In making my point, I purposely under-emphasized the role of individuals because, IMO, they've been given far too much credit. Of course, without all of the individual contributors, you wouldn't have open source as it stands today. However, are you going to tell me that Linus could have made Linux the success it is today without the internet's proliferation? I highly doubt it. This distributed knowledge base made possible by the internet makes it possible to not only release software like Linux, but to be successful with it. What Linus accomplished would not have been possible in 1981. Not saying he wouldn't have come up with something useful, but the growth would have been much slower.
Anyway... this distributed knowledge base means that there will be more and more Linus's on the horizon, and that this will only increase. I'm not saying that individuals like Linus aren't talented, it's just that they're put in a better position for success via processes I described.
It's interesting to me how the pro and con on the article tends to break along libertarian / non-libertarian lines. There's also a break among entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs.
"So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts."
Anti-free software propaganda??? Sounds to me like you got your open source mixed up with free software again;)
I'm trying to take out the moralistic arguments that many want to attach to open source. An open source company can be just as exploitative as a proprietary one.
Free software is a different beast and is all about taking the moral high ground. I like RMS and hope that he continues in his current role. He's the only relevant guy left.
"The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way is his references to programming being a 'black art' until the internet. I'm sorry, but not everyone with an interest in building software has the capacity to become a programmer. Writing software is a learned skill, which requires training beyond the syntax of a language."
Yes, everyone has the capacity to program. It ain't rocket science, honey. As you said, it's a "learned skill"... just like plumbing, electrical work, etc. Welcome to the world of democratized software development.
"Furthermore, his concepts of collaboration are just plain wrong. Writing software is not like painting walls. Speed of development does not unconditionally increase with added manpower."
You're not the only one to note this. What I was trying to get at is that the massive scale of the internet will result in more people starting their own projects, not that more people will contribute code to the Linux kernel or some other individual project. The more projects that are begun, the more that will reach critical mass. The average success of individual projects may actually go down, but total number of projects with a growing user base will go up.
"Surveys [mit.edu] don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns."
Isn't that what I said? Open source contributors and users just want to use the technology with no ideological baggage. That's what I meant to say.
"Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools."
No no no. I'm definitely not saying that the ideologically motivated don't do important work. Of course they do. But at the same time, they are not the primary drivers of the overall open source trend. They are able to exist within the framework that I described. If not for the economic trends outlined in TFA, they would not be nearly as numerous.
As an intellectual exercise, it would be very interesting to note how many users and contributors to GCC are free software advocates. I honestly don't know, but I would be very interested in the percentage.
"If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead."
Enter the strawman... actually, the risk from software patents, DMCA, and other legal pitfalls is entirely exaggerated. I'll go into that in more depth in the follow-up article.
And freedom is a very important component in the equation, as it lowers the bar to entry and allows customers to revolt against vendor lockin.
"As for his point, I did not see too much that's original or any pieces of concrete advice. The Open Source movement has never pushed the four software freedoms over 'practical' matters and has always had a fuzzy philosophy based on economics above all else."
And yet open source is often described in ideological terms, even though it was originally a way to look at free software without the ideological baggage. Whether it's because the media has misunderstood open source from the beginning or because the osi folks aren't completely honest, there is definitely a communication problem.
I loved this NPR story about Mozilla somehow inhabiting a higher moral plane because they gave away browser software. They sort of misunderstood the point that Mozilla couldn't charge for the software, even if they wanted to. That's not to say that they won't be able to in the future, but in 2006, you ain't making money selling a proprietary browser. Not if you have ambitions to make a dent in IE's market share.
"Other than slapping around a strawman and GNU, I'm not sure what his point was."
Who said I was slapping around GNU? More importantly, what from TFA gives you that idea? I like the FSF, and I appreciate its values. They're the ones that take the moral high ground, and I appreciate that.
"Mostly he thinks everyone should think like him and pretends that it's true. He does not have any positive advice like..."
There is no positive advice, because open source is neither positive nor negative. I think open source users and developers should understand that a company with bad intent can use open source to its advantage just like a company that plays well with others. If there's any advide at all, it's that you shouldn't ascribe positive values to a company just because they open source stuff. True, the proliferation of open source has definitely democratized the software development process, but open source companies can be just as exploitative and underhanded as traditional proprietary ones.
"The part of the article about economics of scale is bogus for a couple of reasons:
1. The typical open-source software project has exactly one person working on it.
2. Efficiency goes down as the number of people contributing goes up. People have understood this forever [wikipedia.org]."
That's not my point. My point is that the more people understand software, the more projects that will spring up. Most of those are not viable, and they will die on the vine. The ones that are perceived to add value are the ones that survive. I have no problem understanding that too many cooks spoil the stew, and my article had nothing to do with project management studies or extreme programming examples or any of that.
Shareware proliferated when it was a feasible - but not necessarily ideal - model. It no longer does. Why is that? I don't think it's feasible because software developers know better. Users today have grown to expect so much more.
Your example about the difference between 1980 and 1995 is correct. I have tried to prove that the window of opportunity for software features is rapidly shrinking, and that features currently in the pipeline are rapidly forcing down prices of existing features. If you look at the complexity of open source software in 2006, it's remarkable considering what existed in 1996.
Economies of scale come into play when you realize that the free utilities given away these days are incredibly complex, and that the race to add feature sets is getting faster. The evidence is evident in what tools I have available at my disposal, and how this compares to just a few years ago. The gap between what was available only commercially and what I could download for free was much greater in 1996 than it is now. And that's my primary point - that gap is getting smaller and smaller, and the time required to close that gap is getting shorter.
How else would you explain the proliferation of open source if not for the massive scale of the internet, and the distributed knowledge base?
4. your argument is about point solutions, but there is more value in a software vendor writing tools that make for a whole greater than the sum of its parts
I believe this is known as the "Microsoft invented vendor lockin" strategy. It is correct that many software vendors have created tools that work much better with each other than other tools on a computer or network. However, software users are in open revolt against this strategy. The ability to fire your vendor is a pretty compelling argument for many companies to go with open solutions. I'll get into this in much more depth in the follow-up article. There is a Gartner report about the long-term gravitation towards point solutions instead of using a single software vendor.
Even Microsoft has (sort of) learned this - contrast their.NET strategy with Sun's J2EE strategy. I would argue - and so would the Mono team - that.NET is more open as a platform than J2EE.
5. You cannot just ignore the contributions of individuals and state that it's all the result of economies of scale.
I admit that there is certainly room for individual contributions, and that without individual contributions you wouldn't have open source projects. Yes, that is certainly true. My argument is that without the economies of scale made possible by the Internet, those individual accomplishments would never have reached the point that they have now. Also, with more knowledgeable people in the universe, it's more likely that individuals will spring up with viable ideas.
Another thing that I'll get into in the follow-up article is that all the old ideas about open source - better security, better software, peer review - have not been proven. I'm going to show that adoption of software really doesn't have much to do with fewer bugs, better security, or TCO, but it has a lot to do with being "good enough" and easily accessible.
I've seen several comments here, some of which are quite good and point out glaring deficiencies in the article, which I'll try to correct in a follow-up next week. So, I'll try to respond to some of the major themse I've seen thus far:
1. There are other factors aside from cost and features that drive software adoption
Yes. Saying there are "only two" was kind of dumb. However, I would say that lowering the bar to entry and lower cost - which are not necessarily the same - can drive other factors. For example, zero cost and ease of distribution will help a project gain the critical mass necessary for additional users to aid and abet the process of adding features, squashing bugs, and so forth. Others have argued that there has to be something inherently good about the project in the first place in order for critical mass to happen. My central argument is that because of the internet, there is an incredible glut of ideas and knowledgeable people such that there are bound to be some great projects that spring up.
2. your title is wrong. There *is* an open source community.
Yes and no. There are actually many open source communities, but there is no one community. There are communities around Apache, Linux, and many many other projects, and there is even quite a bit of overlap between all of them. However, many people talk about "the open source community" as if it was this monolithic group of people, which is absolutely false.
3. It's free speech, not free beer!
I believe that the driving motivation for most people to participate in open source projects is not idealistic, but rather sheer pragmatism. It's just easier to download something and start using it than to buy software via traditional means. In that sense, open source proliferation is very much viral. Having said that, you'll notice that I didn't even begin to address the free software movement. That's because it's an entirely different beast, and it's not about economics at all. In the case of free software, people drive the projects because they believe it's better for society. I admire that, and I like the FSF. In fact, Richard Stallman is about the only relevant luminary left on the stage, although he certainly has his faults. ESR and Perens, on the other hand, are dinosaurs that need to be put out to pasture. One of the most annoying interviews I ever heards was when Perens was on NPR's Science Friday talking about how he was the father of the open source movement. Gag.
There are others... I'll try to address them as I find the time.
I work for a company, GroundWork (http://www.itgroundwork.com/ ), that offers subscriptions. Sure, we offer updates + a certain amount of support for a year, but because all of our offerings have a strong open source base, including Nagios and a few others, it's not like the software stops working after a year if you decide not to pay. You just don't have the automated updates and support avenues at your disposal, but you're perfectly free to continue using the software, including whatever proprietary bits we add on. Perhaps we should use a different term, because "subscription" seems to have a bad connotation, but I just wanted to note this for the record.
And he's writing a book for No Starch Press due in August:@)
It's called "Silence on the Wire" and he is One Smart Dude (TM).
Full disclosure - I work for No Starch Press.
Jon Erickson's "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation"
on
Exploiting Software
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a slightly biased source of information (I work for the publisher, No Starch Press) I would recommend the above-mentioned title for those interested in software exploits. It's a great introduction to fundamental ways to exploit software. It may not have quotes from Schneier, but it's a great book. Check it out here: nostarch.com
It says to enter the time in GMT, which I did. When I did that, the resulting date came out to be 14 hours earlier from what I entered. Wtf?
It wouldn't be correct even if they're trying to guess my time zone and adjust for that - which would be dumb anyway, otherwise why bother requesting the date in GMT?
Because all you have to do is recruit non-Arabs. Can you say John Walker Lindh? What about Richard Reid? Can you honestly say that those are the only ones? If we concentrate our entire anti-terrorism on Arabs, then we are really making ourselves vulnerable.
It's from No Starch Press. As the reviewer mentions, it is not as comprehensive, but it is well-written and is a great introduction to Webmin for newbies and *gasp* Windows sysadmins coming over to the good side.
My mom loves the STCB series, and that's the audience No Starch is going for with this book - those that don't really know much about the internet or computer security. It's a good read with interesting anecdotes. Nothing more, nothing less.
I can guarantee you that my mom would be much less enthralled with any of the books you listed.
"The Web Programmers Cross Reference" from No Starch Press is a complete reference guide to HTML, Javascript, CSS, and DHTML. When I say complete, I mean every HTML tag with browser version compatibility, every Javascript function, every CSS directive, and a bunch of stuff on MS-isms for web programming (kind of necessary, even if a tad evil) Check nostarch.com for more information - should be taking pre-orders next month or so, and the final printed version should be in stores by December.
Look, the person who said that was Morpheus. As we've discovered in the sequel, Morpheus is wrong about a few things, and I have a hunch that his reasoning for what humans are used for is also wrong.
The Wachowski bros. can say they intended it to be that way along, but we really have no idea if they goofed up and decided to cover their asses. I'm willing to believe that Morpheus is just wrong.
Believe me, I wanted to get someone from IBM, SCO, Novell, or Microsoft, but they were all unavailable for comment, for reasons that should be obvious.
When it comes to lawsuits, the companies that are involved run far, far away from making public comments. So, I did the next best thing and got people who had spoken to everyone involved. You may think it's one-sided, but they offer a good analysis of the case.
I know it's form to reply with, "Yes! Me too!" but what can I say, you nailed it. Maybe if more people reply with "You nailed it!" you'll get those highly sought mod points:@)
I was writing my senior thesis on using GPS to track land movements way back in 1994-95. This is not news. My paper was about tracking seismic buildup in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
Slashdot Mirror
In making my point, I purposely under-emphasized the role of individuals because, IMO, they've been given far too much credit. Of course, without all of the individual contributors, you wouldn't have open source as it stands today. However, are you going to tell me that Linus could have made Linux the success it is today without the internet's proliferation? I highly doubt it. This distributed knowledge base made possible by the internet makes it possible to not only release software like Linux, but to be successful with it. What Linus accomplished would not have been possible in 1981. Not saying he wouldn't have come up with something useful, but the growth would have been much slower.
Anyway... this distributed knowledge base means that there will be more and more Linus's on the horizon, and that this will only increase. I'm not saying that individuals like Linus aren't talented, it's just that they're put in a better position for success via processes I described.
It's interesting to me how the pro and con on the article tends to break along libertarian / non-libertarian lines. There's also a break among entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs.
No... I was saying it's much harder to make money on software *period* and that makes the open source ecosystem viable.
You're not the only person to misread that... which tells me I need to explain it better.
"So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts."
;)
Anti-free software propaganda??? Sounds to me like you got your open source mixed up with free software again
I'm trying to take out the moralistic arguments that many want to attach to open source. An open source company can be just as exploitative as a proprietary one.
Free software is a different beast and is all about taking the moral high ground. I like RMS and hope that he continues in his current role. He's the only relevant guy left.
"The thing that really rubbed me the wrong way is his references to programming being a 'black art' until the internet. I'm sorry, but not everyone with an interest in building software has the capacity to become a programmer. Writing software is a learned skill, which requires training beyond the syntax of a language."
Yes, everyone has the capacity to program. It ain't rocket science, honey. As you said, it's a "learned skill"... just like plumbing, electrical work, etc. Welcome to the world of democratized software development.
"Furthermore, his concepts of collaboration are just plain wrong. Writing software is not like painting walls. Speed of development does not unconditionally increase with added manpower."
You're not the only one to note this. What I was trying to get at is that the massive scale of the internet will result in more people starting their own projects, not that more people will contribute code to the Linux kernel or some other individual project. The more projects that are begun, the more that will reach critical mass. The average success of individual projects may actually go down, but total number of projects with a growing user base will go up.
"Surveys [mit.edu] don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns."
Isn't that what I said? Open source contributors and users just want to use the technology with no ideological baggage. That's what I meant to say.
"Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools."
No no no. I'm definitely not saying that the ideologically motivated don't do important work. Of course they do. But at the same time, they are not the primary drivers of the overall open source trend. They are able to exist within the framework that I described. If not for the economic trends outlined in TFA, they would not be nearly as numerous.
As an intellectual exercise, it would be very interesting to note how many users and contributors to GCC are free software advocates. I honestly don't know, but I would be very interested in the percentage.
"If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead."
Enter the strawman... actually, the risk from software patents, DMCA, and other legal pitfalls is entirely exaggerated. I'll go into that in more depth in the follow-up article.
And freedom is a very important component in the equation, as it lowers the bar to entry and allows customers to revolt against vendor lockin.
"As for his point, I did not see too much that's original or any pieces of concrete advice. The Open Source movement has never pushed the four software freedoms over 'practical' matters and has always had a fuzzy philosophy based on economics above all else."
And yet open source is often described in ideological terms, even though it was originally a way to look at free software without the ideological baggage. Whether it's because the media has misunderstood open source from the beginning or because the osi folks aren't completely honest, there is definitely a communication problem.
I loved this NPR story about Mozilla somehow inhabiting a higher moral plane because they gave away browser software. They sort of misunderstood the point that Mozilla couldn't charge for the software, even if they wanted to. That's not to say that they won't be able to in the future, but in 2006, you ain't making money selling a proprietary browser. Not if you have ambitions to make a dent in IE's market share.
"Other than slapping around a strawman and GNU, I'm not sure what his point was."
Who said I was slapping around GNU? More importantly, what from TFA gives you that idea? I like the FSF, and I appreciate its values. They're the ones that take the moral high ground, and I appreciate that.
"Mostly he thinks everyone should think like him and pretends that it's true. He does not have any positive advice like..."
There is no positive advice, because open source is neither positive nor negative. I think open source users and developers should understand that a company with bad intent can use open source to its advantage just like a company that plays well with others. If there's any advide at all, it's that you shouldn't ascribe positive values to a company just because they open source stuff. True, the proliferation of open source has definitely democratized the software development process, but open source companies can be just as exploitative and underhanded as traditional proprietary ones.
"The part of the article about economics of scale is bogus for a couple of reasons:
1. The typical open-source software project has exactly one person working on it.
2. Efficiency goes down as the number of people contributing goes up. People have understood this forever [wikipedia.org]."
That's not my point. My point is that the more people understand software, the more projects that will spring up. Most of those are not viable, and they will die on the vine. The ones that are perceived to add value are the ones that survive. I have no problem understanding that too many cooks spoil the stew, and my article had nothing to do with project management studies or extreme programming examples or any of that.
Shareware proliferated when it was a feasible - but not necessarily ideal - model. It no longer does. Why is that? I don't think it's feasible because software developers know better. Users today have grown to expect so much more.
Your example about the difference between 1980 and 1995 is correct. I have tried to prove that the window of opportunity for software features is rapidly shrinking, and that features currently in the pipeline are rapidly forcing down prices of existing features. If you look at the complexity of open source software in 2006, it's remarkable considering what existed in 1996.
Economies of scale come into play when you realize that the free utilities given away these days are incredibly complex, and that the race to add feature sets is getting faster. The evidence is evident in what tools I have available at my disposal, and how this compares to just a few years ago. The gap between what was available only commercially and what I could download for free was much greater in 1996 than it is now. And that's my primary point - that gap is getting smaller and smaller, and the time required to close that gap is getting shorter.
How else would you explain the proliferation of open source if not for the massive scale of the internet, and the distributed knowledge base?
4. your argument is about point solutions, but there is more value in a software vendor writing tools that make for a whole greater than the sum of its parts
.NET strategy with Sun's J2EE strategy. I would argue - and so would the Mono team - that .NET is more open as a platform than J2EE.
I believe this is known as the "Microsoft invented vendor lockin" strategy. It is correct that many software vendors have created tools that work much better with each other than other tools on a computer or network. However, software users are in open revolt against this strategy. The ability to fire your vendor is a pretty compelling argument for many companies to go with open solutions. I'll get into this in much more depth in the follow-up article. There is a Gartner report about the long-term gravitation towards point solutions instead of using a single software vendor.
Even Microsoft has (sort of) learned this - contrast their
5. You cannot just ignore the contributions of individuals and state that it's all the result of economies of scale.
I admit that there is certainly room for individual contributions, and that without individual contributions you wouldn't have open source projects. Yes, that is certainly true. My argument is that without the economies of scale made possible by the Internet, those individual accomplishments would never have reached the point that they have now. Also, with more knowledgeable people in the universe, it's more likely that individuals will spring up with viable ideas.
Another thing that I'll get into in the follow-up article is that all the old ideas about open source - better security, better software, peer review - have not been proven. I'm going to show that adoption of software really doesn't have much to do with fewer bugs, better security, or TCO, but it has a lot to do with being "good enough" and easily accessible.
I've seen several comments here, some of which are quite good and point out glaring deficiencies in the article, which I'll try to correct in a follow-up next week. So, I'll try to respond to some of the major themse I've seen thus far:
1. There are other factors aside from cost and features that drive software adoption
Yes. Saying there are "only two" was kind of dumb. However, I would say that lowering the bar to entry and lower cost - which are not necessarily the same - can drive other factors. For example, zero cost and ease of distribution will help a project gain the critical mass necessary for additional users to aid and abet the process of adding features, squashing bugs, and so forth. Others have argued that there has to be something inherently good about the project in the first place in order for critical mass to happen. My central argument is that because of the internet, there is an incredible glut of ideas and knowledgeable people such that there are bound to be some great projects that spring up.
2. your title is wrong. There *is* an open source community.
Yes and no. There are actually many open source communities, but there is no one community. There are communities around Apache, Linux, and many many other projects, and there is even quite a bit of overlap between all of them. However, many people talk about "the open source community" as if it was this monolithic group of people, which is absolutely false.
3. It's free speech, not free beer!
I believe that the driving motivation for most people to participate in open source projects is not idealistic, but rather sheer pragmatism. It's just easier to download something and start using it than to buy software via traditional means. In that sense, open source proliferation is very much viral. Having said that, you'll notice that I didn't even begin to address the free software movement. That's because it's an entirely different beast, and it's not about economics at all. In the case of free software, people drive the projects because they believe it's better for society. I admire that, and I like the FSF. In fact, Richard Stallman is about the only relevant luminary left on the stage, although he certainly has his faults. ESR and Perens, on the other hand, are dinosaurs that need to be put out to pasture. One of the most annoying interviews I ever heards was when Perens was on NPR's Science Friday talking about how he was the father of the open source movement. Gag.
There are others... I'll try to address them as I find the time.
I work for a company, GroundWork (http://www.itgroundwork.com/ ), that offers subscriptions. Sure, we offer updates + a certain amount of support for a year, but because all of our offerings have a strong open source base, including Nagios and a few others, it's not like the software stops working after a year if you decide not to pay. You just don't have the automated updates and support avenues at your disposal, but you're perfectly free to continue using the software, including whatever proprietary bits we add on. Perhaps we should use a different term, because "subscription" seems to have a bad connotation, but I just wanted to note this for the record.
It's Fedora Core 1, but we chose not to emphasize that because the target audience doesn't really care :@)
-John Mark
Acquisitions Editor
No Starch Press
And he's writing a book for No Starch Press due in August :@)
It's called "Silence on the Wire" and he is One Smart Dude (TM).
Full disclosure - I work for No Starch Press.
As a slightly biased source of information (I work for the publisher, No Starch Press) I would recommend the above-mentioned title for those interested in software exploits. It's a great introduction to fundamental ways to exploit software. It may not have quotes from Schneier, but it's a great book. Check it out here: nostarch.com
Open for Business rocks! Whether or not it's complete depends on what you need, obviously.
It says to enter the time in GMT, which I did. When I did that, the resulting date came out to be 14 hours earlier from what I entered. Wtf?
It wouldn't be correct even if they're trying to guess my time zone and adjust for that - which would be dumb anyway, otherwise why bother requesting the date in GMT?
Because all you have to do is recruit non-Arabs. Can you say John Walker Lindh? What about Richard Reid? Can you honestly say that those are the only ones? If we concentrate our entire anti-terrorism on Arabs, then we are really making ourselves vulnerable.
Book of Webmin page at nostarch.com
Full disclusure: I am the acquisitions editor for No Starch Press
My mom loves the STCB series, and that's the audience No Starch is going for with this book - those that don't really know much about the internet or computer security. It's a good read with interesting anecdotes. Nothing more, nothing less.
I can guarantee you that my mom would be much less enthralled with any of the books you listed.
-John Mark
Acquisitions Editor
No Starch Press
(yes, I am a No Starch Press employee)
Look, the person who said that was Morpheus. As we've discovered in the sequel, Morpheus is wrong about a few things, and I have a hunch that his reasoning for what humans are used for is also wrong.
The Wachowski bros. can say they intended it to be that way along, but we really have no idea if they goofed up and decided to cover their asses. I'm willing to believe that Morpheus is just wrong.
Believe me, I wanted to get someone from IBM, SCO, Novell, or Microsoft, but they were all unavailable for comment, for reasons that should be obvious.
When it comes to lawsuits, the companies that are involved run far, far away from making public comments. So, I did the next best thing and got people who had spoken to everyone involved. You may think it's one-sided, but they offer a good analysis of the case.
I know it's form to reply with, "Yes! Me too!" but what can I say, you nailed it. Maybe if more people reply with "You nailed it!" you'll get those highly sought mod points :@)
I was writing my senior thesis on using GPS to track land movements way back in 1994-95. This is not news. My paper was about tracking seismic buildup in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.