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Interviews: Ask a Question To Christine Peterson, the Nanotech Expert Who Coined the Term 'Open Source'
Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998. Now Christine's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
Interestingly, Christine was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and on the state of California's nanotechnology task force. Her tech talks at conferences include "Life Extension for Geeks" at Gnomedex and "Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security" at the 2007 Singularity Summit. Another talk argues that the nanotech revolution will be like the information revolution, except that "Instead of with bits, we should do it with atoms," allowing molecule-sized machines that can kill cancer and repair DNA. Her most recent publication is "Cyber, Nano, and AGI RIsks: Decentralized Approaches to Reducing Risks." Christine graduated from MIT with a bachelors in chemistry.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.
How can we more open source medical software? Given that medical devices are so heavily regulated it seems like it will be hard to get, say, an open source pacemaker system that users can hack, or at least audit.
Radio software seems to be in a similar state - cellular modems, wifi chipsets etc. are all heavily regulated and closed source, with signed code required for updates.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here.
What would that look like here? What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them? How and where might we start to look for them, if we wanted to be likely to find something?
I know there were published discussions about silicon based listening and transmitting devices, bugs, that were smaller than grains of salt. I also know that there was great published fervor over single-pixel cameras, and, impo, I have seen a surprising gap in entangled non-return imaging. I expect "they" have working, single-photon, non-return-imaging cameras on grains of silicon too small for the eye to work with, so perhaps nano drone swarms used for data gathering/surveillance, where each drone is less than 0.1mm across?
When I look at robo-cat, and the alleged robo-squirrels or robo-insects, I think they have such swarms that can be ingested/injected/otherwise-implanted inside animals that don't realize they have become "listening posts". What would you do with a fully-functional jet-engine that was only a few microns across? I remember sub-cellular size bar-codes made by shooting proton based cylindrical holes in silicon, then lithographing layers of gold or other stuff to make the code, then removing the silicon substrate. Could we put markers into people to inform future medical reconstruction such as "non-invasive" 3d printing of organs in-vivo? How would we detect sub-cell-size tagging, or fabrication? I like the idea of nanotech-driven bio-energy harvesting. Why can't we turn trees into solar panels by hacking into their organic photosynthesis?
-EngrStudent
Cut back the max term lengths to something sane like 5 years.
Ummm... everything else in the summary makes her an expert on what Slashdot asks her (if they stay on topic).
Well, no. She seems to be an expert on nanotechnology. If Drexler wanted to co-write a book with her, that definitely demonstrates her chops. But she's clearly not an expert on Open Source Software. She didn't even know that people were using the term in 1995 and prior when she claims to have coined it. Even I know that, because I was one of the people who were using it. If she didn't know that, she is about as far from being an expert on that subject as it is possible to be.
I checked her qualifications before writing this comment. How many people do you think will check her qualifications before reading this thread?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How concerned should we be about nanotechnology equivalents of the software threats we see today?
I would hate to have my circulatory system held hostage for bitcoin.
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This is why I don't post much.
or are you warming up for the OSI to make a run at copyrighting the phrase?
That would be sort of hard when the US copyright law disallows the copyrighting short phrases and this backed up by the USPTO. One can get a trademark on a phrase but tyat is not the same as a copyright. If you’re going to try to sound smart at least learn something about the subject before blabbing.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980422034538/http://opensource.com:80/
But it's clearly an unrelated consultancy.
Whoops! I made that same error last time I brought this up! Of course, you're an anonymous coward, and I treat you like you're all the same person, too pathetic to even log into Slashdot, so I'd say I'm doing pretty well compared to you right now. 99% of what you do is troll and spam.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What do you think Tyrell Corporation should do with its current batch of Nexus 6 replicants? Obviously the 4 year life span has its own problems and wasn't the cure-all Dr. Tyrell expected.
With enough eyeballs going over their source code, could open sourcing their programming find the cause of their tendency to rebel?
Trolling is a art,
Nano-materials, in general, seem to be becoming a significant source of hard-to-cleanup pollution. Do you see nano-tech heading in the same direction?
"Proprietary code! Never ever touch it! Never modify it! Don't even think about re-distributing it!" That's what Caldera's talking about -- and it's evil.
I can remember when Slashdot used to understand the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary code.
In my view, Stallman created Free software as an ethical point. He didn't like that companies were selling software without source code. (To be clear, Stallman doesn't mind selling software, because the GPL allows that. Stallman doesn't like software without source code.)
And the term open source software was invented to communicate a way of working together on something. Out of the chaos of the bazaar comes something good.
Do you agree with that?
Martin. There's a certain company out in San Diego that we all know, parts maker and patent troll. They are working to put royalty-bearing patents in modern standards. They are using the exact same language as you at the standards committees, telling us that "there isn't one Open Source" and then going on to tell us that Open Source should only be about copyright, and that there should be patent royalties in standards that - regardless of what they say about its being only about copyright - Open Source would then not be allowed to implement. Unfortunately, they are gaining traction in important standards committees, especially the national ones.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not working for these guys, you sound exactly like you are. What you are doing hurts both Free Software and Open Source (they are really the same). As I fly around the world to educate standards committees about the Open Source Definition and what they really need to do to accommodate Open Source in standards, they're going to be pointing at your words and using them against me.
This is really important. For medical reasons, this is probably the last decade of my life, and I am spending a good part of it to work on this issue. You're getting in the way. Cut it out. I promise that nobody can trademark the words "Open Source" today, and you are feeling threatened for nothing.
Bruce Perens.
Chris couldn’t read my mind, so she had no way to know that I spotted “open source” as the winner we were looking for the first or second time the phrase was mentioned [in that same meeting where Chris Peterson introduced the term, which is what this essay is about].
Fixed that for you.
As someone who worked closely with Eric Raymond (and had interactions with Jon "maddog" Hall), what were they like in 1998? I'm curious what the whole "mood" of the development community was like in 1998 at that historic meeting. Maybe you could also talk about how things changed -- what they were like before the Open Source movement revved into high gear, and what they were like after.
And how does it all compare to when you first joined the tech scene in the 1980s?