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Unusual Open Source
Dumitru Erhan writes "The Economist has a special report on open-source. It analyzes the way open-source projects succeed and finds that a rigid, business-like organizational structure is of vital importance to the quality of the final product. It cites Firefox, MySQL and (more recently) Wikipedia as examples of projects that do not simply allow anarchy to rein in, but which have 'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'. There is also a discussion of open-source methods being applied to non-software projects." From the article: "Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality. This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule."
Isn't that how people get elected?
Oh, I see what he means now.
Sometime in the late 1990s Forbes wrote a similiar article about GNU. You can imagine their conclusions.
Wikipedia is what it is today because of the large amount of people who care about it enough to fix vandalism. Not necessarily because of a centralized leadership.
Open source is successful because of the large number of people who have an interst in its success. Centralizing leadership might be helpful in some way, but I don't see it as the most important thing.
Of course projects with strict organisation do well. It isn't very easy to finish making something when you have developers leaving without notice for extended periods of time. Nor does it work to have 1/3 of the development staff having no clue as to what they're supposed to be doing at the time.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
>> "His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule."
Perhaps they will just have to wait and see...
Lack of imagination is not a convincing argument. I'd actually like to hear a convincing argument as to what, precisely, invariably prevents such a success.
PJ over at Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/ has this story.
The reporter interviewed her. She has his questions and her answers. He obviouly ignored what she told him and printed a story full of factual innacuracies.
This is bad, bad reporting. Do I still trust the Economist? Not much.
Regardless of the resier4 and other fiascos, does the kernel not serve as an example of a sound organizational structure? Linus is kinda relevant to Linux, I contend.
"It cites Firefox, MySQL and (more recently) Wikipedia as examples of projects that do not simply allow anarchy to rein in..."
As an anarchist geek, let me point out that this is a wrong use of the word "anarchy." Anarchism is a political philosophy that is FOR organization. Many people have described Wikipedia as an example of "anarchism in action" and they aren't misusing the word instead of using "chaos." The free software/open source (FOSS) movement is another example of anarchism in action and includes many actual anarchists working on various projects.
Find out more about anarchism at http://www.infoshop.org/ (where half of the visitors are using Firefox and other open source browsers)
Why is it a surprise that a business should be run any differently just because they are focused on open source, or open source centric?
Of course you have to stick to a rigid business-like organizational structure.
The BSDs have more rigid professionalism than the typical Linux project. I don't know why this is, but there is a focus on correctness over features.
Yet again, the PR-excellence of the Linux crowd wins. Even though, for instance, Yahoo!, a company that hosts a huge number of sites (and stores), uses FreeBSD.
That's OK with me -- it is a secret weapon.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
*Your actual mileage may vary.
Good advertisement for your mag mates.
... pulled ... in that there is a need for them... Traditional software is ... pushed ... in that there's a need for profit.
You see, one thing economists (and many, many others) get wrong time and time again, is self organisation... They just don't get it for some reason. The "bazaar" encourages, promotes lots of projects, lots of errors, lots of iterations, lots of dead projects and we get emergent behaviour out of that environment. These are projects which are strong, robust and evolutionary in that they will fill all of the niches in which they are needed. These projects are
Deleted
It's strange that the findings turn out this way, because to judge by Eric S. Raymond's presentation of the open source idea in his influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar one gets the idea that hierarchies and control are bad and that anarchy is the most fruitful situation. Certainly the most well-known example of open-source, Mozilla, only got tied up for years due to its exclusivist design system.
So, if you define sucess as having a big reachable community, the sucessfull projects will have someone able to tell you the name of every developer. If you define sucess as being used by corporations, the sucessfull projects look like corporation projects.
Now, we could get the first page with some more truisms, or we could forget about generalising this idea of "sucess" to an area where there is simply no metric to be used.
Rethinking email
If the guy was so offended, why didn't he just edit the Wikipedia entry to fix the mistakes?
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
This is just something they write, so that they can feel good about themselves, but still support Open Source.
This is entirely a matter of what clothes people wear, what syllables are chosen for words, with nothing substantial behind it.
Open Source is still what Open Source has always been, with all it's variety, with all of it's jumble.
Wikipedia is not, in the traditional style, open source. With open source projects, there is still a central leader or small team of developers vetting contributions. With Wikipedia there are no such checks, with content being controlled by those who edit and revert fastest and those who can sneak malicious contributions into obscure places. There is also no-one handling the overall quality of any individual entry, thus the horrible prevalent writing style.
Liking Wikipedia to Linux is a huge error. The quality issue is extremely relevant.
I used to write a lot for wikipedia. If somebody didn't like what I wrote, they would edit it, and they'd either offer an alternative writeup or they'd start a discussion on the talk page where they'd state what they thought was wrong with the article. Either of these tactics let me refine my text into something that person would find more fitting for wikipedia, and usually this process worked great because honestly I'm not a great author.
Now I've stopped, because the vigilantes who claim to be working to fight vandalism invariably just revert any changes they disagree with or dislike without making any useful criticism or alternative input whatsoever (typically, "thank you for experimenting with wikipedia, your changes have been reverted, next time use the sandbox for your tests").
The people who used to vandalize, now they just sign up as anti-vandalism vigilantes, and delete the efforts of others. It's too annoying to deal with when I've got a life already.
I predict that soon there will be a brisk business in selling wikipedia monitoring and modification - if you're a crooked politician, you pay off a wiki vigilante to make sure your entry stays slanted towards whatever you want to portray.
Wikipedia, I wish you all the best, and all the success in the world. But your swarms of vigilantes may bring you down just as fast as the vandals they were created to combat.
It's obvious that an entry created and commented on by many disinterested people is less biased than an entry created and commented on by few. Traditional encylopedias fall in the latter category, Wikipedia falls in the former. But people are not always disinterested, and that's where the problems lie. So the real problem is: are all the participants disinterested? With traditional encylopedias, the chances are that most writers are semi-disinterested observers, as they are ordered to write about subjects, they don't select them themselves. With Wikipedia, people self-select themselves, which means they cannot be disinterested, by definition. And that's the reason that some kind of community control is required for projects like this.
As a word geek, let me point out that the original author apparently confused the word "reign" with the phrase "rein in". But at least it was kind of spelled right...
Independing programmers and Open Source advocates discover that organization leads to increased productivity. Shouldn't this have been a gigantic no-brainer from the start? That organizing a software project - or ANY project as others seem to have suddenly discovered - might make it work out better in the end?
'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.
Any task envisioning an end product could be said to require the characteristics mentioned above. What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist'(although I believe its always been seen as left leaning) is making an effort to wrap its mind around Open Source and in doing so allowing its readers to follow suit.
Over the last year plus I've noticed more articles that tend to view Open Source projects as akin to 'hardnosed' business methods. I think they represent the establishment coming to a positive consensus about Open Source methods and projects.
I noticed a turn in the way the general business community reported and interacted with Open Source from about the time IBM ran the ads picturing Linux as a small, blonde haired, blue eyed wonderkid.
The old boy network isn't about to let Open Source join the club but they're certainly ready to let it in the service entrance.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Depends on the quality of the mob.
"For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property."
Then later, "With software, for instance, the code is written chiefly not by volunteers, but by employees sponsored for their efforts by companies that think they will in some way benefit from the project."
Jesus. There must be a host of FOSS projects which were highly successful, but never involved with a company or corporate sponsorship.
Does the Linux kernel itself fall under that category? At least for most of its history? And in fact is it the same thing to say that some "volunteers" are paid to do their work, and that therefore this is an indication of FOSS having to adopt "cathedral" management styles in order for its projects to succeed?
What about all the FOSS network tools, Snort, Nmap, and the like? Were those all sponsored by corporate interests?
Is it anything more than a red herring to say that FOSS software-production leaders actually must be able to manage?
Any Project whether it's open source or commercial needs this to succeed. Open source is more than a development model. It's a software licensing model. As a result it's also a software as service model. The main difference between commercial and open source is the openness of the code and tendency to the service side rather than shrinkwrapped.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
Are there good open source projects that buck this trend, that disprove the thesis of this article?
This is the crowd that would know.
Or in the alternative, is "strong central leadership" so inherent to all human endeavors that the thesis is a meaningless tautology?
The economist frequently mistakes responsibillity for discipline and constraint for authoratarian policing. Every project needs constraints. If I were to sit down and write a song without constraining by some mood and some form of theory it would sound like shit and no one would listen to it. Open source provides the right constraints in order to have an end product that's not a phillip glass or john cage composition. The fact is, corporate environments OVER police. Corporate policing gave us brittany spears and matchbox20.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
It is unfortunate that the term anarchy has a dual meaning - the most common being "disorder". A more historical meaning is that of "without authority", which seems to be what open source is all about - nobody telling anybody else what to do.
Open source projects are the model of anarchist principles - people getting together, contributing when they want to, and promoting the common good. Even Wikipedia knows that.
Mob rule has it's problems, but I'll take it over plutocratic aristocracy any day of the week.
Should we give FEMA to be run by the staff of the Economist then ? They seem qualified enough !
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
From TFA:
"The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of "The Success of Open Source" (Harvard University Press, 2004). "Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply--but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge," he says."
This guy makes a great point. BSD, for example, came up with many of the features that are found in Linux. And wikipedia? An encyclopedia that simply compiles already-known knowledge? Give me a break!
Innovation has clearly reached its limit in open source.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I don't know if this is quite far enough removed from open source software, but the Open Graphics Project is applying OSS ideas to all sorts of things. It would seem to apply well to HDL for chips, but they've also released their PCB schematics under a GPL license.
The scourge of OSS.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Yes, well said. However, it's worth pointing out that lots of free software is developed with good practices. Probably more free software developers use version control systems and bug ticketing than proprietary development processes. It's well established I think, that Free Software code is more conscientiously checked and validated before being submitted and committed to the mainline code base. Moreover, we have free tools available for all sorts of things, like code testing, vulnerability discovery, etc., along with lots of documentation and discussion about how that is useful, and how to actually use it.
...it doesn't mean what you think.
PJ and her followers do not take even mild criticism of open source well at all.
"Innovation has clearly reached its limit in open source."
Now you know how OSS is going to make it's money.
This is giving way too much credit to SCO's claims. I don't think it was ever proved that a single line owned by SCO was found in Linux. As I recall they were basing their claims on free lines of BSD which were added to both SCO and Linux.
And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries
This is simply wrong. Anonymous users can and always have been able to edit existing articles.
Well, this article is still pretty decent but I expect better from The Economist.
The role of software decentralisation in the linux revolution is unfortunately too little appreciated. . . Most people are still in the thraldom of the Open Source dogma that centralisation is 'more efficient and economical.' They close their eyes to the fact that the alleged 'economy' is achieved at the cost of the developers' limb and life, that the 'efficiency' degrades him to a mere development cog, deadens his soul, kills his body. Furthermore, in a system of centralisation the administration of software development becomes constantly merged in fewer hands, producing a powerful bureaucracy of software overlords. It would indeed be the sheerest irony if the revolution were to aim at such a result. It would mean the creation of a new master class.
I used their site search feature and this is what it came up with.
"Search did not return any results for Groklaw, please try again with a different term. "
How can it expect to be influential.
Well, he doesn't have to. He could leave it as is; but that's not the point.
And yeah, if he did and another kept reverting his changes, he could throw up one of those controversial boxen thingies. I don't see the problem here.
http://pixelcort.com/
Firefox is the end result of a bunch of irrationally exuberant hackers sinking years into realizing that the Netscape 4 source was atrociously bad and trying to use it was a waste of time. I use it because everything else sucks more.
MySQL is a bunch of shockingly ignorant and sloppy hackers slowly realizing there's a reason other databases chose to give right answers rather than faster answers. I don't use it because everything else sucks less.
This is what they think successful projects look like?
...are examples of "mob rule". The only variances are which mob is doing what ruling. Even single named individual autocratic leadership organizations, from a nation to a ..kernel,say, are still examples of "mob rule" as ultimate dictates still need to be carried out by a *willing* mob. So called "democratic" organizations-mob rule. A private corporation? Mob rule. Representative republic? Mob rule.
About the only thing that isn't, is a project that is totally conceived, implemented and deployed by a single human. Everything else is an example of a mob, although no one wants to admit they are in a mob, it has a negative connotation and only ever applies to "the other guys" and their "mob".
Not a big point, but helpful in cutting through propoganda and media spin and manipulation.
I lika proffessional a bit more and best thing it's freee!!!!!
I'm sticking to GPL projects because I don't know about other ones as well. This is not meant to diss the BSD crowd.
Okay, but I also think that cataloging open source projects is kind of fruitless, since there are so many. The internet connects people with common interests. They develop projects. Some are more open than others. Still, if the project gets too rigidly hierarchical, someone will fork the code and head off in a different direction. Example: the different flavors of BSD.
How do we know it can only be explained in terms of human experience? Please state some facts to back up your assumption.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I have a paper that challenges these notions being published in the upcoming (Summer 2006) edition of Organization Development Journal called, "THE PENGUINIST DISCOURSE: A critical application of open source software project management
to organization development"
While I can't make the paper available online just yet, the abstract reads as follows: For those with in-house OD folks, you may want to alert them to the next edition of the journal. (I also do strategy and OD facilitation and interventions on a contract basis; you can track me down via my profile.)
Isn't this too how the "invisible hand" of Adams is supposed to work? Groups of people making individual contributions and decisions and creating an optimal solution?
Really, I have come to the opinion that most people are afraid of true freedom, but would rather look for direction from centralized control such as religion, corporations, a religous belief in certain Economic dogma (the free market, the inevibility of communism, capitalism etc.) or the government.
The article also seems to equate commercial success with true success. But the two do not equate. For example, no one is making any money directly on the tcp/ip stack, though it is used almost everywhere for commercial and non commmercial work. The same is true of C, HTTP, the aqualung (realeased to public domain by Jauqes Cousteau) and a host of other technologies.
In contrast, proprietary software would be a failure because it does not stand the test of time, e.g., every few years the old version becomes obsolete and dies out, as opposed to open source which continues living and growing.
Centralized control is not the answer, a self policing community may be the best answer available.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That guy didn't know what he was talking about! Mob rule, well... RULES!!! ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
From the article:
... Don't they know that it is much more expensive to use high quality software one can download for free than it is to use poorly designed software that you pay for? ;-)
"... open-source software--products that are often built by volunteers and cost nothing to use."
Apparently they haven't read the many Microsoft funded TCO analysis papers
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Working markets require an educated public.
I bet most people have no idea how their health is effected by industrialized runoff created by the products they use every day. The 3M plant here is one of the worst environmental offenders - and yet I bet asthma suffers don't think twice about buying that roll of tape...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
So The Economist is just trying to teach those poor Open Source programmers The Right Way (tm) of developing software. This article is wrong in so many ways. But others like Groklaw have pointed plenty of them.
I just want to make a point that I always miss in this kind of discussion. There is a wildly sucessful, innovative, world changing collaboration effort that works in the same principles of open source that is never mentioned: science.
Scientists build on top of each other's work. They publish data, theories and results for other scientists to use freely. They form a meritocracy that measures success by how much their work is used by others.
By contrast, propietary software is alchemy, magic. They will only do their trick if you pay them, and never ever tell you how it is done.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And then, they forget that they ever anything but your best friends.
His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule.
Like... democratic governments? o.O
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Letting the lunatics take over the asylum is not "businesslike."
Nothing you wrote was accurate. She didn't say any of what you
just wrote. For one small example, she said she was inspired by
Scott McCloud's work, always wanted to try it, and so she loved
the book Bound by Law.
As for Linus, she said his method of organizing influenced her.
All the rest is just the same anti-PJ stuff I believe SCO and MS have been pushing. It's a kind of "Get the Facts" campaign against Groklaw.
My customers usually are like: "OMG!"
Probably not for the reason you are thinking though....
> What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist'
> (although I believe its always been seen as left leaning)
Maybe your political parties swing different ways to the ones in li'l old England, but The Economist, to me, has always seemed right-leaning.
In British terms, right-leaning means favouring unfettered free enterprise, low taxes and free markets. Right-leaners liked Thatcher and her Conservative Party (whose colour is blue.)
Left-leaning publications favor high taxes, socialism, market regulation and nationalisation. They support the Labour Party (whose colour is red.)
And don't get me started on "liberal". Just be aware that to an American, a Frenchman, an Englishman in politics, and an Englishman serving you alcohol, "liberal" means four very different things, respectively Clinton, Bush, a centrist party and a generous serving.
Divided by a common language....
What about bittorrenet that revolusionised entertainment and is 50% of all internet traffic? Is that an examle of open source reaching its limits and does what others have done before?
Once again we have a group of people amazed by the concept of giving away knowlege for nothing without noticing that we got to where we are today by exactly that process. We need better science education in our schools and universities - if only to stop some bottom rung business graduate who has achieved his position via connected relatives from calling us commies for using firefox.
Edison for many good reasons is held up as the great example of technological capitalism, and the light bulb as his greatest acheivement. Consider that many of his contemporaries even in remote parts of the world also produced working light bulbs within weeks of the time and totally independant of his efforts - he built his great acheivement on the shared knowlege produced by others and circulated worldwide.
To sum up, open source is an old idea and Bill's idea of charging money for hobby software is a new one.
Surely what the article should say is any open source business ventures need to consistently guided towards business goals to succeed in that area. No shit sherlock.
Perhaps it never occured to these clueless twats that some open source projects aren't aiming to succeed as a business, and are quite happy being consistently guided by their focused, cooperative maintainers towards the goal of being a decent peice of software.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
If anarchism is about getting rid of the hierarchy and the disproportional power of the higher-ups, then why isn't it called anhierism?
Look at the GNU toolchain, then try the UNIX originals. The UNIX originals, frankly, suck in comparison. Were the UNIX folks more creative? Well they needed something, nothing existed, so they made something, there was no-one to copy. The gnu folks copied it because that way everone (aka the users) would know what it was. But they made it far better over time. Was anybody creative in the process? Sure. There was lots of creativity, but it was in dribs and drabs, in details, over a long period of time. What made the GNU stuff great was that it could capture all the improvements over time, because it was free software, where proprietary stuff would have severe NIH because of their licensing model (do not want to share revenues with every bozo that has an idea.)
The activity in the private sector that goes into creative innovation is miniscule compared to the amount that is either just plain obvious to someone in the domain, a minor improvement on something existing, or just outright copying/competing with somebody else. 99+% of creativity is obvious. Look at Apple, the ipod was not creative in a technical sense. What distinguished it was the design and execution. How well it was done in comparison to other mp3 players and integration with itunes.
Anomie is one of the possible meanings of anarchy as it is used in the English language.
... this article. FTFA:"The "open-source" process of creating things is quickly becoming a threat"
TFA is littered with nonsense like this. So insightful. Sadly, PHBs will jump up and down when they read a snippit like this.
"The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality"
That explains why so much of it works so well. It lack conventional QA. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Its called 'peer review'. Those stupid scientists have been using it for years, and look where it got them. Stupid white coats, and no dates.
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality."
Never a problem in commercial software, or in any product development. Except windows and office, of course.
"In order to succeed, open-source projects have adopted management practices similar to those of the companies they vie to outdo"
See, they're just like us, when they "need to get 'er done". OSS doesn't exist, really, see?
"Projects that fail to cope with open source's vulnerabilities usually fall by the wayside. Indeed, almost all of them meet this end. Of the roughly 130,000 open-source projects on SourceForge.net, an online hub for open-source software projects, only a few hundred are active, and fewer still will ever lead to a useful product. The most important thing holding back the open-source model, apparently, is itself."
See - OSS will ultimately die out completely by killing itself. Die! Die! Die! Mhahahah!
"Traditional profit-seeking firms cannot usually rely on their customers to play an active role in their product development."
Explains why so much of it is badly done. I put Fluke's packet viewer product on a pc, alongside ethereal, to analyze packet captures. Fluke=crap++, ethereal=usefull++. Die, OSS, die.
The best way to get a lie accepted is to mix in just enough truth to make it look true, upon cursory inspection. Like this article. It just a slightly more clever version of FUD. Nothing to see here.
Move along.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Cyril: "I'm going to stand here on the corner speaking about anarchy, if you want to find out about anarchy, feel free to come and listen."
Bert: "Ooh, yes please, I'd like to learn the meaning of anarc...*THWACK*...OWW!! You just twatted me on the head with a hammer!! Why did you do that you bastard?"
Cyril: "Look, if you don't want to get hit on the head with a hammer you should wear a helmet. Now, about anarchy.."
Yeeeeeeaaah...it's perfectly reasonable to expect someone to alter the default settings of their web browser just because someone can't design a usable site! Awesome reasoning.
structure is necessary for any OS project to be successful and effective. however, whether it is 72 or 50, there seems to be a serious problem with the mozilla foundation when looking at the generous alienware that the developer of the best firefox extension gets. imho, there needs to be more transparency because firefox is to a large extent a community projet - yet, the money that the foundation generates does not go to the people who deserve it. there is not not even clarity on the absolute amount that the - open (yeah right) source - project generates. critising is always easy, so here are our thoughts.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Manuel De Landa puts it in another context:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only
because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but
because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties
of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete
experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs
or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn
out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the
appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the
services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other
hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a
better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory
occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten
years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an
increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities.
But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity
articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution.
After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we
do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of
property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions.
Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the
solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental
attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what
the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze
and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You believe Adolf Hitler? That's a strange person to believe. Still, I know you meant you believe he first made the statement, but still...
And if he did say something like it, it was in German!
I believe that if people were to conduct studies of spiritual phenomenon, we could produce facts and figures to support it. No matter what the subject, until that happens, any given subject matter can only be explained in terms of human experience. The thing is people want it to remain that way, so it becomes not a statement of the current state of affairs, but a prophecy.
...Pokémon. There's an article for almost all of the three-hundred-something monsters in the series of games. For a more data-oriented site (with an index), there's also the "Wikibooks Pokédex".
that annoyed me too, what the hell. I keep seeing errors here. Someone needs to moderate these slashdot posts, like wikipedia.