Fake Steve Tees Off

Spacemonkey — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:22:00 +0000

I’ve been using the excellent Vienna RSS reader for the majority of my time on this Mac, and have to admit that I’m just getting overrun with all the reading and simply cannot catch up. One such feed category that I stopped looking at was the Apple one, that had a bunch of interesting and entertaining feeds.

So I took a quick gander today just to see if I’d missed anything. Other than the whole Leopard launch (sorry, off limits until Digidesign updates ProTools, grr) there were not that many interesting items, but there were a few that made me chuckle.

One of which is the Diary of Fake Steve Jobs and I have to presume you’re not living under a rock and know of the site, famous for a comedic/parody of a guy openly saying he’s pretending to be Steve Jobs.

The first post to make me chortle was Stallman to Dvorak: Welcome to freedom, your rulebook is in the mail. This is penned as a parodied response to Dvorak’s recent column where he chastises Redmond for giving him so much frustration that he’s seriously considering switching operating systems.

NOTE: As proper punishment I’m not linking to John’s original article, as I do occasionally try to follow the age-old advice don’t feed the trolls .

Of course, the most entertaining aspect of this is how he also deftly pretends to be a father figure of open source, Richard Stallman, who writes an open letter to Dvorak giving him instructions on how to comply with his newfound freedom.

He (Fake Steve, that is) then takes it one step further with PJ to Dvorak: Please schedule a re-education course ASAP, panning another open source celebrity.

However the point he’s shrewdly trying to make – while making fun of his victims of course – is that there are some pretty extreme people hanging around the open source world and they have some less-than-tolerant views on those who don’t subscribe to the exact same views of theirs.

That is one of the things that led me to launch this site, in the hopes of bringing to light the alarming rapid separation of open source and free software ideologies. The open source folks are totally hip with the free software gang, however there have been repeated examples of how intolerant the free software folks can be toward other open source efforts – some of which have been chronicled on this very site (not that anyone other than my mom reads this site, that is).

I had to write this article as Fake Steve really hit that nail on the head, while not bashing open source he clearly targets the more extremist types.

When are these people going to realize that enforced freedom is an oxymoron?

Homesteading the Noosphere

Spacemonkey — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 15:17:00 +0000

Eric S. Raymond is a rather high-profile personality in the industry. His involvement in open source started decades ago, and you could say that he’s been a primary participant from the beginning.

He’s written a fascinating essay on the topic that I’m starting this site over, called Homesteading the Noosphere.

Some of the most appropriate quotes for this website:

“Historically, the most visible and best-organized part of the hacker culture has been both very zealous and very anticommercial. The Free Software Foundation founded by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) supported a great deal of open-source development from the early 1980s forward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the forseeable future.”

“For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. They effectively defined the term `free software’, deliberately giving it a confrontational weight (which the newer label `open source’ just as deliberately avoids).”

“Thus, perceptions of the hacker culture from both within and without it tended to identify the culture with the FSF’s zealous attitude and perceived anticommercial aims. RMS himself denies he is anticommercial, but his program has been so read by most people, including many of his most vocal partisans. The FSF’s vigorous and explicit drive to ``Stamp Out Software Hoarding!’’ became the closest thing to a hacker ideology, and RMS the closest thing to a leader of the hacker culture.”

“The FSF’s license terms, the ``General Public License’’ (GPL), expresses the FSF’s attitudes. It is very widely used in the open-source world. North Carolina’s Metalab (formerly Sunsite) is the largest and most popular software archive in the Linux world. In July 1997 about half the Sunsite software packages with explicit license terms used GPL.”

Ok, so that explains the one group. But there is another…

“But the FSF was never the only game in town. There was always a quieter, less confrontational and more market-friendly strain in the hacker culture. The pragmatists were loyal not so much to an ideology as to a group of engineering traditions founded on early open-source efforts which predated the FSF. These traditions included, most importantly, the intertwined technical cultures of Unix and the pre-commercial Internet.”

“The typical pragmatist attitude is only moderately anticommercial, and its major grievance against the corporate world is not `hoarding’ per se. Rather it is that world’s perverse refusal to adopt superior approaches incorporating Unix and open standards and open-source software. If the pragmatist hates anything, it is less likely to be `hoarders’ in general than the current King Log of the software establishment; formerly IBM, now Microsoft.”

“To pragmatists the GPL is important as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. Its main value is not as a weapon against `hoarding’, but as a tool for encouraging software sharing and the growth of bazaar-modebazaar-mode development communities. The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.”

Excellent reading, as the piece goes on to explain how the pragmatists gained a foothold with the introduction of linux and Linus Torvalds, who has always been a pragmatist and takes occasional potshots at the zealots.

“Increasingly it was the anticommercial purists who found themselves in a minority. How much things had changed would not become apparent until the Netscape announcement in February 1998 that it would distribute Navigator 5.0 in source. This excited more interest in `free software’ within the corporate world. The subsequent call to the hacker culture to exploit this unprecedented opportunity and to re-label its product from `free software’ to `open source’ was met with a level of instant approval that surprised everybody involved.”

“In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s. Other semi-independent communities with their own self-consciousness and charismatic leaders began to bud from the Unix/Internet root stock. Of these, the most important after Linux was the Perl culture under Larry Wall. Smaller, but still significant, were the traditions building up around John Osterhout’s Tcl and Guido van Rossum’s Python languages. All three of these communities expressed their ideological independence by devising their own, non-GPL licensing schemes.”

I’ll leave the rest of the reading for you as a literary exercise :-)

Pragmatists, unite!

Open Source Hypocrisy: Tag rms

Fake Steve Tees Off

Homesteading the Noosphere