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You asked:
Why on earth is this article on /. ?

Because ... science fiction is part of the "Hacker/Nerd" culture. ESR, Eric S. Raymond no less, advocates the following for this cult in How To Become A Hacker:
Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).

Personally, I can't see how any one in their right mind case read science fiction or watch those sci-fi shows on TV. When I see people read science fiction, I think of women reading romance novels. I wonder if there's any connection?

Good riddance X-Files!

nly instead, we'd really make a "National Spam-The-Spammers Day," and

For Spammer's Day, let's support them in a nationwide effort to locate them and show our support in person at their doorsteps. Imagine a spammer answering his door and receiving the gift of a free clue bat !

1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site.

My day-time job is a pretty typical "hacker" job. I am primarily the "production support developer". While the rest of the project team are off deeveloping new features etc, I spend my days fixing things that go wrong in our production environment. Perl, csh, ksh, awk, SQL. Whatever it takes to get it working again. That pretty much covers most of the various definitions of hacker. And you know what? When I get home, I am so happy to get away from that crap, and do some pleasant elegant coding for BeOS.
One of the jargon file's definitions of hacker includes "enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming", well in my experience the average hacker (and ppl like Linus etc are far from average) either enjoys programming at the expense of theorizing (which gives us software that works but is quite simply horrible - ie a kludge) or theorize too much (which gives software that is overly idealistic rather than usefull). X-Windows is a great example. The original design was too theorized (too many API levels, everything customisable) and the resulting system is under-theorized (IMHO horrible to use).
I think that you'll find BeOS attracts developers who appreciate some good old fashioned basic "design" in the OS. The free unixes have a design goal along the lines of "making a good free unix". Sorry, but that by definition cannot be a good design, bcs unix has grown so randomly, that the system they (linux/*BSD) are trying emulate/extend no longer has any real design.

High calibre programmers need/want more choices than "pick the free unix you like best". BeOS is one of those choices, and if you look at the Be Community, I think you'll find that they are making that choice.

-- Zod (I can't remember my password)

If you want to tell your kids that computers are "Tools, not toys," go ahead. Don't forget to add that sex is dirty and drugs are bad m'kay?

-trp
P.S. You're a tool (See #4).

You might find this interesting. Especially the third example.

Please read the Jargon File entries on hacker and cracker, so you can use the proper terms in the future. In the quote above, what you mean is The argument that cracking should be some sort of protected activity...

Thank you, come again.

Please read the Jargon File entries on hacker and cracker, so you can use the proper terms in the future. In the quote above, what you mean is The argument that cracking should be some sort of protected activity...

Thank you, come again.

I ask, held us back against what? Seems to me that many (most?) quality pieces of Free Software were produced before the advent of "Open Source" - before it was even conceived. gcc and the whole GNU project, X, Linux, the BSD flavours, to name a few.

So, essentially, everything we needed was completed before ESR, Bruce Perens (sp?) and their cronies came along and started praching the Open Source mantra.

In my mind, Open Source has accomplished nothing of any importance to us. Netscape said that one of the major reasons for the NPL and MPL release of much Netscape software was because of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - and, as it later came out, because of Jamie Zawinski's evangelism within the company. In other words, ESR had something to do with it, but Open Source wasn't even around then.

No, I haven't forgotten people like Apple with the monstrosity of a license like the APSL which it peddles. In my mind that shows the negatives of Open Source - that such crap can go on and be accepted and welcomed. Companies should come to us on our terms - on the terms of Free Software - and not the other way around.

Grow up, Eric. It's your New Hacker's Dictionary and all, but I can't help but notice there's an entry for open source in it. Why not tell people what Free Software is? Without it, there would be no Open Source.

Er, I don't think you're gonna get flamed for insulting ESR. If anything, I think you're gonna get flamed for seeming clueless. At the moment, thousands of /. readers, like myself, are rereading ESR's last comment for any hint of offense.

First: offense is something the offendee feels. In some cases, it is unfair to blame the offender for a statement/action that feels offensive; perhaps the offendee is not allowing customary liberties to the offender. Thus the backlash against "Poltical Correctness"; if person A says something inoffensive by community standards, but person B has unusual standards, person B might be offended, but person A did not offend person B.

Second: I saw NOTHING offensive, by reasonable standards, in ESR's last response there. It was, as others have noted, a flippant response to a silly question.

It would be nice to have an evangelist who can keep his penis out of the evangelism of linux.

Er, I've read most, if not all, of ESR's Linux advocacy. And I can count on negative fingers the number of times he's mentioned sex, his penis, Mae Ling Mak naked and petrified, etc. The one mention of anything even remotely sexual I can recall is in one of his personal, non-Linux-related writings on his website. It was about his trip to Japan. To say that he can't keep his penis out of Linux evangelism is just SO WRONG! It's slanderous, both in the sense of falsehood and in the sense of malice. I think most of this community would agree that you have grossly misinterpreted any connotation ESR implied, and that you have applied a bizarrely high standard to the ordinary chaos of /. discussion.

Gee, I thought it was just a funny in the Jargon File. It is a pity...I want that recipe :o)

In his script, Eric has:
# We don't deal with leap years here because the baseline day is after
# the last leap year (1996) and there's a long time before the next
# one (2004).

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...

ESR is a leading open source advocate. The Halloween Documents, internal memos from Microsoft about Linux, Open Source, and stuff, were leaked to him and he posted them at opensource.org. If you'd like to find about him and his views, probably reading his reaction to the Halloween Docs would do the job. Or, just go to his homepage and read about him.

Links to his essays

That would cover all I know about him, which really isn't all that much.

ESR is a leading open source advocate. The Halloween Documents, internal memos from Microsoft about Linux, Open Source, and stuff, were leaked to him and he posted them at opensource.org. If you'd like to find about him and his views, probably reading his reaction to the Halloween Docs would do the job. Or, just go to his homepage and read about him.

Links to his essays

That would cover all I know about him, which really isn't all that much.

ESR is a leading open source advocate. The Halloween Documents, internal memos from Microsoft about Linux, Open Source, and stuff, were leaked to him and he posted them at opensource.org. If you'd like to find about him and his views, probably reading his reaction to the Halloween Docs would do the job. Or, just go to his homepage and read about him.

Links to his essays

That would cover all I know about him, which really isn't all that much.

Why did you choose to stay in Pennsylvania? It looks like you never moved. Your resume shows a few different companies (all in PA?) until '85, and then you list yourself as an Independent Consultant for over eight years. I'm sure you got many offers in that time, many of them interesting, but likely most of them located in Northern California too. At the same time, your choices in PA must have been pretty slim.

If you could enlist Supermans help and reverse the rotation of the Earth and turn back time, would you make the same choices? What advice would you give to graduates and others that face the choice of whether to move to an area like Silicon Valley, or whether to stick it out and blaze their own path at home?

Thanks for fetchmail, by the way...

P.S. would you take the blue pill or the red one?

In your paper The Magic Cauldron you talk about the sale value (final cost to consumer) and use value (what economics would consider a capital good). Modern capitalist societies have evolved very complex and sophisticated instruments (a la the profit motive) to price these goods and signal to the market what is valued. With OpenSource, this pricing information is missing and thus time/effort is spent on "sexy" projects like 3D interfaces (what economists call malinvestments) instead of really important stuff like good optimising compilers.

Question 1) Pricing of OpenSource Software How can OpenSource software be fairly priced given that it is always possible to undercut a distributor?

Question 2) Distribution of Resources Instead of vertically integrating all the profits at the sale end (distributions like Red Hat), how can the creators of the intermediate goods get enough funding to continue refining their products?

Question 3) Scaling to Megaprojects Given the limitations of no capital pool of funding so that intermediate software can maintained, will OpenSource projects be limited to "small" projects that can be supported by 1-6 key designers and wouldn't this be an inherent constraint?

Question 4) Bazaar Rules of Conduct At the moment, the Software Bazaar is controlled by gentleman rules of conduct (no encroaching on projects, equal sharing, etc). Do you see this continuing with the increasing commercialisation (and potential moral corruption) of the hacker's "gift culture"?

Question 5) Software Patent Roadblocks In a situation where time-to-market is becoming a key factor in dominating the bulk of the profits (see some notes on game theory of software patents), how can OpenSource work around limitations of key locks on irreplaceable algorithms?

Question 6) Freedom to Copy. While big companies like SGI have the resources and name-brand equity to release and protect their OpenSource efforts, how will smaller entry level players survive long enough without their ideas being poached by bigger companies?

LL

In "Understand my job, please!" you described Bruce Perens's proposal that we have a team of Linux advocates sharing the load as "glib". Could you say more about why you feel this way - isn't it more likely that a job where the load is shared would be more attractive?

Thanks,
--

For those of you who don't know Intercal, it is a Turing-complete programming language deliberately designed to be unlike any other programming language in any form.

Check The Intercal Resources Page for more information.

It's wrong because it presumes that you need to be intelligent to contribute to this movement. It's wrong because intelligence is NOT the primary attribute required to make a meaningful contribution to this culture, and it's wrong because ESR said it. It is simply a wide misconception that you need to have a 180 IQ to program - Microsoft is proof of this. *rim shot*

If you guys want to talk about the technical community, talk TO the technical community before you publish - don't go making blind assumptions about what you need, or do not need, to be a member of this community. When in doubt - ASK!

Do I seem upset? Yes, that's because I am. That statement does more to undermine the free software movement than virtually any other - we accept contributions from anybody. If it's good, we'll take it. You don't need to be an Einstein to join us.. all you need is dedication, and time.

--

Read the essay, and note how software as service has the _potential_ to overcome the worst of the defects in the traditional software model.

Of course, this doesn't allow proprietary SW to overpower free software, but it does remove its greatest instability. Probably the best part of this move is that the need for agressive growth in order to survive will quite likely be removed. MS will be able to stop attacking and still make good money.

Now, I've analyzed this as a big shot in the arm for proprietary software. And so it is! But it's not bad for free software either, because as more people come to understand that software maintainance is the thing you're paying for, they'll come to understand that the code itself is a weapon in the hands of their enemy only when it's secret.

I'm very optimistic about this, for both free software and proprietary software. And best of all, for programmers' salaries -- this model change may removed the much-bandied about salary drop that even RMS sees as inevitable because of free software.

Software users of the world -- UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

A discussion of the many ways in which MS can mess this beautiful thing up is, of course, beyond the scope of this editorial. ;-). I'm sure others will cover the problem.

-Billy

LinuxOne will support these new technologies with its sophisticated proprietary device drivers...

While this will certainly not win the good graces of RMS, last I knew it was Linus's interpretation that linking a binary-only driver with the Linux kernel did not constitute a "derived work" per the GPL. Given that much of the kernel is © Linux Torvalds, I'd say that his interpretation goes.

Of course, this is a colossally stupid thing to do. But it's not actually illegal.

"Cleverness kills wisdom"
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World Today

I don't even want to start talking about the stupidity of alienating the same developers who's code they plan to sell. Their real problem is that they are ignoring Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Or as ESR states a bit more lengthy,

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Chilli *crying*

I don't even want to start talking about the stupidity of alienating the same developers who's code they plan to sell. Their real problem is that they are ignoring Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Or as ESR states a bit more lengthy,

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Chilli *crying*

Yow... there's a mouthful to anyone not on the Eastern world...

Heh. It's a mouthful to anyone not from south India -- even north Indians make fun of how long names are in the south. But really, I figure that if you are going to have a name, you might as well make it an impressive one.

I mean, names like Smith, Wu, or Patel are frankly pretty wimpy compared to Ramakrishnanarayanan. The downside is of course that we are far more vulnerable to C Programmer's disease than most, but that's IMO a small price to pay. :)

Maybe the folks at the very top of this business live to work, but I think the Pulpit article is fastening on a glamorous-seeming minority that hasn't got too much in common with the people I actually program with every day.

Frankly, I think of most programmers I know as living to play. Programming is play; and we play hard. We also mountain bike hard, play Quake and Doom hard, love our families too hard sometimes...

As for the not spending our money part of the article -- this part I agree with. We don't spend our money on ostentation. Why not? Well, part of programming is about community. Most of you have probably read it, but check out Eric Raymond's Homesteading in the Noosphere if you really disagree with this statement. Anyhow, if we, as programmers, develop exclusionary "only the rich can play" habits, we isolate ourselves. Programming as a culture is about intellectual community and competition. Start buying toys other programmers can't afford and pretty soon you're outside your culture.

I guess my point is that the Pulpit article suggests we are all pitiful losers who can't do anything else and won't spend our money. To them I say this: I am happy. I am productive. I don't work like a slave, I play like a child. Lighten up!

--Scrappy

Someone should take a clue-by-four to this idiot. I think he has seen "Hackers" once too often (arguably, once is once too often, but hey), and should switch to decaf.. At the very least he could visit the Jargon File and look up a few other interesting terms (like, hacker, perhaps?). Most of us really don't have the inclination to spend most of our free time just cracking into Web sites. *yawn*

Your last name is Nasal? Wow! I don't mean any offense here, but you could probably make the folks over in comp.lang.c (Deja link) laugh themselves silly pretty easily. Just write a program doing something unspecified (letting main() return void is a classic), and see what happens. Oh, the joy of stupid word plays.

Well basically Cobalt sells standalone server appliances and rackmount systems, a niche area eminently suited for Linux due to hands-off maintenance and need for long-term stability. Rather intrigingly, they use MIPS-based chips (is similar to SGI) which, despite corporate x86 fixation, is a very cost-effective and efficient processor. If one ignores benchmark pissing contests, MIPS chips actually produce very good real-world application performance per dollar. Some generic reviews can be found by searching zdnet for their products. While I have no clue as to their success in the wider market, I note that several ISPs offer bulk CPU/storage/network based on amortised capital cost + (storage+bandwidth) operational charges. This may be a good choice for companies looking for a place to park their corporate data without worrying about the fine details.

The interesting question for /.ers is should Cobalt be viewed as a company that supports the OpenSource philosophy? Despite porting Linux to use MIPS, as far as I'm aware, they have not contributed their port back into mainstream (correct me if I'm mistaken). Despite distribution hiccips and angst, RedHat have recognised the value of the Linux community by releasing a portion of its IPO shares to the hacker community but then their success is directly tied to the availability of high quality source. Cobalt is not exactly the same situation being more a vertical integrator rather than Linux distributor/support.

I suspose the point of all this musing is to think and explore the relationship between traditional businesses and the OpenSource "gift economy" as detailed by ESR. Would insisting on a gift (of shares) be considered boorish? A "gift" which is automatically expected suddenly shifts from a voluntary exchange of appreciation to a compulsary tithe on the future goodwill (ie thou must give away x servers or else!) which could shatter the easy-going nature of the OpenSource community. While individuals can be expected to keep social balances in their heads (e.g. cousin x gave y last Xmas so I'll give z in return where y~=z), corporations are run on tough balance sheets principles under recognised accounting rules with the sole objective aim of increasing "value" to "shareholders". This creates an unresolved issue in dicussing how corporations can both support and benefit from OpenSource without being seen as overly exploitive (which could potentially lead to loss of goodwill). What do people think?

LL

ENIAC on a chip (linked from ESR's Retrocomputing museum).

ENIAC on a chip (linked from ESR's Retrocomputing museum).

Click Here I don't know if it has PHB (a term for retarted people who manage smart people, from the boss in dilbert) but it's got a lot of other acronimical information :)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

HTH. HAND.

--
Repton.

For information on almost everything regarding hacking, read The Jargon File by Eric Steven Raymond. Oh, by the way, also MSNBC has a Linus-bashing article. They're really after him this time...



Moo(__)
\oo)
|_/\

In fact, the Xanadu Operating Company (XOC) was funded by AutoDesk (of AutoCad fame) for about five years under the pretext that the Xanadu system would make a dandy archive/retrieval system for AutoCad design files. That it also tickled the imagination of AutoDesk founder John Walker was a happy coincidence.

I was involved in a week's worth of discussion with the folks at XOC (and ESR) about turning USENET into a "coarse grain" hypertext system (after all, every article has a world-wide unique message-ID, required by the transport, and the software can use "references" like links), but there were a number of issues we didn't have clean answers for, and the discussion never resulted in software. Besides, now we have DejaNews as an archive of USENET, also Alta Vista can search it, too.

Anyway, when Carol Bartz became CEO of AutoDesk, she cut a lot of things (AutoDesk was in financial trouble at the time), and XOC was one of the casualties. Now, one could well ask why, with five years of funding, XOC never produced anything that the market saw...

I think the principal failing of Ted Nelson's dream was the almost relentless drive for perfection, with almost no "real world" testing of the incremental versions of the software - no one associated with the effort wanted to release anything less than complete and perfect.

Result: nothing was ever released (until now).

It'll be interesting to see if the code lives up to the decades of hype about it.

Browse here for a clue.

Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead 2^8 = 256. This goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became the caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to reinforce the convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^ for exponention.) The notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because ^ means bitwise exclusive-or in C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.

For a long time, I didn't think the profile you described was the "typical" hacker. Then a couple years ago, I came across this part of the Jargon file:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/j argon/html/Appendix-B.html

and I've noticed that quite a few of the people I know and work with, fit the profile (not to mention that I fit the profile pretty well too).

I bet there's a logical reason where the typical liberal/atheist/open minded stereotype got started. It probably has something to do with the ultra-intelligent folks at MIT and Caltech in the late 60's/early 70's.

My knee-jerk explanation is that it's just the nature of working with computers. Computers are controlled environments, I can start it up, shut it down, make it do anything I want. In a simplified way, I'm the "god" of my system and I can do anything I want, I have no limits, my imagination is the only thing holding me back (there's also some memory/CPU upgrades holding me back, but I won't get into it here :). You can also say the world of mathematics is much the same, a controlled place, where the controller has the feeling of total control over the universe in which they inhabit.

If I had to pick a common theme running among things like religion, conservativism, and closed-mindedness, I'd have to say the first word that comes to mind is "limits." Religion limits what you can do; it does so for good reasons, but they're limits nonetheless, and I should be able to decide what is right and what is wrong. Conservativism also makes me think of limits to what my freedoms are, especially after growing up in the Reagan/Bush years. Closed-mindedness seems to be the antithesis of someone who works almost exclusively with computers. Computers have taught me that it doesn't matter what your background, sex, race, upbringing, sexual orientation, or disability is, the only thing that matters is how well you can code or produce great things from your computer. I've been surprised on several occasions to learn upon meeting someone that someone I've been exchanging email with, they happen to be completely deaf, or grossly overweight, or 18 years of age when their writing suggests 35.

A quick straw poll of where I work (small computer group at a large american university) shows that 14 out of 16 fit the typical profile pretty well, there's just a couple of right-wing types in my computer group.

What types of computer people seem typical to you?

The Jargon File, aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary" currently written/edited by Eric S. Raymond, paints just the picture you mention. Hardly the "liberal media" that you mention.

The Jargon File, aka "The New Hacker's Dictionary" currently written/edited by Eric S. Raymond, paints just the picture you mention. Hardly the "liberal media" that you mention.

Does anyone know where keyboards of this type can be obtained, or even where I could find a picture of one?

On how many firkins of gasoline? (See also the Jargon file.)

(Oh, and according to most of the linux hackers, it's a scam, since you can't write a TCP/IP stack in 512 words)

You've never read the story of mel have you? You should try stepping through something like, oh, NES Zelda with an emulator and see how they fit that game into 32k. (Hint: Parts of the executable code are also used as sound samples!)

I could definitely see a TCP/IP stack being implimented in 512 clever bytes. I would hate to debug it though.

Yet another comment in favor of McConnell's books, though the one I use most often is Software Project Survival Guide (ISBN 1-57231-621-7).

My experience has led to an almost religious belief in the importance of early work in requirements gathering and design, especially in large projects. I say this because I have seen too many large projects fail catastrophically when the early work wasn't done, or was rushed through in order to get to the code and get the product out the door. In almost every case, skipping the early work or cutting corners has led to major schedule slips and really bad software down the line. In contrast, the project I am working on now spent several months in the early work, and looks likely to ship ahead of schedule.

I would also like to comment on McConnell's emphasis on staged development. His process bears some resemblance to ESR's "release early, release often" philosophy (see The Cathedral and the Bazaar if you haven't already). The idea of bringing each stage to a releasable state, whether or not you actually intend to ship it, is especially relevant to my current situation, as an early stage that was never intended for public release is about to become a shipping product.

In all of this, though, bear in mind that there is such a thing as too much documentation. A rule of thumb I like to follow is this: if the printed documentation is bigger than the printed source code, then there's too much. YMMV, though, depending on your project.

One other book that I have found useful in the architecture and design stages of a project is Craig Larman's Applying UML and Patterns (ISBN 0-13-748880-7). Note, however: Do not attempt to drive or operate heavy equipment while reading this book :)

On the whole, I liked this article. I just have a few things to comment on.

What if the Linux community continues to do things like change the C/C++ libraries and compilers, as they did recently, which triggered so many compatibility problems?

Now, I don't consider myself an elite hacker or anything, (I do write and compile a lot of software though) but I haven't noticed any compatibility problems on either of my machines. But maybe that's because, like most of the world, I don't try to be bleeding edge. Neither will the mainstream. Companies like Red Hat are terribly concerned with compatibility issues, and because their money is on the line, they make sure that compatibility will be a matter of upgrading x number of packages. The cooperative and open nature of the open source community makes the turnaround time on fixing broken stuff much shorter, we all know that. But why? Because if someone with a large stake in Linux needs compatibility with new libraries or compilers, they can easily

1. fix it themselves
2. use their resources to aid the developers in charge of the project(s) in bringing it up to date

What if someone decides to do something you hate with your program, such as make changes that preserve compatibility with prior versions and break compatibility with your latest release, and then spend millions of dollars to promote their version?

This is the new Coke dilemma. Sorry, I just had to say that. Seriously though, this does happen. It's the problem best exemplified by EGCS. EGCS was a split from the main development track of GCC, but eventually it proved to be more promising than its predecessor and it was brought back into the fold. Our community is better for it.

Like our mythical political party, the community has to learn to compromise and be more understanding and accommodating of the mainstream.

To a point. The Linux community, through projects like GNOME and KDE, has made the important changes that the mainstream will want. But as a partisan, I have to say this: Let's not forget our Free Software roots. It's terribly important that we focus on the ideals that got us this far, like unabashed source availability and respect for the owners of open source projects (go here if any of this is new to you). These are the ideas that have protected and nurtured the movement this far, and they will continue to do so in the future.

-k

One of the perhaps smaller, but of a certainty significant, aspects of the Mozilla project is apparent to those of us who browse the Bugzilla database. Ergo, it has lain unnoticed by the silent majority, the flamedot minority, and the ha-ha-Netscape-fools gawkers.

Users and programmers have traditionally been the poles of a divide (if I may carelessly mix my metaphors), kinda like boys and girls. (Which of the pairs is analogous to which I leave as an exercise to the reader >:+} ). While other companies or groups have been renowned for their attention to user interface or responsiveness to users, Mozilla, through Bugzilla, more so even than through the newsgroups, stewards a new user/coder frontier: The blessed enhancement request. Pssst - Rob - your code won't permit me to include the necessarily long CGI URL.

Here, in this well-mannered and efficient forum, users make unreasonable requests - and watch with astonishment as they are sometimes granted! The Netscape engineers are for the most part tolerant and polite - even enduring unwarranted abuse - and are open to luser suggestion. If indeed lusers they be. And most proposals are at the very least discussed, for the greater number.

The seeding of this hitherto untapped and rather mangy range of the noosphere (to use your beloved but limited vernacular), the (*scoffing*) user base, is an advanced, or rather advancing, inclusion that makes our trumpeted Open Source method more of a societal, a popular?, phenomenon than before. (*Leaving further such analysis to the grandiose*)

Needless to say, these words apply only to those members of society who are sufficiently interested to linger circa such domains. So should it be. We (or, perhaps, I) mad bastards who think to shape the next Netscape browser toward our ends and in reflection of our method-minds rather like the lack of company >:+)

And there is another aspect of appeal in the Bugzilla milieu. (Milieu being a browsable web database, an ongoing discussion with engineers, a devoted newsgroup set, a sense of comradeship against hostile outside, media, forces, &c) The satisfaction of submitting a bug and awaiting it's speedy repair soon becomes a quite forthright expectation, something akin almost to a human instinct, undiscovered alas until this late march of the Industrial age. It is the desire and expectation that, finding a bug, one reports it, and will soon be using a fresh copy of the software that is bereft of the very flaw. If such a cycle were established in all public domains, many corporations would be afflicted, and many consumers would rejoice. And lo!, the yobbers would owe we "computer hackers". It nearly calls to mind the fabled customer service and quality of vendors such as the Eaton's of the 1960s (to those non-Canadians who do not recognize the reference, *nyyahh* to ye).

Or perhaps I'm foaming verbose again - there was the Great Overboard some time ago, as I recall - but we'll see when it ships, won't we, kiddies?

vaporware /vay'pr-weir/ n.
Products announced far in
advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
See also brochureware .


So spaketh the Jargon File
--

vaporware /vay'pr-weir/ n.
Products announced far in
advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
See also brochureware .


So spaketh the Jargon File
--

vaporware /vay'pr-weir/ n.
Products announced far in
advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
See also brochureware .


So spaketh the Jargon File
--

From ESR, I would add The Jargon File. The Cathedral And the Bazaar is more about Software than the Internet, but if that's there, than RMS's Why Software Should Be Free should also be there.

Another critically important RMS piece (and one more relevant to the internet) is The Right to Read.

Also there's The Declaration of Independence [of the USA], not as a document in its own right, but as the first entry into Project Gutenberg.

Getting more internetty, you've got RFC Number 1, the description of the tentative IMP protocol to be used between the four systems on the brand spanking new ARPA network.

Going to distant history (in computer terms) there is the 1945 paper by Vandemaar Bush, As We May Think, one of the inspirations for the ARPA project.

There's the 1989 whitepaper from CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal, the paper that started the WWW.