Wherein you get to watch me feed a troll

[Bryan Bishop]

I was reading some links today and found Sung was talking about open source software development and I can't help but see a lot of things wrong with his understanding of what it is and isn't. Honestly this email he wrote (and then posted) is probably just an attempt to rant and troll. And if that's the case, I deserve wasting 10min on this email for not detecting that ;-) and if not maybe we can come up with some ways to redirect-into-more-useful-endeavors this sort of anger, at least in the future...

So, I'll be providing some comments here. Some of you may remember Sung from diybio-nyc and the article published on him where it was claimed that "he might be the only student trying to make a synthetic organism" (sic).

http://www.bloggersbase.com/blogging/jaron-lanier-fall-of-opensource/

1.Opensource movement is boring. Seriously, sitting down and writing Wikipedia entries (of often questionable accuracy), worrying about how to format texts? Sure, it's something you and I might do in our spare time, but we are geeks. Opensource is about

Wikipedia is not in the business of open source software development. I mean, sure, you commit changes, and the workflow might feel similar, but why not just talk about creative commons and how "boring" it is to create things? That's what you're really talking about (not open soure software, which is really more of a specialized legal topic under the broader banner of copyrights and creative works that you seem to be upset about). But if you want to take a project as an example for software development, you could maybe use the mediawiki platform which runs Wikipedia anyway.
 

serving all of humanity, but as it stands opensource just serves the narrow interests of a very small portion of the population: Geeks and nerds. As long as grandma and primary schools kids next door can't use opensource products/projects/frameworks simply because it's fun, the whole culture is just another outlet for elitism and fascism most hackers are supposed to hate so much. Ever said something on the lines of 'I hate being the tech support for the whole family'? That means the people who wrote those programs and services suck, not the users.

The hate is strong with this one. I don't even know where to begin.
 

2.Major opensource products are built upon nostalgia of the 'better times', the golden age of the hackerdom during the 60's~80's. Linux, gcc the vast majority of the main opensource projects are built upon, vim vs. emacs war, and etc etc. Linux distros had been making some good strides in this department but we still need to face facts. To anyone who didn't string together shell scripts when he/she was in high school, major opensource projects and the tools they are based upon look downright archaic. It

To anyone who doesn't know any better, "print" and "echo" also look archaic. Ew, text! omg! But in reality "echo" is just a simple tool available to be used when needed.
 

isn't because they have bad user interface design (they do). It's because they really are old and deprecated. I am continuously

Actually the latest vim is pretty recent, it's not as old as you might think. Same with emacs.
 

amazed by how many people tell fresh young minds entering hackerdom to go learn C. Kindergartners don't start learning English

Meh, let the kids learn it if they want to.
 

language by starting with Latin. Why is the whole darn culture based on a fast-but-bad programming language designed before many of us were born? Let's be honest here, most people who recommend C to beginners started with BASIC. When a whole culture based on ideals of innovation and sharing begins to look outdated and conservative next to hulking multi-billion/trillion dollar corporate entities, they are in trouble.

 
What on earth does corporate entities have to do with learning a couple programming languages? Honestly there's this point where you can just pick up multiple languages pretty easily.. it's not a big deal.

3.This is a repeat of above statement, but it bears some reiteration. There isn't enough innovation in the opensource community.

Woah, that's a pretty broad statement. Are you just measuring number of patents filed, or are you oblivious to the community's development and innovations, or something else entirely?
 

Again, large corporate entities that takes three days to ship an empty box innovates a whole lot more than most of the

What are you measuring, again?
 

opensource communities out there. Sure, there had been some interesting developments that's making the world a better place, like Ruby and Python. The same Ruby and Python people praise for finally getting around to implementing great ideas of programming languages like Smalltalk and Lisp. Smalltalk and Lisp was invented back when the idea of a cheap personal computer was the stuff of science fiction. Linux is playing catch up in terms of features and architecture with commercial

Can you link to some claims for "playing catch-up" in the kernelspace? I am sure there are some areas for improvement, and if you have some insight into that, you should, by all means, write that down.
 

operating systems and in critical applications UNIX is king (guess how old it is).  Meanwhile Microsoft is making strides with .NET

Microsoft .NET is just another CLR in a long line of similar initiatives.
 

framework and Google/Apple is on the cusp of next era of personal computing. Based on real world progress, opensource

community as a whole lack clear vision of what the future should be.

 
This is getting tiresome. :-P

4.There is an inherent elitism within a lot of the opensource communities. Personally I have no issue with elitism on personal level.

I would disagree with that last statement.. this entirely article is totally full of elitist opinions. Opinions aren't a bad thing to have, but this has been spiralling down hill since the beginning.
 

It's when such attitude permeates within entire communities that they begin to do real harm. Common sense dictates that any software targeted at Jane Doe should be easy enough for J.D. to use. Not so in a lot of opensource communities. If Jane Doe has hard time using an obsure text editor with more commands than the usual operating system it's her fault for being so lazy and/or dumb. If a kid who can barely type can't learn C and work with pointers the kid must be stupid. If it's too difficult for artists to use

I've never heard anyone calling a kid-who-can't-type stupid for not knowing pointers. I suspect you're making this one up.
 

computer systems to create beautiful things without pre-packaged software it's because artsy types aren't supposed to be good at computers. These problems are being addressed by a new wave of hackers and hacker-minded people but they are still tragically present in many of the present communities, even when they don't specifically come out and say those things. 

 

There are other interesting traits about opensource and opensource oriented communities Jaron Lanier pointed out as well, like how most of them are structured to shout down any voice of dissent based on fear of isolation, and how there is a culture of complacency among its leading members, but those things apply to almost any large group of people, so I felt no need to single out and discuss them.

 

I'm an optimist. I think there are movements within the opensource community that are trying to address this problem. I think the prevalence of web platforms, popularity of light weight scripting languages, and web/user interface designs are all in some form a reaction to the perceived stagnation of opensource community. People are increasingly becoming aware of what a stupid idea it is to teach C in middle schools, and how even stupider it is to begin computer education in a middle school instead of much, much earlier. I might go out on a limb and say that some people are beginning to realize that programming as an activity is not difficult at all, and that it is the teachers who don't know what they are doing, not the students.

 
How does that last sentence stem from anything that you've been talking about? It's a nice thought, but it's been around for a very long time..

Yet I am still worried about the culture of opensource. Opensource as in framework of idea, not of computing. How can we apply the ideas of opensource and innovation to the fields outside computing, like CNC based personal manufacturing, scientific

Well, in CNC personal manufacturing, you have the problem with patents (which exclude people) and how you're not granted a copyright when you build/design something. You can publish a representation of a design, and get a copyright on that, but building the actual thing is usually covered by a patent right, which you have to register for. If you don't register for it, you're OK if nobody else already has a patent right for it, and the graph of arrows and boxes is pretty hairy and complex. Nobody has solved that part yet, but fundamentally in open source hardware it boils down to pretty much the same tools used in the software development toolchain- revision control, a representation of the hardware design in some modifable form (i.e. not a compiled binary object), and some sort of "licensing" or some way to port over the open source definition through some- currently unknown- legal mechanism.
 

research and DIYbio when it's running into such problems on what should be the culture's home ground? Are those

open-manufacturers/scientists/biohobbyists/etc about to run into unforeseen trouble inherent in existing idea of opensource itself? Are we already in trouble?

Well, there's definitely a clash between the fundamental concept of a "patent"- the ability to exclude others from making or doing things- and the concept of trying to preserve the right for others to "do it". But everything else just requires you to calm down a bit and look at the approaches the community has been developing and discussing, instead of ranting and making problems worse. Thanks,

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Nathan McCorkle]

That guy's got his head up his *ss

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Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics