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Jimmy Wales's Open Source Collaboration Tips
destinyland writes "In a new interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledges his debt to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and discusses his new open source search project. He applauds the way Open Source developers work around their ideological differences, acknowledges that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds, and blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years."
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy. I recently read Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court, 1998) which, besides being a chronicle of how many lives her and her immediate followers wrecked, talks much about how the philosophy community--even scholars with ethical views similar to her own--reject her work as lacking in rigour, containing much inconsistency and back-peddling, and showing a lack of understanding of the earlier philosophers she cites (putting words into Kant's mouth, for example).
It doesn't reflect well on Jimbo at all to claim such a crackpot and madwoman as a role model. Besides, isn't part of Objectivism supposedly rejecting gurus? Why doesn't Jimbo just say he's an individualist, why bring up Rand at all?
You use software that you didn't pay for, in terms of support you deserve exactly what you paid for. If the authors happen to be kind enough to return your e-mails instead of snickering 'RTFM', that great, but a FOSS author is under no obligation to support anything. If he wants his project to succeed, he will have to support what he's written for at least some time, but nobody's gonna put his feet to the coals for dropping support for a project he no longer has time for.
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On that basis predicting the weather should be easy, since molecules in the atmosphere are dumb as rocks, even dumber that dumb people.
And yet... weather forecasting requires supercomputers.
You're confusing dumbness with predictability. They're not the same thing, although dumb people can be predictable sometimes.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
I know of no successful open source software projects run that way. On all the successful open source projects only few are granted write access to cvs/svn and most open source projects are run by one or two very opinionated people who do not accomodate others on a whim. In most cases, people finding a problem submit a patch and onte of the trusted few will apply it. In many cases, the patch will not be applied directly, but will be rewritten to achieve the desired effect better.
Sure people can take all the code and fork the project, but that is very different to having control over the document. You very seldom get wikipeia-style edit wars in OSS code bases because "the boss" does not tolerate it. Abuse the privaledge of write access and you lose it.
To draw a parallels between Wikipedia (which is uncontrolled) and Open Source (which is controlled) just does Open Source a disservice. There's enough anti-Open Source FUD out there and we don't need people thinking that any dummy with a chip on their shoulder can modifyt open source.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Collectivism allows the individual to persue his goals. Without the support of others, people are very limited in what they can do. Without collectivism, we would each be at the mercy of the strong and amoral, as well as nature. There's an old African proverb that peaks to the reciprocal nature of individual freedom and social responsibility: Only free individuals can make a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can make free individuals.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
> Is that what I was doing on Wikipedia? I thought that I was engaging in a hobby I enjoy, which is of benefit to me.
:-)
Weird. Normal people rationalize away their greed and selfishness. I never realized that Rand's followers rationalized altrusim, instead...
I'm not complaining, mind you--I'd much rather you were altrusitic than some greedy asshole--but I confess that the notion of rationalizing it seems odd to me. You usually only rationalize bad things