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Is Open Source The New Jerusalem?
"And I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God ... its radiance like a most rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal ... By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it." --The Book of Revelations
So the history of revolutions, just like the philosopher said, is in fact sad and strange. They never last long, inevitably grow corrupted by private interests, and often wind up failing the very people who worked so hard to make them. They veer off in unanticipated directions, have unforeseen consequences, cause casualties among the innocent. They can also do incalculable good while they last, advancing noble ideals, improving lives, giving people a powerful sense of freedom and creation. Sometimes, their effects can't be seen or measured for years.
Yet the goals of revolutions often remain unattainable, at least during the lifetimes of their creators.
It's too soon to say for sure, but the state of this revolution, the Net Revolution, can't ultimately be judged by the ups and downs of the stock market, by the fleeting passions of venture capitalists, by the willingness of traditional institutions to embrace it, by the hysterical judgments of the popular media, by the revenue it generates, by the narrow perspectives of techo-elites who created it, or the people who misuse, abuse or exploit it.
Those drawn into this particular revolution for reasons other than gain and profit will have to accept, as others have over the centuries, that they may never get to enjoy watching the rest of society come around. Nor will they necessarily get to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labors. They may get a taste of immortality, by leaving sites, archives, and plenty of code behind. But they may never get to the New Jerusalem.
Once established, free institutions always have to defend and re-assert themselves against the profit motive of capital, the tenacious power of entrenched political elites, and what Hannah Arendt called the "authoritarian" logic of bureaucratic systems. (In our time, she might have added the monopolistic logic of "corporatist" systems as well.)
These are, historically, powerful forces, and they tend to win conflicts, since they have money, law and leaders on their side. Since the Net has no institutions of freedom, only vast, networked collectives of individuals, this particular kind of freedom -- the search for free space beyond conventional media and politics -- may end up a personal choice, even a lonely struggle.
Some of the most powerful ideas coming from any revolution are works-in-progress, beacons, places we want to reach but possibly never will. Perhaps the trip itself, more than the destination, is the point.
For those who believe they are involved in a struggle to liberate and re-distribute information, to create and problem-solve for the joy of it, to learn for the love of it, to share the labors of their work generously with others, the revolution is more than worth its challenges and disappointments. For those whose primary interest is to gather data, play games, chat or amuse themselves, many of these issues are irrelevant. Party on.
This revolution -- a convergence of programming, computing, and coding with the Net and the Web -- isn't over, so much as it's reeling from the harsh realities of contemporary life. Everybody likely has his own nominees for the most enduring ideas and movements of the unfinished Net Revolution. My two are the hacker and the Open Source movement, the two most inherently political, idealistic and powerful ideas, the two most likely to leave marks on the world. Open source software, whose explosive growth grew directly out of the Net, has turned out to be a viral transmitter of openness. It is hard to imagine how it could ever be shut down.
The hackers brought joy, freedom, exploration and enterprise back to work, and more than any other single group, sparked the computer and Net revolutions. They led one of history's great outpourings of freedom and innovation. Someday, there will be statues of Phiber Optic and the like in front of important public buildings.
Open Source and it's offspring, open media and an open society, may well prove the most enduring legacies of the technological revolution still underway. They challenge the rest of society to be more honest, open, autonomous, self-critical and generous -- worthy goals for any social movement. They're both intensely political, and capture the spirit of being free and making something new. These things will ultimately drive enormous change in the way society and culture work. The spirit of Open Source has probably liberated more information for good than any other single ethos, and created an enormous, cohesive, and intrinsically political sub-culture, one of the biggest and most powerful of the Net Revolution. Proprietary instititions, from education to media, will have no choice but to open up the processes by which they operate. From Napster to Freenet, the movement towards open information culture has exposed countless people to culture, information and innovation they would previously have been unable to see.
Last month, a programmer named Andrew Steele e-mailed me a message about the Biblical parable in which Jesus blesses a mere two loaves of bread and five fish and then distributes the food to a large, hungry crowd. After everyone has eaten, a large amount of food remains. Christians know this story well.
"Being one who tries to hold the tension between my faith and my scientific understanding of this world, I have long ago interpreted this passage as one where the generosity of the boy leads others to be generous with the food they had." Still a miracle, wrote Steele, but not one which violates physics. "Is generosity the raw material of miracles?" Steele wondered.
I don't know, but it might be the raw material of revolution. The generous nature of Open Source has advanced technology, humbled the world's most powerful corporation, returned some control of media and information to individual human beings, and established a new kind of freedom beyond censorship; it threatens the very foundations of an intrinsically closed culture. But Open Source may very well mean that the institutions that run the world will have to come out into the sunlight where everybody can see them. Isn't that one of the core ideas?
In the end, Open Source isn't about software code, of course. As author Glyn Moody says in Rebel Code, it's about "creation, beauty and what hackers call 'fun' -- though 'joy' would be nearer the mark. They are about the code within that is at the root of all that is best in us, that rebels against the worst, and that will exist as long as humans endure."
It may be that this revolution is, like the spiritual city, an idea more than a reality. This revolution is another "bubble," writes Bill Bumgarner of Codefab, another revolutionary new technology -- railroads, gold mines, steam engines -- that promised to bring the whole world closer together and unify everyone under one single God, but ultimately burst to some degree because very few people really understand the way technology or markets really work. New techologies are revolutionary, says Bumgarner, just not quite to the degree their adherents sometimes expect.
"Hey! Calm down," urged Amir Karger, a student at Yale. The information revolution is inevitable, he says. "Once the genie's out of the bottle, it won't go back in." Karger says he's confident that in 50 years the world will be a better place because of the Net. "Maybe not in exactly the ways we expect, but better. Spreading information may not be the 100 percent good some people say it is, but in general, it'll be more a force for good than evil."
Richard Akerman wrote that he too was somewhat disappointed by the Net Revolution, but is still optimistic. "What has happened in reality is in line with all of the technological upheavals of the 20th cenbtury -- increased democratization, which I think ultimately has to be good." Many of the early promises of digital empowerment have, in fact, come to pass, says Akerman. Individuals by the millions are now content providers.
Good points, and true.
So the New Jerusalem of this Revolution is still unclear, the crystal city shrouded in fog. But the hackers did in fact, pull off one revolution within another: they saved the Net and the Web from corporate and political domination, and created an energetic, creative and passionately involved community that creates its own corner of the information world.
It depends on how you define "revolution". You could say that taking power away from established authorities is a form of revolution, and that's happening.
Consider the effects of the Internet on a typical office worker. I am a Canadian living in Paris. In a week or so I will start a new job working remotely for a company in Helsinki. No country's tax laws are really designed for this sort of thing. I haven't really figured out who I'm supposed to pay taxes to. Probably France.
But, if the taxes in France are too high I can move anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection and still keep my job.
As more and more people end up with the same arrangement that I have, countries will lose the ability to set tax levels for their own citizens. It used to be that only the very wealthy could leave a country if they didn't like the taxes, soon a large percentage of people will be able to do it. This is a revolution of sorts and who knows what effect it will have.
And that's just one example of old-style governments losing power. As more goods become "intangible" - music, movies, literature, cultural products like magazines - traditional import/export controls break down. Canada likes to limit the ability of foreign (mostly U.S.) magazines to enter the Canadian market. You can't do that on the 'Net. So that's another area where, for all practical purposes, the government has lost control.
There are lots of other examples.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
It's all about corruption. If there is one thing that I have noticed in my travels around the globe it is that the prosperity of a country is inversely related to the amount of corruption in it's systems. In those countries where the postman steals your mail, or the policeman hits you up for protection money it is simply impossible to effectively run a business of any kind. This is especially true because these countries generally also have politicians that buy and sell elections.
Democracy helps, but not as much as the rule of law. It is much better economically to have a dictator if he/she comes down hard on corruption (Chile under Pinochet is a good example of this).
The Falcon and the Amiga were doomed by simple economics. The PC (with its open architecture) was significantly less expensive than the Amiga, and for most folks it was "good enough."
In other words the same market forces that doomed the Amiga are going to make sure that Linux continues to do well in the marketplace (notice I didn't say "Linux companies"). Linux is very inexpensive, it is flexible, robust, and mature, it runs on commodity hardware, and for many uses it is "good enough." That's a winning combination, my friend, and that's why Linux is being used in all sorts of projects.
Technology has little or nothing to do with the success of a product. We've all seen countless hardware and software gizmos that were gunned down by inferior competitors. The trick is to make a product that is "good enough" for most people, and do it for less than your competitors. Of course, knowing what constitutes "good enough" is quite tricky.
P.S., I'm always fascinated how people hold a distaste for organized Christianity and a love for the Lord of the Rings and Siilmarillion simultaneously, given the unashamedly Catholic imagery woven throughout those two books.
"While open source software may indeed offer advantages that traditional development methods do not, drawing parallels with sacred beliefs borders on absurd."
:)
Heh. You've never talked with a real open source "zealot" have you?
I think RMS more "religious" about free software than most church-goers are about what they believe.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
10. If you use Open Source software and you're 18 years old, you don't have to join the army.
9. Nobody ever bombed a Linux box.
8. Linus vs. Bill is a more exciting match than Sharon vs. Arafat.
7. "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux" debate slightly less violent than "Israel" vs. "Palestine" conflict.
6. I'll take "The Free Software Song" over "Yerushalaim Shel Zahav" any day of the week.
5. There are no penguins in Jerusalem.
4. If you go on a Beer Hike in a remote area of Israel, you might get shot.
3. Ten Commandments aren't GPLed.
2. Jolt and Ramen noodles are cheaper than falafel.
And the number one reason why Open Source is better than Jerusalem:
1. Two words: Bruce Perens.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
All of these apps and architectures can be classified as OSS. And to claim Mozilla as a failure is disingenuous at best since it was crippled for the first year or so of its existence by its dependence on non-free libraries.
Damn. You know you're responding to a troll when you get to the end of a reply and you've just quoted all the facts and figures at the Open Source website for the fiftieth time.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
It's much older than that too. Basically as soon as standardized computers came out, there was software written and exchanged between users of the new systems. Field Service engineers were often the way that programs were exchanged, as they tended to visit all the sites which had that particular system.
Background: I'm a middle aged CTO of a small software company. A year and a half ago we open sourced (BSD license) some of our core components, partly because we thought we might get some more exposure that way, and partly because we use a lot of open source stuff and it felt like time to give some back.
Recently I needed a basic component. I could get it, but it was proprietary, so we couldn't distribute it with the open source stuff we'd already put out. So I developed it from the start as an open source component, and already I've had patches contributed by half a dozen different people who are using it and finding it useful. By making it open, by inviting collaboration, I've had a lot of the work done for me.
And what that made me think about was artificial scarcity.
During the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat. During the Ethiopian famine in the Eighties, Ethiopia was exporting water melons to Europe - you could by them in the supermarkets. Food was not scarce, people just couldn't afford to buy it. The scarcity wasn't real. It was artificial scarcity created by 'market economics'. What's this got to do with software? Hang on...
Glaxo (and other pharmacutical companies) are trying to prevent the South African government from allowing cheaper, 'generic', anti-AIDS drugs. 10% of the population of South Africa is HIV positive. In other African states the figures are worse. Over one hundred million africans have HIV or AIDS. They don't have drugs to ease their suffering, because they can't afford them. But the drugs are cheap to make. They're only expensive to buy because the industry is using its patents to create an artificial scarcity. A hundred million people are suffering and dying to enhance the profits of the drug companies. What has this to do with software? Hang on...
Classical economic theory says that the price of a good varies inversely with it's scarcity. Goods which are extremely rare - like caviar, or diamonds - are expensive. Goods which are extremely abundant - like farmed salmon, or sand - are cheap. But digital information goods - computer programs, or digital recordings of music or movies - cost nothing to reproduce. Inherently, they are infinitely abundant.
I can make one copy of Apache for every person on the planet, and it costs (almost) nothing.
I can make one copy of Microsoft Office for every person on the planet, and the copying costs (almost) nothing.
The natural price of software goods, according to classical economics, is near zero.
Just now, people pay a lot of money for a copy of Microsoft Office. Microsoft are able to charge that money because of artificial scarcity, just like Glaxo can charge for their AIDS drugs. But Microsoft can't sell IIS for lots of money, because there isn't artificial scaricty in high-quality Web servers.
As projects like KOffice get better, so there won't be artificial scarcity in quality office software, and Microsoft won't be able to charge so much.
There are real costs in developing software, but the generosity of a community acting together can absorb the costs, and publich the source code for free. Similarly there are real (and larger) costs in developing new drugs. But the principles of common community action and common generosity can, taken over the community with an interest in the cure of diseases, absorb those costs too.
Open Source does not only have to apply to software. It can apply to every product where commercial interests try to create artificial scarcities by controlling access to information. The next revolution may well be open source medicines. Chemists, clinicians and health administrators could collaborate over the net to develop new medicines which anyone could make for no more than the cost of the ingredients.
The point is that many - perhaps most - people are creative. We like to see the things we create being used to help other people. No one individual can afford the time to invent a cure for cancer, any more than any one person can afford the time to create a new operating system. But the net allows people to collaborate and contribute the quanta of time, energy and talent that they can afford to give, and now we've got a free operating system.
Software is an almost pure case of the sorts of things that can be developed by co-operative generosity. It costs relatively little to acquire the tools to co-operate in a software development project. It costs a little more to get into co-operative development of hardware, or medicines, or some kinds of engineering, and so these things will follow more slowly. But the example has been given, and I'm convinced these things will be given.
Taken together, open collaborative projects in different economic areas will inevitably challenge the morality under which it is ethically acceptable to create artificial scarcities which cause suffering. The world will change as a result of what we, as hackers, are doing now, and it will change for the better. We are talking about a revolution here.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The situations you mention aren't addressed by your concept of what you call "classical economics" but is really just uninformed clap-trap.
The scarce resource in Ethiopia was generally food transportation and storage, as well as a generally messed up economic structure caused by Soviet-influenced (i.e. totally wrong-headed) economic and political policies. If you can't get the food *delivered* to the hungry people, they still starve, no matter how scarce or abundant your food is.
The "scarcity" in drug research is the research ability and clinical resources used to develop the drugs, not the raw materials or the manufacturing capacity. Sure, an Indian company can produce a knock-off of a developed drug and sell it cheap, just like anyone like Cheapbytes or a Hong Kong pirate can copy a Windows or Linux CD or a Britney Spears CD. But are you going to wait for that Indian company to develop an AIDS vaccine? Hope you're ready to wait a long time, because it's not going to happen. An AIDS vaccine, if it can be developed, is going to be developed in the First World, using highly trained medical researchers. They don't come cheap, because they really are scarce.
Think for a moment about what really pays your salary, Mr. CTO. Somebody pays you money for something that you have that the average lower-paid person (e.g., the person who washes your office windows) doesn't. Or, they made a mistake. Is your talent "artificially" scarce?
1) The last book of the Bible is "Revelation" not "Revelations".
2) In the necessary endeavor of speculation into matters concern the Divine, there is a fine line between the profound and profane . Congratulations for positing a theory that manages to be neither while pretending to be both.
3) If you believed that the Bible is absolute, living breathing word of God, the idea of trivializing it in the manner that you have would cause you great personal distress. If you don't believe that the Bible is the absolute, living breathing word of God, what is the point of co-opting its false revelatory promises for explaining the Open Source movement? Oh- I know! You're just contributing your postmodern part to the Great Symbol Drain that Neil Postman warned about....(do a find on "great symbol drain" at the link above for more info...)
4) For those with a genuine interest in understanding the importance of the promise of the New Jerusalem to Christians, do yourself the favor of reading the following substantive study...
5) Jon, the Katz bashing is so de rigueur on slashdot that it saddens me. If ThinkGeek rolled out a "Reduce Internet Pollution- Banish Jon Katz from it" t-shirt, they'd probably make a fortune. I don't believe people always give you a fair shake and believe it is morally wrong to bash you. But sometimes, it seems like you're just begging people to do it. Help those of us who want to see the bashing reduced by not reinforcing the stereotype bandied about here. In short, don't post tripe!
I'm Audi 5000. Peace.
Jon, please.
The Internet, like any new technology, has new & unexpected applications. "Open Source" or "Free Software" is one of them.
But the Internet is not a "revolution". Merely the logical evolution of existing technology: computers and telecommunications.
"Open Source" or "Free Software" is not a "revolution", merely the logical evolution of existing technology: BSD/GNU, UNIX and dozens of years in compiler and operating systems design.
These two evolutions are not going to change the world: they are merely going to percolate down within the different world societies which can afford these technologies.
Technologies are not revolutions and, in and out of themselves, they are not going to change the world.
On the other hand, the people who use these technologies to communicate and exchange ideas may create revolutions... but, by definition, revolutions are sudden and quite unpredictable. They come from the bottom before creating their own hierarchies and elites. This is why I believe talking about an Internet "revolution" is complete nonsense.
In a way, we ain't seen nothing yet... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Katz's pathetic social commentary is more suited for a Joan Beaz record.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Its great that there are driven and enthusiastic people but their drive must be tempered "wisdom".
Open Source is probably the most important and powerful movement in technology since Microsoft came out with Windows 3.0. It makes the might Microsoft quake. It makes the giants like IBM move. Even with all of this power I make no illusions: it isn't a silver bullet that will solve all of the world's computational problems. Not yet anyway.
Its the difference between good and bad advocation. Its one thing to point out to as many people you can that Linux is cooler and better technology than Windows. Its something else to try and ram it down people's throat because you believe it is.
So lets promote but not crush. Otherwise you've just forced software onto people that makes them confused and uncomfortable.
Amen brother. I'm growing tired of the Microsoft defenders that point to it as being good enough, better, or all you need. I want choice, and yes sometimes that choice can be Microsoft, but if they are the only choice, you won't even know what you are missing.
Open source software has been somewhat like a religion in that it is opening the eyes of people to different methods of doing things ("I was blind but now I see"). This is not bad, the grousing by Microsoft supporters is mostly just because the ease of their choice is being removed, you have to make decisions based on merit, cost etc. and not just based on that being the only thing you can get.
Having choices is a liberating thing.
A thing that is being teared apart by three or four more or less extremist religious movements and that explodes as soon as you prod it? A thing that people go to for the clensing of their souls, only to return unchanged, only a bit more tanned? A thing that people/fractions will fight over for millennia just to get to say "we saw it first"? Nah.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
Last of a series.. ah what sweet words.
Hackers at MIT were using "Open Source" software long before the internet. They would post up source code, and leave their paper tapes in the drawers for anyone to copy or update as they saw fit.
Hardware Hackers at Homebrew meetings freely exchanged hardware designs and information, as well as neat hacks for the new machines among each other. GNU was started in the early 80's, before the Internet became commercialised.
What the Internet has done, however, is to increase the speed and audience that Open Source code can reach. Instead of paper tapes in drawers hackers post their source to an FTP or CVS site. The ideals and ethics of Open Source software have been spread much farther than a small room in MIT or Berkeley. The Internet didn't start this though.
If anything, hackers had their Utopia long before the corporations took control. There were hackers in the world before there were software companies. All the companies did was to see a market, and sell to people who in many cases, had little knowledge of computers. Open Source and hackers carried on just as they had before.
So are we on our way to a New Jeresulam? Nah, we were already there Jon, it's just that people have only just begun to realise it.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Don't be so quick to start a fight. Its simply an anology... political correctness is for the weak.
It was just something that made sense to the author... if it offends you, do you want to censor it??? Maybe your browser should indicate your religious preference so you aren't offended.
.plan!! what plan?
After hanging out in this dimension for 62 years, I've been led inexorably to the conclusion that any society based on greed and arrogance is doomed to fail. Open Source is one of the few bright spots. I find it very reassuring that folks I have never met, nor likely ever will, generously share the fruits of their intellect and labour with me. I suspect that this is the essence of the Christian 'New Jerusalem'. Sharing. As for Open Source being revolutionary... may I suggest that it is part of an ongoing revolutionary struggle that has been happening since man has been able to communicate with the other members of his species. There has always been a core of folks struggling for freedom. Open source is part of that struggle. Unfortunately, revolutions are generally co-opted by the very people they were designed to displace. You only have to look at the French Revolution, the Russian, American, Chinese, Filipino, the list is long, to see that this is true... and you only have to look at our small segment of the larger picture to see the dangers. It is vitally important that we defend the GPL against all attempts to co-opt it. And you may be sure that the mega-corporations are trying. One can only hope they will die in the attempt. Finally, it would seem that folks think of revolutions in terms of blood and the struggle of armies. Ours is not. It is a rediscovery of a beneficial mind set... the belief that sharing is the only way to ensure the survival of our species. The Net and Open Source have done more to transcend national borders than any other technology in our history. Unfortunately, but inevitably, it has been under attack by transnational corporations who have attempted and are attempting still to co-opt and corrupt it. The good news is that they have pissed their pants so far in the attempt. I must say that I'm a little disappointed in the attacks on Mr. Katz by ./ participants. His piece may be a little euphoric but hardly deserving of the vituperous rhetoric it seems to have attracted. Perhaps we, the participants in Open Source, are a little embarrassed by praise. I hope so. Then again, perhaps Mr. Katz's detractors are simply corporate shills. Bear up, Mr. Katz. The light at the end of the tunnel, although distant yet, is not an approaching train.
...the state of this revolution, the Net Revolution, can't ultimately be judged by ... the hysterical judgments of the popular media, by the revenue it generates, by the narrow perspectives of techo-elites who created it, or the people who misuse, abuse or exploit it.
So since you fit into all these categories, you're the worst person to judge how it's going?
The hackers brought joy, freedom, exploration and enterprise back to work...
I've always enjoyed my work - I work in embedded software engineering, which is what I've always wanted to do. There's enough software jobs that anyone who is really keen on it doesn't have to take a job in McD's instead - only if they want to. And if you choose to take a dead-end job instead of doing what you really enjoy, that's your choice! If you can't live with the choices you've made, don't expect too much sympathy.
Open Source and it's offspring, open media and an open society...They're both intensely political...
Where did these come from? "Open media"? What's that? And how do you get a more open society from hackers writing C code? Sorry, this is pure hype. In addition open-source is completely apolitical. From the user side it doesn't care about your convictions or your use for it, it merely provides a known-good base structure. From the programmer side, it's all about fun, as you say later, and doing something bcos you enjoy doing it, and sharing that interest with other ppl, is completely natural to everyone. Politics doesn't come into it.
Proprietary instititions, from education to media, will have no choice but to open up the processes by which they operate.
Let me know when it happens. Most of the options I can see for proprietary institutions involve staying profitable, and opening up to anyone who comes along, for free, can be summed up as "killing your profit stream".
Grab.
Not necessarily. Some certainly do have that problem - Burkina Faso would be a good example. These are the worst hit of all.
But most have the capacity to feed their populations, but either: (a) piss it away on pretending to be a super-power, eg. Russia; (b) piss it away in civil wars and border disputes, eg. Ethiopia; or (c) piss it away in government back-handers and slush-funds for politicians, eg. too many to mention. Or there's a fourth category, achieved by the USSR - piss it away by chronic mismanagement.
Most could be solved by the government of the countries concerned, but human nature says it won't be. And it's these places where you really feel sorry for the ppl - they could be living quite comfortably, but instead they're just getting screwed over by the tribal/army/religious/political leaders.
Grab.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Just let me choose what I want, what I want to do, what I want in a software package. I don't give a darn what the ethos is or what the theology is for a software package. I want the best package for the best (not necessarily least) price I can get. I do NOT want stuck with one company (read microsoft) products because they are the only fish in the pond and they squash all competition one way or another.
Open source is another type of competitor. It's better in that MS cannot buy up the IP rights and then jack up the price or kill the project just because it competes with one of their packages. They have to actually play by the best software wins rules and they are not doing a hell of a job of that.
One way or another, let me choose, don't force the choice no matter which side of the house you're on.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Katz keeps talking about how the Net made open source inevitable. I don't agree with that view and would argue that Katz doesn't know his Internet history very well. The Inernet in its earliest history was a research network setup to facilitate communication between national laboratories and universities. The culture of the participating institutions has colored the Internet to this day. The world of academia and espeically science relies on open communication to function. Consequently, one would expect this to become cultural value in the world of the Internet. Then there are the indiviuals who built the system. A lot of these guys came of age as technically educated adults during the sixties. They transmitted their values into the new world they were creating. Already we can see that Net was a reflection of its builders. Then there are very real technological decisions that shaped the Ineternet. Back when this whole enterprise was called the Arpanet, it was controled from the top on down. There was a small body of people making design decisions. They could have done the logical thing and gone with the vendor that had the best stuff for the cheapest, but they didn't. Instead, they decided on a software solution that would work with what was already installed in all the various institutions. They went one step further with the solution. Driven by hardware and OS incoimpatiblities, they developed a set of standards that defined how data would be communicated between machines. The implmentation was left up to individual members. This set of standards is what we call TCP/IP.
The standards were developed democratically through a series of commitees populated by engineers. There's a good treatment of this in David Comer's TCP/IP series of books, and another one in The Simple Book. Their outlook was epitomized by the statement "We reject kings and presidents! We run on rough consensus and working code!". I forget who uttered that, but it tells a lot about the people working on what we would come to call the Ineternet.
The point of this whole diatribe is to point out that the Internet didn't have to be that way. The Internet was designed to be open by people who held those values close to their hearts. The existence of an open set of communication protocols was an invitation to students and professional developers alike to develop implementations that suited their particular needs. As long as it adhered to the protocol, any implementation would work. And, remember until fairly recently, the only people on the net were employed in academia. The culture of academia is one of openess and co-operation--or at least it used to be--and software was freely distributed to colleagues and collaborators. This is where the open source movement came from.
Thinngs didn't have to be that way. If, say, DEC, got the contract to develop the Arpanet, they wouldn't have given a darn about openess and interoperablity: They had their own functioning protocol, DECNet, and they could have locked everyone into using their implementation if not their hardware. Instead,the Arpanet was developed by university academics. While the Internet has gone through many different incanarions, DARPANet, ARPANet, NSFNet, and so on, throughout most its history the Internet has been academia's private reserve. Things have opened up now, and while one might expect to lead to still more openess, the Net has been subjected to the values a larger world, and those values do not necessarily include open and free communication.
Another poster back up correctly pointed out that open source did not begin with the Internet. Yep, he's most definitely right. However, the openess of the Internet and the freedom of open systems fed off one and other. Infact, I would argue that the neither would have been possible today without the other. Opensource and the Internet have a very symbiotics relationship.
I'd say it represents a significant "embrace of practical reality" from the Open Source community. Even RMS would accept mozilla as "better than nothing".
You should not begrudge those software developers choose to give freely and wholly unto all. Neither should you be surprised that some recepients who have partaken of free software tend to prefer it. What would a movemant be if nobody really beleived in it?
Plus you will find that 99% of free OS users are wholly pragmatic.
I'm pissed my little off-the-cuff ideological run got nil moderation. For somethine that looks that decent (lemme get your opinion), I wish I could've gotten a bit of karma!!
Secondly, this article talks about a 'New Jerusalem'. I can't think of another word or name (besides God, itself) which is so inherently religiously charged. I mean, the city was founded by the Hebrews as their capital and was the home of the Temple of Solomon and the Ark of the Covenant's resting place.
Christianity adopted the city by having the titular founder Emmanuel (aka Jesus Christ) die there and resurrect a couple of clicks away in a private tomb.
And the Muslims, who thought (and, one can argue, still think) that a) they were the rightful heir of Abraham and b) converting the Jews would be easy and to their advantage, adopted aspects of the Judaic religion (eg. the ban on pork and certain alcoholic beverages) and Judaic holy sights, namely the Temple Mount.
That makes up, oh.. about a THIRD OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION. Maybe more.
That means that, to no less than every third person you talk to, Jerusalem has a religious significance.
My particular rant was based upon a more reasonable assumption than the troller that started the thread: that neither side was necessarily Good v. Evil (hell, I'm working on a script based around a more realistic set of spectra of gender, sexuality, politics, and morality. Talk about a mind f~(k.) , and that the current scenario in the Middle East wasn't a good analogy.
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Just picking one example at random from an article littered with them:
what Hannah Arendt called the "authoritarian" logic of bureaucratic systems. (In our time, she might have added the monopolistic logic of "corporatist" systems as well.)
Hannah Arendt would not, because, having read Weber in her lifetime, she knew that corporate bureaucracies have the same internal dynamics as state bureaucracies. That's why the word is the same. Hannah Arendt also knew a lot about the various theories of bureaucracy, how they worked, what their characteristic behaviours were, which is why she would (and I do not mean this as an insult) have written a far better article on this subject than you have.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
JonKatz says the Web is safe 'from corporate and political domination'
Dangerous words.
There were those of us in the past that put our faith in an already achieved victory: the ST community thought the Falcon 060 could bring it back to the fore; the Amigans thought the A1200, CD32 et al. was destined to save their preferred format. It was not so - the pathetic PC won out(even though I own a PC it ires me still 8).
There are forces greater than any one hacker, programmer and/or local user group. They aren't mystical or magical(well, maybe a little bit, in an evil way 8). They are the corporations and political powers who daily try and wrench back control of things from the open source community, the personal web page owners et al - which are all very much connected and interlinked. If it weren't for the concentration of the true hacker spirit in continental Europe, the money of liberal Americans and a good deal of serendipity, the whole thing would have turned to crap a good many years ago.
The greatest danger that now exists is that we rest on our laurels, we say well done, congratulate ourselves and let our guard down. Not to paraphrase Robespierre, but JonKatz is betraying the very revolution he's trying to commend. We call that counter-revolutionary where I come from(yes, Ireland).
Just as a side note on the imagery used - the whole mixture of movements shouldn't be categorised as a religion, in my opinion. It is not. If anything this is war, insurgency...an uprising even.
Face the future, but always guard your back.
8)
Concrete analysis...
It is the classic unmentioned assumption of most Utopias, that all would be well if we do not have to deal with these folks, or if there are no undesirables around.
Look at the world around you, and see how many fall into the category of "undesirables". Take an inventory. If it crawls much above single diget percentage points, then there is a problem.
When you include these "folks" (spammers, lusers, etc), it certainly meets illustrates the problem of the commons as seen in classic games theory.
Now saying this will upset some folks. It will upset those well in touch with "their inner troll".
It will hold up a mirror that we each have to look into long and hard. If you do not like what you see in the mirror, is the solution to break it?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm not sure the marketplace is the correct measurement for the success of opensource. It is not a traditional product. Who cares if only 2.5% (according to my web logs) of systems use it? (That's still millions of users anyway). To me, opensource is successful because:
- it gives me a choice of tools to use: without OSS (Linux and FreeBSD in particular) my choice would be between a couple of Microsoft operating systems. But now I (and everyone else) can choose to run the right tool for the right job. Even if all that OSS does is to force MS to pull out all the stops to compete and make a better product, it's benefitted everyone.
- I don't judge Mozilla a failure. Sure, it's usage is not as widespread as MSIE (and MSIE is a good browser), but Mozilla works well (certainly on my system at home at least) and helps to give me that choice of tools I (or anyone) can use.
- The point is that Linux and FreeBSD are here to stay. They aren't going to suddenly go away because of the whims or failures of a company: that's the important difference with an established piece of OSS.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The metaphor carries well into understanding the future of Open Source. Within a few decades of his death, the movement of people who believed in Jesus's 'Open Source for the Soul' ie: a much freer way of interpreting religious rituals & traditions was swarmed with fakers and poseurs, people who were eager to call themselves popes and bishops and use the foundation of freedom to shackle their sheep.
You can expect the same thing to happen with the Open Source movement, although faster because we got fax machines, BBSs, and e-mails. Yes, it is pure and beautiful now, re-interpreting all previous proprietary-information-dissemination-techniques. But it will increasingly be swarmed with people using it for their own selfish ends. Human nature.
Human nature, and the fact that the United States still has a strong Christian ethos driving it: for example, the apocalyptic end-of-the-world nature of the Book of Revelations played a big role in the Y2K scare of only a coupla years ago.
These factors must be considered when you look at whether Open Source is what it says it is, and whether it will still be the same in ten years.
The funny thing is, most programmers/hackers have a Tolkien/Star Wars/and even specifically nonChristian kind of mythology driving their personal end-time worldview, but the generalizations I just made still hold. Why is this funny? Because people who are adamantly nonChristian now PRECISELY BECAUSE of the thick hypocrisies laden in this religion, don't see the parallel that in 50 years, Open Source will be laden with hypocrisies, too, and people will think of it in cynical, jaded terms.
In those days, there will be a few stalwarts who hold to it fiercely, just like there are some fundamentalists now in the Bible Belt, who ain't gonna let you tell them that Jesus ain't God.
Hope you see my point and don't respond to the trollware woven throughout. This is a conversation about Open Source and New Jerusalem, and I think it's a valid question. Well framed by John Katz.
information is immaterial
I am a fan of Open Source, in part because of its generous nature (as the article suggests), and in part because it allows peer review and dissemination of ideas.
However, it bears pointing out that revolutions normally corrupt themselves by insisting on a certain dogmatism, rather than embracing practical reality. In the open source literature one sees very little consideration or mention of ideas such as hybrid open source, in which the source code is revealed but the owner still retains some IP control over its use. In fact such an idea is considered heretical by many open-source practitioners, who view anything other than GPL as counter-revolutionary.
Is there any room in the open-source community for licenses that are more friendly to business? I think there are.
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