The author of the paper ref'ed in the above post, Nikolai Bezroukov, has a large website that is full of material related to collaboration and the social issues that surround creating and using software. It is quirky, but replete with infonuggets that will either piss you off or make you smile.
Collaborative social constructs that enable the accumulation of software capital will become very important for the OSS community to identify and exploit once market subsidies based on false business promise disappear.
MS and Bill Gates fell into the PC business, they didn't create it through form of satanic foreknowledge. The PC business happens to be the kind of biz that prints money, with or without an attendant to guide it.
The fact that they are actually good at it just makes it sting more!
Katz' ranting case of paranoia seems to indicate a hidden wish for his own pool of sticky, self-replicating, corporate slime.
The PC form factor, and the desktop to go with it, are yesterday's news. Mobile devices, moving through server-resident infrastructure, are a forward looking thing to start coding for...and the servers that back these devices will include a lot of Linux.
Want UNIX tools on your desktop, but with great fonts and a decent window manager/graphics system? Go run Mac OSX - seriously. It's great. Can't beat it, and why would you want to?
Has anyone else noticed just how absent IBM is from this whole "dialog"? I've seen financial analysts say that they made over a billion US dollars in pure patent profits last year. I wonder whether Perens and his merry band of "open source leaders" have actually thought this through - is their idealistic society of share-and-share-alike actually subsidizing Big Blue?
One of your favorite topics is the erosion of the global nature of the Internet's address space. This is being caused, you argue, by the lameness of the existing infrastructure, as well as by the emergence of communities (both P2P communities and walled gardens). You argue that the new communities are bubbling up through the floorboards, and that they collectively represent the next generation of addressing and control for network computing resources.
One implication for software developers is that their programs will need to become community-context-aware; software features and namespaces will be aligned upon community boundries, rather than upon the device or user boundries that we see today.
In his book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein argues that this data hiding nature of Internet communities will cause harm to any "deliberative democracy." Have you had a chance to look at this book? What are your thoughts on the issues raised?
In your opinion, how can we build both walled gardens and open playing fields that provide for the entire spectrum of presence and accountability, from safe public spaces to intimate and anonymous backrooms? Is this possible without the cooperation and/or regulation of the many parties and technologies involved?
Bonus troll:/. is a great example of a cybercascade producing community. Are self-reinforcing communities that are produced in places like this actually a good thing? Or are we, by "sharing" our resources with only like-minded individuals, just creating virtualized ghettos? Once they become the primary address space for our efficient new network-aware society, will communities such as/. invariably become oppressive arbiters of taste and behavior, much as the mainstream media are today?
Slashdot Mirror
Collaborative social constructs that enable the accumulation of software capital will become very important for the OSS community to identify and exploit once market subsidies based on false business promise disappear.
The fact that they are actually good at it just makes it sting more!
Katz' ranting case of paranoia seems to indicate a hidden wish for his own pool of sticky, self-replicating, corporate slime.
Want UNIX tools on your desktop, but with great fonts and a decent window manager/graphics system? Go run Mac OSX - seriously. It's great. Can't beat it, and why would you want to?
Get out and do something DIFFERENT!
Has anyone else noticed just how absent IBM is from this whole "dialog"? I've seen financial analysts say that they made over a billion US dollars in pure patent profits last year. I wonder whether Perens and his merry band of "open source leaders" have actually thought this through - is their idealistic society of share-and-share-alike actually subsidizing Big Blue?
One implication for software developers is that their programs will need to become community-context-aware; software features and namespaces will be aligned upon community boundries, rather than upon the device or user boundries that we see today.
In his book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein argues that this data hiding nature of Internet communities will cause harm to any "deliberative democracy." Have you had a chance to look at this book? What are your thoughts on the issues raised?
In your opinion, how can we build both walled gardens and open playing fields that provide for the entire spectrum of presence and accountability, from safe public spaces to intimate and anonymous backrooms? Is this possible without the cooperation and/or regulation of the many parties and technologies involved?
Bonus troll: /. is a great example of a cybercascade producing community. Are self-reinforcing communities that are produced in places like this actually a good thing? Or are we, by "sharing" our resources with only like-minded individuals, just creating virtualized ghettos? Once they become the primary address space for our efficient new network-aware society, will communities such as /. invariably become oppressive arbiters of taste and behavior, much as the mainstream media are today?