Charles Connell's essay presents appealing ideas; it'd be nice to think software could be "more aesthetic". However, the truth is that Worse Is Better -- as Richard P. Gabriel will often argue (and other times refute).
Exactly those things which make software "ugly" -- complexity, poor modularity, leaky interfaces, and sacrificing design and comments in the name of rapid deployment -- can also help make it more successful, commercially and socially, in the long run.
Exactly those things which make software "beautiful" -- such as Connell's qualities of "appropriate form", "minimality", "component singularity", "functional locality", "simplicity", and even "readability" -- can in fact make software fail, as "great programmers" spend a bunch of time making "elegant solutions" that never catch fire, because they lack the immediacy and approachability of more haphazard solutions.
While this idea may sound like an excuse to avoid doing up-front thought, it's actually a hard-earned lesson that what aesthetically appeals to good, well-intentioned programmers may in fact involve all the "wrong" tradeoffs.
Read all the stuff on this topic at Gabriel's Worse Is Better pages, then revisit Connell's aesthetics peice, and Connell may seem downright naive to you.
Besides the fact that Gracenote (1) patented something that was already published for years (a no-no); and (2) trademarked a term already in wide use (a no-no); they also (3) have asserted a copyright in purely factual information which, by legal precedent, probably isn't copyrightable at all, regardless of the promise under which it was collected.
Note that this means a CDDB database couldn't be GPL'ed, under the law, either. You're just not allowed to tell other people what to do with facts.
Eben Moglen commented on this in another email forum on May 24; here's an excerpt of his analysis:
> The copyright claim has been particularly discussed here: the
> assertion is that Gracenote can copyright the CDDB database and somehow
> act to prevent infringement. Much attention is being paid to the fact
> that this database was assembled by mass contribution through the net.
> That fact is conceptually interesting: it's an example of the
> beginnings of the "free data" economy I have written about elsewere.
> But it has no effect on the legal situation. The short obvious
> answer, which should result in the dismissal of Gracenote's copyright
> claim, is that Gracenote has no copyrightable interest in the
> database. That's the holding of the US Supreme Court in Feist
> Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 US 340 (1991). Feist
> concerned the assertion of copyright in the content of telephone white
> pages. The Court held that there is insufficient originality in the
> directory associating names, addresses and telephone numbers to put
> the directory within the scope of copyright.
>
> Hence my comment to the press about a phone directory built by asking
> customers to call in. The point is precisely that it *doesn't matter*
> how you come by the information: a directory like the telephone white
> pages or the CDDB database is not copyrightable whether it was
> assembled by going out and finding the information using your own shoe
> leather, or by getting free contributions from others. In any event,
> because what results is facts, not expressions, it's not subject to
> copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Charles Connell's essay presents appealing ideas; it'd be nice to think software could be "more aesthetic". However, the truth is that Worse Is Better -- as Richard P. Gabriel will often argue (and other times refute).
Exactly those things which make software "ugly" -- complexity, poor modularity, leaky interfaces, and sacrificing design and comments in the name of rapid deployment -- can also help make it more successful, commercially and socially, in the long run.
Exactly those things which make software "beautiful" -- such as Connell's qualities of "appropriate form", "minimality", "component singularity", "functional locality", "simplicity", and even "readability" -- can in fact make software fail, as "great programmers" spend a bunch of time making "elegant solutions" that never catch fire, because they lack the immediacy and approachability of more haphazard solutions.
While this idea may sound like an excuse to avoid doing up-front thought, it's actually a hard-earned lesson that what aesthetically appeals to good, well-intentioned programmers may in fact involve all the "wrong" tradeoffs.
Read all the stuff on this topic at Gabriel's Worse Is Better pages, then revisit Connell's aesthetics peice, and Connell may seem downright naive to you.
Besides the fact that Gracenote (1) patented something that was already published for years (a no-no); and (2) trademarked a term already in wide use (a no-no); they also (3) have asserted a copyright in purely factual information which, by legal precedent, probably isn't copyrightable at all, regardless of the promise under which it was collected.
Note that this means a CDDB database couldn't be GPL'ed, under the law, either. You're just not allowed to tell other people what to do with facts.
Eben Moglen commented on this in another email forum on May 24; here's an excerpt of his analysis:
> The copyright claim has been particularly discussed here: the
> assertion is that Gracenote can copyright the CDDB database and somehow
> act to prevent infringement. Much attention is being paid to the fact
> that this database was assembled by mass contribution through the net.
> That fact is conceptually interesting: it's an example of the
> beginnings of the "free data" economy I have written about elsewere.
> But it has no effect on the legal situation. The short obvious
> answer, which should result in the dismissal of Gracenote's copyright
> claim, is that Gracenote has no copyrightable interest in the
> database. That's the holding of the US Supreme Court in Feist
> Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 US 340 (1991). Feist
> concerned the assertion of copyright in the content of telephone white
> pages. The Court held that there is insufficient originality in the
> directory associating names, addresses and telephone numbers to put
> the directory within the scope of copyright.
>
> Hence my comment to the press about a phone directory built by asking
> customers to call in. The point is precisely that it *doesn't matter*
> how you come by the information: a directory like the telephone white
> pages or the CDDB database is not copyrightable whether it was
> assembled by going out and finding the information using your own shoe
> leather, or by getting free contributions from others. In any event,
> because what results is facts, not expressions, it's not subject to
> copyright.
--
Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...
cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm
(OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?)