I hate most explanations for why people participate in Open Source. I care about this question. I enjoy the game of puzzling out the answer. In a reversal of the usual cliche I love the game and hate the players; the casual players who think they know the answer. After two decades of thinking about [...]
June 1984: The Lisp Machine is a product of the efforts of many people too numerous to list here and of the former unique unbureaucratic, free-wheeling and cooperative environment of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I believe that the commercialization of computer software has harmed the spirit which enabled such systems to be developed. Now [...]
This is great… In a sense, Google, in its ADD-driven style, is building up a sizable engineering liability here, one that it will eventually have to ‘fess up to.” — at Infecious Greed Is it true? For the life of me I don’t know. Network effect businesses depend on running as fast as you can [...]
Yoav’s post on Nagios reminds me I’d been meaning to post about Selenium. He’s right, by the way, about Nagios. The best open source emerges when a group of “buyers” have a desperate need and no patients or budget to wait for a vendor to show up and bumble around cluelessly trying to figure out [...]
I think this is extremely interesting. Linksys has a new home wireless router model, the WRT54GL which is clearly labeled as having a Linux base. At the same time the WRT54G brand is accumulating a large number of models and versions running a closes source OS (VxWorks). It has been something of a mystery to [...]
Friday, November 25, 2005
This slashdot comment reflects a common misunderstanding about how open source works… “I just setup an Apache web server for use at home, and now I’ve got 4 Apache developers living in my basement. When they showed up, they said they were my Apache community overhead and I had to let them stay there. Oh, [...]
There is a thread unfolding over here about this one liner: “The whole point of social software is to replace the social with software” But the thread has descended into a who said exactly what discussion that avoids the provocative nature of the standalone statement. The statement is obviously true in for some situations. For [...]
About 25 years ago Symbolics and Lisp Machines spun off from the MIT AI lab. MIT licensed the intelectual property around a machine known as the CADR, or MIT CADR, to these companies. This was a landmark event in the history of open source. This event made it clarified a lot of people’s thinking, particularly [...]
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
In Praise of Tweaking: A Wiki-like Programming Contest by Ned Gulley, The MathWorks, Inc. is very very cool. The folks at MathWorks make a programming platform for scientists and engineers. So they have a developer network that they manage consciously. Like most developer networks they have contests. Contests can be great for generating some excitement [...]
This is a note about how to save a few hundred dollars on your Verizon cellphone bill, and why you should seriously consider switching from a BSD or old Apache style license to the new cooler Apache 2.0 license. Standards reduce the diversity of behavior. Reducing that diversity creates efficiencies and free up resources for [...]
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