Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd

An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday, writes an open letter to U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. ESR points out the concerns of 'the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century' about politicians attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools. A portion of the letter reads: 'I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.'"

Comments

Routing around the censorship

[OzPeter]

Sometimes when I read

“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

which appears as a nice and cutesy rainbows and unicorns saying, I get the impression that it actually means

"Fuck off. You don't belong here and we'll subvert anything you try to do that impacts what we want to do"

In an angry, anti-establishment, "we know better than you" superior way.
 
Note that I do believe in a free Internet.

Unity is a sad pun

[epine]

This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note

This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob â" that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? Itâ(TM)s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.

Me? Iâ(TM)ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it.

Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.

Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.

Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.

Re:To Which the Reaction Will Be

[SomeKDEUser]

There is a fundamental assumption difference between the two. Atlas Shrugged is based on the assumption that it's, to use common parlance "the 1%" who make the world go round.

Fight club assumes that it's the "99%".

Fight club is right on that point (obviously -- CEOs and lawyer and finance wizz-kids do not contribute to the economy commensurately to their salaries). However, there is no such organisation as "the 99%", and therefore, hoping that you can suddenly bring down civilisation because everyone will suddenly push in the same direction is a fantasy.

Progress still happens because ideas get diffused, take hold, and eventually become so dominant that the moral zeitgeist is altered. Within 25 years, only fringe loonies will be against gay marriage (we are close to that, maybe 15 years), and pot legalisation will have become self-evident. In Europe, the last religious generation will have died out, and in the US, atheists will be the majority. The current US debates on _contraception_ will be looked upon as the abhorrent obsession of the few.

But there still will be liberals and conservatives, and the debate will be as lively as now. The point is that you do no effect change by revolutions, if the social structures allow change that is. Change occurs because old people die out, young people grow up and facts remain. Doing whatever fits reality always wins in the long run.

But the ride is smoother is you keep talking about reality.

Re:uhhh.

[dkleinsc]

George Washington in particular was against this - the reason he went by "Mr President" was that he wanted to have some sort of title that indicated that the President of the United States was on par with his counterparts in other countries (which were likely to be Kings, Dukes, or Princes), but he wanted to emphasize that the President is also just a regular citizen, so he started it with "Mister". One of the key reasons he was instrumental in creating American democracy is that after he won the American Revolutionary War he didn't take the army he'd just won with and try to take over the country, and then as President stepped down after 2 terms and peacefully transferred power to John Adams.