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Embracing Insanity
There's a continuing avalache of technical/OS and other books and manuals, but very few that remind us why we should care about this stuff and, better yet, give us the tools, arguments and data to convince others.
"Embracing Insanity," by Russell C. Pavlicek (Linux Evangelist for Compaq's Professional Services organization, and 20-year computer industry veteran) is funny, smart and warm-hearted, something one could hardly expect from a book on the origins, meaning and history of the open source movement. Even though it's written by an OS veteran, it seems to be written mostly for the non-technical who need to come to terms with a movement that is both evolutionary and revolutionary.
Many of the people reading this will know some or all of the material in '"Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development."
This is a book to give your parents if they are wondering what you're doing up in your room all night, your teachers if they haven no clue as to why software has political, social and cultural implications, and perhaps as important, your boss, as he or she wonders why they need to understand open source and free software if they really want to do business in the 21st century.
It's not great literature, and doesn't purport to be. It is written with great heart, clarity and authority. "Embracing Insanity" is a history, a primer and a social biography. It explains what to do regarding OS, and what not to do, the sometimes bizarre nature and traditions of the OS culture.This is not a book that will confuse or scare off non-techies with language that isn't explained, or technical information taken for granted. Quite the contrary. It brings OS to life in a way that is completely accessible, explaining it's significance as a business and social model for many kinds of institutions, and its profoundly non-technological promise.
Pavlicek traces the growth of the OS and the free software movement, but he catches the weird (insane, perhaps) history and spirit of this particularly geek-driven phenomena. He sees OS as the liberation of the geek culture, for which he obviously has great feeling and empathy. One of his very neat ideas is that OS software development is "Essential Disruptive Technology," one of a hand of particular technologies that come out of nowhere to alter the direction of technical progress, change the rules, and catch all of the regular players off guard.
"...it is not so much that Open Source ventures onto technical ground that has never been explored before. But it does bring the rules and expectations from one area of technology (large computer systems) into another area (PC systems). And, most importantly, it does so in a way that defies the norms of the computer industry..." OS, he writes, is a new way of thinking about technology and computing, especially desktop computing.
"Embracing Insanity" is an proselytizing book (with a foreword by our own Robin "roblimo" Miller, Editor-In-Chief for the Open Source Development Network (formerly Andover.net). It's clear that Pavlickek has been trying to explain to people for years why anybody should care about OS, so he's written this book to make sure the argument continues and widens. "Embracing Insanity" is the view of a true believer about a movement that is widely misunderstood, and whose commercial and social significance is still lost on much of the non-geek world.
Pavlicek claims that OS explodes the myth of the anti-social geek. In a world where dread stereotypes of geeks pop up on the evening news nightly, nothing, he says, could be farther from the truth. Geeks are quite social, they just have a different set of priorities. The OS community, he says, uses a number of ways to sociall connect with each other, from basic Net tools like email and IRC, mailing lists and weblogs to the rapidly-proliferating OS news and discussion sites (like Linux Today). In the Linux community, bands of people come together all the time to talk about OS software and, in some cases, the free software movement.
Pavlicek covers some well-known OS history, but he also breaks some original ground, including when he talks about the moral values of OS beyond technology and software. One of the key values of OS and its community, he argues, is truth. "In a world where people are constantly exchanging ideas, evaluating concepts, and suggesting enhancements, it is vitally important that everyone speak the truth as he sees it. If someone fails to speak the truth, the process of creating software will be greatly impaired." The impact of anything less in the OS environment is devastating to the process of creating software. "If someone in charge of a piece of code willingly lies about how the code functions to other developers seeking to use that code, that person has caused great harm. Someone who lies to a development team could cost that team hundreds of even thousands of wasted hours of development. In that case, the liar has caused numerous individuals to waste precious hours of time chasing down a dead-end road."
There aren't too many media, social or political movements so dependent on truth or vulnerable to posturing, inaccuracies, hype and blatant falsehoods. Pavlicek explains why out this sometimes ill-tempered meticulousness is deeply rooted in geek culture, where mistakes have consequences, and where patience for fools and dissemblers is short. That could hardly be said of politics or media.
"Embracing Insanity" is an argument for OS, but Pavlicek bluntly spells out the business realities -- pro and con -- that underlie open source development. Is it good or bad for the bottom line, good or bad for the consumer, practical or not for everybody else? In addition to writing a primer of OS terms and names, he also dispels some myth and confusion. Lots of people don't know that Open Source isn't freeware, or that OS software isn't the same thing as public-domain software.
There aren't a lot of books coming out of the Open Source movement that you can hand to anyone with an interest in the future of technology -- that would cover a lot of people -- that so confidently captures the spirit, history and potential of one of the most interesting social and technological ideas in the world. OS may have started as a programming movement, but it has mushroomed well beyond that. Pavlicek grasps this big idea, even as many of his more technically-minded colleagues still resist it.
Geeks have had a hard time explaining the significance of OS to the world beyond. Now they don't have to. "Embracing Insanity" delivers on its promise to explain why society should care about this communal movement that seemed to come out of nowhere in response to the looming Microsoftization of the planet. It's almost a cliche in publishing to say a book is long overdue, but that's the perfect description here.
"Embracing Insanity" is the right gift for the people who have no idea what you're doing with your life, but may, for lots of important reasons, need or want to know.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
This is a book to give your parents if they are wondering what you're doing up in your room all night,...
Are you kidding? I was doing what any normal, healthy, pubescent boy was doing... and praying like hell that my mother didn't walk in, and that Vivian Hsu would!!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
You really need to read this book.
Here are just a few reasons why OSS will thrive, even if the supposed end of the gold rush comes (out of curiosity, what do you think will make that happen within ten years?):
1) People have generally the same amount of free time regardless of how much they make. When I was making 40k per year years ago, I had the same amount of free time as I do now - in fact I have slightly less because I fee some obligation to produce a lot for how much I get paid. The only difference is how many things you can buy and how you can spend your free time... indeed, if I was making a lot less I would probably travel less, leaving more time to work on OS projects.
2) There's a lot of interest in OS at the college level. These people already are not making any money, they just do it for fun. Why would that change?
3) If there was a crash, there would be a lot of people who had saved up enough to retire - a number of them might go on to work on OS projects in thier spare time.
4) If you look really far ahead at when current programmers finally retire at about 80 or 90 years old, why wouldn't they take up OSS projects as a side hobby? If you look ahead at what happens at people in OSS now grow older, with new people behind them, is it not really likley that the OSS movement will grow tremendously in the next few hundred years?
5) Trolls are always wrong about future events, being short sighted and ignorant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've said this before. Free software, and to a lesser extent, Open Source software, correct a glaring defect in copyright law with respect to software -- it fails to establish a public domain.
Not public domain in the sense of "expired copyright", but public domain in the sense that copyright is supposed to place examples of the art into the public for study and learning. Copyright is supposed to promote disclosure. Publication of object code is not disclosure. It is non-disclosure. Software copyright is a failure in that it grants a monopoly on object code without the required disclosure of the corresponding source code.
Over 99% of the people who purchase a novel will do nothing more with it then use it for entertainment purposes. However, the remaining tiny percent of the purchasers are the next generation's authors. They will read the novel, and from it, learn the art of writing new novels.
Software doesn't work that way. No amount of study of Windows 98 will teach you how to write an operating system. That's because Windows 98 doesn't come with source code. You can use it, but you aren't allowed to understand it. This is no accident. It is the express desire of Microsoft that, in spite of their receiving the benefits of a copyright monopoly, that no one be allowed to read (the technical term for reading object code is "reverse engineering") their copyrighted work. Says so right in their license. Says so, with very few exceptions, in every single license of every single piece of proprietary software on the market.
Imagine if a young student expressed interest in becoming an author, and was told: Ok, but you will have to learn how to write from scratch. There are no examples for you to learn from. You cannot read pre-existing novels. You will have to learn plot development, character development, plot twists, all from scratch -- from textbooks. You must make absolutely sure that you never, ever read someone else's novel, because that would "contaminate" you, and you could never legally write a novel, because you could be sued by the people whose novels you had read.
I don't think that the result would be a "progress" in the art of writing novels. Why should we think that by making every potential software developer "start from scratch" leads to better software?
Now substitute "software" for "novels", and "reverse engineer" for "read", and you will get a statement that most legal departments of software companies would quickly agree with.
No wonder Free software and Open Source software are considered akin to a revolution. For the first time in the history of software the doors are thrown open. People are finally allowed, and encouraged to understand software instead of just use it. The fact that over 99% of the people who use Free and Open Source software will never modify it is irrelevant. What is important is that the tiny fraction of young people who are curious and want to learn how software works so that they can write their own, finally have the opportunity to examine and play with full fledged, working, professional quality software. And in the case of Free software, they have the right to reuse and redistribute their own work -- the modified code.
Free and Open Source software are revolutionary because they transcend the political limits of copyright law, and create what copyright law should have created, but failed to. A way "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Sure, the UI and general workflow of a program you can duplicate pretty easily.
But what about learning how to design a a great colour correction algorithm? What about learning how Photoshop works efficently with files much bigger than availiable memory? In the case of IE, wouldn't it be nice to be able to see and learn from its rendering engine? Mozilla couldn't and had to build one from scratch.
Algorithmic and structural aspects to a program are one of the most important things to learn from, and knowing what other people have done can lead to someone else coming up with even better ideas in future products, or even in exisiting ones.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is one of those books and Jon Katz rants that leans heavily on the perceived romantic, underground nature of Open Source and free software, but misses the technical issues greatly. Namely that most of the Great Works these movements are re-hashes of software that could have been used by our parents in the 1970s, leaving great figures in software and computer science wondering why we refuse to advance.
"If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive UNIX would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because it's name was changed to Linux and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science."
-- Jaron Lanier
Linus created Linux because he couldn't find a decent UNIX that he could get for his PC. It's not that he thought UNIX should be the future, or that UNIX is the ultimate operating system. Realize this. Somehow we've gotten ourselves all wrapped up in UNIX again, thinking that we're oh so cool, but we shouldn't have to be subjected to this nonsense. I think many technical gurus are similarly horrified that we've started a revolution that's given us exactly what we were trying to get away from (Jamie Zawinski and Rob Pike, for example). Stability, pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, yes, they are all good things. But this doesn't equate to "Linux over Windows."
The bottom line is that it's a shame Linux and FreeBSD are the crown jewels of Open Source. Sigh.