C code, or will they just give out Linux CDs?"

How indeed? Well, if you read the dumb article I mentioned above you will find the author's thesis is that neither the source code nor the compiled Linux kernel code is the issue, rather the art in question is the Open Source development model that built it! He bases this proposition the following facts:

• China Youth Daily used the Microsoft consternation over Open Source for propaganda purposes.
• The Open Source development model (as described by Eric Raymond) is about cooperation and participation.
• Indian Potlatches were about cooperation and participation.
• The Surrealists did some stuff that involved cooperation and participation.
• A lot of twentieth century art uses 'quotation' (like painting soup cans or sampling 1970's Rock and Roll for Rap music) and 'quotation' is kind of like Open Source, isn't it?
• John Myatt's art forgery scam was kind of like 'quotation' too! And it was kind of like art as well
• When some people share a pseudonym to do wacky performance art, and then someone else uses the same nom de plume to crack a web site or to write an on-line 'tag-team' novel you have cooperation and participation and quotation and propaganda all rolled into one, with an Internet connection as a sweetener!

My first thought on reading the article was "Huh?" Then I reread and listed the salient points above and reiterated "Huh?"

Clearly Harvey Blume isn't a programmer. If he was I wouldn't trust him to code a 'for' loop based on his demonstrated grasp of simple logic. Nonetheless if he had simply stated that Open Source programming with the Bazaar model is 'Art' because he says it was art I would have much less to quibble with. After all art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Only he didn't. Instead he chose to defend his allegation using arguments that indicate he doesn't understand anything about the subject. In other words, I cannot say Mr. Blume is wrong, but I can state with near certainty that he is the wrong person to make the claim. He might be right, but for the wrong reasons.

So, assuming you can call a development model an art form -- how do you hang it on the wall? I would argue that it is already there. The main point about Open Source is that it is (wait for it) . . . OPEN! Duh^Å Unlike 'Closed' development the source code is available for all to see. And often the discussions between developers are available as well, archived on one list server or another. In the Internet sense you can't get up against the wall any more that that!

But what does the average art lover see hanging there? Open Source as an Art Form? I think not. More like Open Source as an Ant Farm! At most they will get a glimpse of we scurrying workers as we toil underground. But they will never, ever understand. As I said before, I am OK with that.

Non programmer types can present art awards for Linux or even Sendmail if they like, but it doesn't signify to me. In my opinion these awards mean nothing until they are given by someone who understands why the jargon file definition of 'Recursion' is funny. Until then I would rather they just threw money. Wouldn't you?

When the producers of the MTV show Road Rules asked 18-year-old Abe Ingersoll to describe his job, he wrote, "Im a full time systems analyst (a.k.a. "punk hacker kid") for an Internet connectivity company thats run by a bunch of old Berkley hippies." Last month Salon did a feature story about how Abe's hacking (and cracking) skills helped him get on the show and later helped him get close to one of the female cast members. Want to be a TV star? Ask Abe how he did it. Or ask him anything else. Post your questions below. Slashdot Moderators (you know who you are) will choose the most interesting ones. Abe's answers will appear Friday.

When the producers of the MTV show Road Rules asked 18-year-old Abe Ingersoll to describe his job, he wrote, "Im a full time systems analyst (a.k.a. "punk hacker kid") for an Internet connectivity company thats run by a bunch of old Berkley hippies." Last month Salon did a feature story about how Abe's hacking (and cracking) skills helped him get on the show and later helped him get close to one of the female cast members. Want to be a TV star? Ask Abe how he did it. Or ask him anything else. Post your questions below. Slashdot Moderators (you know who you are) will choose the most interesting ones. Abe's answers will appear Friday.

NettRom writes "Salon Tech's latest feature, "A PC in every pot" talks about the free PC and computer-appliance markets and how the companies are relying on alternative OS's due to the cost of MS Windows. Most of the article talks to people that embrace the alternative OS's, so I found it to be generally positive. There's also a bit of the usual "There's not enough applications available. You can't take your Excel spreadsheet with you home." FUD. "

Most small company IPOs have at least a little disorganization and hype surrounding them, but Red Hat's was over the edge. We're not even going to try to sort out the claims and counter-claims, the complaints and counter-complaints, and all the rest, just point you to a selection of stories on the subject, not all of which agree 100% about exactly what happened, when it happened -- or to whom.

• Late IPO change left many red-faced at C|Net.
• Red Hat charges up 272 percent in debut from ZDNet
• Geeks Tip Their Caps to Red Hat at Wired News
• Share Price More Than Triples in Red Hat's Public Offering from the New York Times (free registration required to read)
• The Tech Investor column in the Aug. 12 Washington Post talks not only about Red Hat, but other recent IPOs. Good perspective piece.
• Red Hot (with a cute "hat" graphic) headlined Salon's take on the subject.

I found a bunch of other stories too, but they all said pretty much the same as the ones I listed above. If you spot any more good ones (or have any good stories of your own to tell), please post them below.

Most small company IPOs have at least a little disorganization and hype surrounding them, but Red Hat's was over the edge. We're not even going to try to sort out the claims and counter-claims, the complaints and counter-complaints, and all the rest, just point you to a selection of stories on the subject, not all of which agree 100% about exactly what happened, when it happened -- or to whom.

• Late IPO change left many red-faced at C|Net.
• Red Hat charges up 272 percent in debut from ZDNet
• Geeks Tip Their Caps to Red Hat at Wired News
• Share Price More Than Triples in Red Hat's Public Offering from the New York Times (free registration required to read)
• The Tech Investor column in the Aug. 12 Washington Post talks not only about Red Hat, but other recent IPOs. Good perspective piece.
• Red Hot (with a cute "hat" graphic) headlined Salon's take on the subject.

I found a bunch of other stories too, but they all said pretty much the same as the ones I listed above. If you spot any more good ones (or have any good stories of your own to tell), please post them below.

Kimberley Burchett writes "Genetic Programming Inc. has built a 1000-processor Beowulf cluster for research into genetic programming. GP still has a long way to go, but it's the coolest technology ever for programmers." Update: For more info about genetic programming, please see this article in Salon.

Kimberley Burchett writes "Genetic Programming Inc. has built a 1000-processor Beowulf cluster for research into genetic programming. GP still has a long way to go, but it's the coolest technology ever for programmers." Update: For more info about genetic programming, please see this article in Salon.

mke writes "Life or death software; new medical programs show the strengths of open-source coding -- and its weaknesses." One of the biggest weaknesses mentioned in the article is that there's no software company to sue if something in the code kills or injures a patient. Another problem, at least in the U.S., is that FDA approval for medical software costs millions. The question is, can these problems be overcome, or will proprietary software continue to be the norm in critical medical applications?

Definitely the hot topic this week. Salon is running a quite passionate article written by a hacker who was rejected by E*Trade to participate in the RH IPO in august. his story reads like many of the emails I've got in the last couple days. Hacks don't have liquid net worth, so they're being rejected on that grounds? Its a good piece.

GFD writes "Salon has an article on what the media moguls call "internet marketing" where the film makers or the studio creates a bunch of fake amature fan sites, etc. to create buzz. " Wierd, huh? I'm equally annoyed by websites with fake personalities that run them. Like Hemos- he's really written by a team of marketroids ;) I'd like to state for the record that Rob is not Bill Gates. Honest.

EvilNight writes "There's an interesting article up on Salon that makes a few comparisons between Red Hat and Microsoft. Interesting reading. They also touch a little on the squabbles between LinuxCare and Red Hat. " A very good article. Covers a lot of the issues, and clearly.

Ant (and others) sent in a link to this Salon story that talks about grueling overtime hours in Silicon Valley and how the traditional tech-haus 80 hour work week may conflict with assorted labor laws, especially a new bill that made its way through the California Legislature late last week. A more recent Wired piece claims California Governor Grey Davis is expected to sign the legislation into law later this week, and has a link to the full text of the bill. Will this mean fewer high-tech start-ups in California and more in places like Virginia, where there are hardly any labor laws? Or will Silicon Valley people take life a little easier now, and take a few hours each week to spend some of the money they're making? Or will labor lawyers make all the money? Hard to tell.

oneeyedman writes "Maybe this will give support to the people who think that Linux is a communist plot. Salon has an item about an article called Anti-Microsoft 'subculture'" that ran in the China Youth Daily. In this reading of the situation, Linux users are angry peasants rising with pitchforks aimed at Microsoft's "hegemony." "

sethg wrote to us with a little nugget about David Brin, author of 'The Postman'& 'The Uplift War' that he's written for Salon. The first is an interesting discussion of "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists, while the second examines what's wrong (and right) with "The Phantom Menace". Brin has always been one of my favorite authors and he does an /incredible/ job of de-contructing the myth-as well as making you laugh.

sethg wrote to us with a little nugget about David Brin, author of 'The Postman'& 'The Uplift War' that he's written for Salon. The first is an interesting discussion of "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists, while the second examines what's wrong (and right) with "The Phantom Menace". Brin has always been one of my favorite authors and he does an /incredible/ job of de-contructing the myth-as well as making you laugh.

sethg wrote to us with a little nugget about David Brin, author of 'The Postman'& 'The Uplift War' that he's written for Salon. The first is an interesting discussion of "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists, while the second examines what's wrong (and right) with "The Phantom Menace". Brin has always been one of my favorite authors and he does an /incredible/ job of de-contructing the myth-as well as making you laugh.

Wil Mahan writes "Salon has a short article with some interesting details about the upcoming Red Hat IPO. It gives a brief overview of the S-1 filing, including potential "risk factors", such as the threat of being squashed by Microsoft. The full text of the filing is also available (warning: 1.5 MB of legalese). "

Wil Mahan writes "Salon has a short article with some interesting details about the upcoming Red Hat IPO. It gives a brief overview of the S-1 filing, including potential "risk factors", such as the threat of being squashed by Microsoft. The full text of the filing is also available (warning: 1.5 MB of legalese). "

cpt kangarooski writes "Well, an enterrising reporter over at Salon has found that certain blue comments in some Linux source code may make it eligible to be censored in Australia. Take a look here " Mmm...fun with censorship. Congrats go to Jamais Cascio (known as cynical around here), Slashdot reader, and author of the Salon article.

Mycroft-X writes "Here is a link to a Salon story about the sacrifices fans are making for their Star Wars habit. " Figured I better post something besides to poll question to talk about this little movie thing. No, I still haven't seen it. Damn conferences.

papertiger writes "Andrew Leonard has an interesting story, Code, on Neal Stephenson. He also has a FAQ on the book which is worth reading. " And I get to see Chris DiBonia today-who has my signed copy,

We break the week barrier, and tons of people email to gloat that they've seen screenings. The rest of us will have to settle for massive media hype including mantid's note from harper's that proclaims that Reagan's Star Wars project costed $4.166 billion, but Star Wars merchandise costed $4.5 billion. mattdm noted that Moviefone blew up under the ticket demand yesterday. ZD-Net has a report. DH1 sent us a really top notch interview at Salon with Empire Director Irvin Kershner- kinda nice to read something cool about the original movies after all this gas over the new one. Lastly Jethro73 sent us a George Lucas's take on piracy of Star Wars. Basically, he will be very angry and fight very hard (big surprise) against pirates. Update: 05/14 01:59 by CT : My ticket plans haven't happened, so if anyone has bright ideas on getting tickets for the Slashdot crew while we're at LinuxExpo, lemme know...

Robert Rwebangira writes "There is a nice review of Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 over at Salon - read the original review. Bottom line: The easiest Linux to install so far, but there are signs of increasing fragmentation in the Linux distributions. "

Rounding at a full week of stern reviews, stern takes a look at Andrew Leonard's new book Bots: The Origin of New Species. You may recognize Leonard's name from Wired and Salon. Click below to get the natural selection on his new book. Bots: The Origin of New Species author Andrew Leonard pages publisher HardWired Books rating 5/10 reviewer Stern ISBN summary

Define "bot" as any long-lived software process which runs with little or no human input. Andrew Leonard tries to make them exciting.

The Scenario

Andrew Leonard is yet another Wired reporter who has written a book about the computer software that will take you into the next millennium. He discusses bots, long-lived software processes with some decision-making capability, in their native habitats of IRC, usenet, MOOs and the web.

What's Bad?

While it is safe to guess that bots, under the guise of autonomous software agents, will be major players in the computing world, in order to get a book's worth of material, Leonard had to define the class very broadly. As a result virtually anything from IRC eggdrop bots to that little dancing paperclip in Microsoft Word qualifies. The stretch becomes particularly visible when he reaches back into history to discuss the origin of bots and comes up with early backup software and 'Eliza' [Note to younger readers: Eliza was a program which faked human conversation, badly. It has been implemented in every programming language you can imagine]. In chapter 4, Leonard actually describes the Wumpus of "Hunt the Wumpus" as a bot, about as ludicrous an argument as you could imagine. [Note to younger readers: Hunt the Wumpus was a very simple, very stupid game that was played on university mainframes and the early home computers of the 1970s. You wandered (textually) through a finite network of caves. Each time you moved, the wumpus moved too, randomly. You could shoot arrows into adjoining rooms. If you hit the wumpus, you won. If you wandered into the wumpus, you lost. Look, Doom wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.]

Once he's defined 'bot' so broadly, Leonard has to contend with the universe of daemons and faceless applications which infest any modern operating system. Unfortunately, most of these are not very exciting and Leonard focusses on software which is more visible, and ideally anthropomorphic. This means that all his modern bots fall into a small number of classes: usenet monitoring programs (including cancelbots), IRC bots, MUD and MOO bots, and web spiders. This puts him in an awkward position -- this book is clearly intended for the mass market, but the vast majority of the discussion regards systems which his readers will never use.

Leonard very much wants to draw trends and lessons from the evolution of bots in these areas. Unfortunately for him, the universe of bots he chooses to discuss has been so short-lived that he can draw only the most banal conclusions. "Poorly tested bots can get into infinitely recursive conversations with each other." "AI bots do a poor job of mimicking human beings." "When evil bots are programmed, good bots are usually created to fight them. Both groups are then reprogrammed repeatedly in attempts to outsmart each other."

This book avoids the typical Wired error of quoting a bunch of "friends of Wired" as experts on whatever topic is at hand. However, it does slip into the magazine's absurd typography. Many paragraphs (selected randomly, as far as I can tell) start with an initial letter which is dramatically larger than the surrounding text, rotated sideways, and rendered in a different font. How hip.

What's Good?

The book is delightfully cerebral, drawing from Plato and Darwin, Gibson and Asimov. [Note to younger readers: Plato for his moral "demon", Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does not apply), Gibson for the AIs in Neuromancer, and Asimov for the "Three Laws of Robotics"] The research is admirable, and Leonard tracks down the authors of an awful lot of the software he describes. I used MUDs a few times back in 1990 or so (and honestly never saw the point). Chapters 1 and 5 describe in amusing detail the troubles caused by bots at various MOOs, including an extended discussion of "The Barney Problem," or the 1993 swamping of Point MOOt by sloppily programmed Barney Bots singing the "I love you" song.

The discussion of Bot politics on IRC was instructive. I've been on EFnet for almost ten years now, but have always tried to avoid the undying politics of IRC-abuse and server control. As a result, I missed the inside scoop on why Alternet formed and why Nickserv went away, and so forth. Leonard fills in the gaps. Would this be as interesting to somebody who doesn't use IRC, or who uses it so much that they already know the stories? Probably not.

The material in chapter 3 on the failure of AI could form the core of its own book, a book about why AI looked so promising in 1980, the brilliant people who devoted their careers to it, and why it failed nonetheless.

"In part, the AI community doomed itself. Its own bold promises and early success led to a breathless boom period in the 1980s. Corporations rushed to adopt so-called expert systems -- programs that specialized in particular domains of knowledge and were supposed to represent the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of human experts. Unfortunately, most expert systems ended up requiring even more human resources than they replaced, and they often failed to work as promised" [stern: give me examples! juicy ones!]

"A sorry record of broken promises and the demise of the cold war dried up most AI funding and sent the artificial intelligence community reeling. Attendance at the premier artificial intelligence conferences declined. Morale sank to its lowest point when aspiring AI workers discovered that just putting the words artificial intelligence in a grant application guaranteed the kiss of death."

Those two paragraphs, on page 45, could be the first two paragraphs of a book about the past failure of AI and new methods being tried today, especially on the web. That book would probably be better than the one which Leonard has written.

Two Additional Notes

1. Curiously, Amazon.com placed this book at the top of my personalized 'recommended books' list for months. Since this list is generated by the Netperceptions affinity engine, I can only imagine that it would not have made the list unless it was selling pretty well. This makes me perplexed about how it was marketed, since its true audience seems so small.
2. One of the blurbs on the back (you know, the ones which normally say things like "A brilliant work of technical writing which I will treasure forever" -- Sylvester Stallone) reads, in its entirety,
   "Bot is short for robot, which is cooler than program."
   IRC hacker, John Leth-Nissen
   That seems rather random, doesn't it?

So What's In It For Me?

Leonard writes well, and his research can not be faulted. I look forward to reading his future books. This particular book should be of interest to people already familiar with (and curious about) robo-moderators on USENET, web spiders, IRC or MUDs/MOOs. If you do not fall into one of those categories, don't waste your time here.

If you're into this, pick up the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Plague of Barneys
2. Daemons and Darwin
3. One Big Turing Test
4. The Bot Way of Being
5. War
6. Raising the Stakes
7. On the Brink
8. The Technodialectic

Manuka writes "Salon has a neat article debating the issue of whether college is worth bothering with for geeks." The article references an old Slashdot thread and throws out some interesting comments and statistics on the subject.

caferace writes "More news about Salon... In what looks to me like a sharp bid to continue their move up the 'Net food-chain, Salon today announced they are purchasing The Well , the renowned Bay area BBS/Web community that started some 14 years ago. Wired has a story here. "

Smasher writes "The redesigned, more ambitious incarnation of Salon is now "completely rebuilt" around Linux and Apache. This is a great boost--Salon is a very popular site, and this gives Linux even more exposure to the mainstream. " We see Salon articles regularly on these pages. Glad to see them take the plunge. Update: 04/05 10:17 by CT : here's a news.com story on the same thing.