what specific thing did Bruce Perens say that you think he shouldn't have said in a public forum?
Ghods. Where do I start...? There have been so many, starting with his vicious attack on Tim O'Reilly last fall...
See http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4179.html. That lovely little denunciamento did our negotiations with Apple very serious damage. Going public with it instead of approaching me or OSI or Apple privately caused a whole lot of unnecessary grief and flamage within the community as well.
Simply going off on a tear might have been forgiveable, except that Bruce's analysis of the APSL was just plain wrong. He's not a lawyer, he didn't have advice from people competent to reaf legalese, and the problems he thought he'd detected were all bullshit and vapor.
The only real problem with the license a technical glitch in the export clause that Bruce never noticed. (To be fair, we at OSI missed it too until Seth Schoen pointed it out. Seth now does all our first-pass license evaluations.)
The fallout from Bruce's public grandstanding still hasn't settled out. There are still people who think (mistakenly) that APSL 1.1 is not OSD-conformant and is a broken license.
Bruce is not an idiot; he had to have known that the effect of splitting the community over APSL would be to damage OSI's negotiating leverage with other big corporations, thus making it harder for us to head off truly bad licenses like the SCSL.
Even leaving out his personal attacks against me (representing the OSI decision as though I had gone into some kind of reckless cowboy mode instead of having the unanimous approval of the OSI Board -- and that was the least of them) I can't forgive him for needlessly damaging OSI's credibility and usefulness to the community when a single exchange of email with me or anybody else on the inside of the negotiations would have prevented any problem.
I respect the elegance and ingenuity of BeOS's design. But I think we're past the point at which developing a new OS in closed source is a viable option.
There are many reasons I believe this, but I'll focus on one: the free Unixes have soaked up so much hacking talent that I don't think BeOS will ever be able to grow an independently viable developer base.
Sorry, BEfolks. If it's any comfort, I thought it was a really nice try...
I agree with your point that both gift and exchange cultures are both part of the market. But you've missed the critical difference between the two -- the expectation of reciprocity.
When I trade with someone, whether the transaction is monetized or not we have reciprocity. We can set up conditions (such as third-party escrow) which guarantee that the trade won't complete unless both of us get fair value.
In a gift culture, I don't have an expectation of reciprocity from any given beneficiary (or collection of beneficiaries). I just have to cast my effort on the water and hope it multiplies.
Every time ESR talks about his non-shared personal beliefs in an OSS forum, he betrays those he represents. Not so. I betray those I represent only if I confuse the listener about which beliefs are shared and which are personal to me.
Like Larry Wall, I am very careful not to do that. Like Larry, I feel free to speak about my own beliefs so long as I maintain that separation.
Let's put it this way; if you devote a very large chunk of your life to something, it becomes more and more difficult to compartmentalize the different parts of your life. End the end, you have two choices: either be in "work" mode all of the time and go home espousing the virtues of the OS model to your SO, or relax the partitions between work and everything else. On the surface, this may seem to be inefficient, causing problems similar to the one you see. OTOH, it does make for a somewhat more sane ESR.
Quite right, zantispam, and astute of you to notice.
There's something else going on, as well -- I find that some of my quirks and opinions are a useful form of street theater that helps me gain and hold the attention of journalists. A "safer" (read: more boring) evangelist would be less effective on our behalf.
I think the collapse of Microsoft will slow down our momentum hardly at all. Because I don't think the open-source movement is fundamentally about being against Microsoft -- it's about being for better programs.
This reminds me of the old chestnut about how we don't know what the features of the most commonly-used programming language of 2020 will be, but we do know that it will be called FORTRAN.
Suppose I accept your theory that I should have gone to RMS and Bruce first. Should I also have gone to Linus Torvalds? Larry Wall? Brian Behlendorf? Should I have polled Slashdot?
Sounds nice in theory. But who will guard the guardians? Who monitors SPI to make sure they are trustworthy? I'm not saying this to do SPI down, I'm just trying to point out that trust has to ground somewhere. Otherwise where does the infinite regress stop?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only will I not answer this question, I will tell you that I refuse to answer.
People are entitled to make mistakes in private, as long as they're corrected, without taking flak. Even corporate people.
I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's not recoverable if it doesn't.
Ghods. Where do I start...? There have been so many, starting with his vicious attack on Tim O'Reilly last fall...
See http://linuxtoday.com/stories/4179.html. That lovely little denunciamento did our negotiations with Apple very serious damage. Going public with it instead of approaching me or OSI or Apple privately caused a whole lot of unnecessary grief and flamage within the community as well.
Simply going off on a tear might have been forgiveable, except that Bruce's analysis of the APSL was just plain wrong. He's not a lawyer, he didn't have advice from people competent to reaf legalese, and the problems he thought he'd detected were all bullshit and vapor.
The only real problem with the license a technical glitch in the export clause that Bruce never noticed. (To be fair, we at OSI missed it too until Seth Schoen pointed it out. Seth now does all our first-pass license evaluations.)
The fallout from Bruce's public grandstanding still hasn't settled out. There are still people who think (mistakenly) that APSL 1.1 is not OSD-conformant and is a broken license.
Bruce is not an idiot; he had to have known that the effect of splitting the community over APSL would be to damage OSI's negotiating leverage with other big corporations, thus making it harder for us to head off truly bad licenses like the SCSL.
Even leaving out his personal attacks against me (representing the OSI decision as though I had gone into some kind of reckless cowboy mode instead of having the unanimous approval of the OSI Board -- and that was the least of them) I can't forgive him for needlessly damaging OSI's credibility and usefulness to the community when a single exchange of email with me or anybody else on the inside of the negotiations would have prevented any problem.
I respect the elegance and ingenuity of BeOS's design. But I think we're past the point at which developing a new OS in closed source is a viable option.
There are many reasons I believe this, but I'll focus on one: the free Unixes have soaked up so much hacking talent that I don't think BeOS will ever be able to grow an independently viable developer base.
Sorry, BEfolks. If it's any comfort, I thought it was a really nice try...
FYI, my favorite class of shooting irons is the .45ACP.
classic 1911-pattern
When I trade with someone, whether the transaction is monetized or not we have reciprocity. We can set up conditions (such as third-party escrow) which guarantee that the trade won't complete unless both of us get fair value.
In a gift culture, I don't have an expectation of reciprocity from any given beneficiary (or collection of beneficiaries). I just have to cast my effort on the water and hope it multiplies.
Like Larry Wall, I am very careful not to do that. Like Larry, I feel free to speak about my own beliefs so long as I maintain that separation.
Quite right, zantispam, and astute of you to notice.
There's something else going on, as well -- I find that some of my quirks and opinions are a useful form of street theater that helps me gain and hold the attention of journalists. A "safer" (read: more boring) evangelist would be less effective on our behalf.
That's not constructive criticism. Constructive criticism would have been avoiding a flamewar -- coming to OSI and Apple privately with your concerns.
That's what I can't forgive -- and won't.
I was thinking of this when I wrote my reply.
I've since discovered the incantation to make
gnuplot do color PNGs. I didn't use GIMP at all.
Suck's whole shtick is cheap cynicism. This article is not a surprise. Nor is it very
interesting.
Hm. I'll have to add a note the `Open Source'
prett much stomped on FRS.
Damn, that's good. I wish I could think of a way
to shoehorn it into the File...
Think about it...