antikoan

 |::| Monday, August 05, 2002

 |::|   11:42:12 AM 

Mad Magazine is 50 years old.

Sure, it's not what it used to be. What is? What should be? It's still kinda sophomoric and silly. But somehow that doesn't bother me much. I'd rather have the kids reading Mad than swallowing the Party Line with the hook and the sinker attached.

 |::| "Free" as in "Work Will Set You Free," not as in "Freedom"  11:34:07 AM 

You know, information doesn't get to be free. But that's got very little to do with the bits, or the atoms, or the bandwidth, or the speed of the copying, or any of these things that techies lick their chops over. Information stays expensive because of the social processes in which information is embedded.
Bruce Sterling, from "A Contrarian View of Open Source" at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference

I read Bruce Sterling's contrarian rant about open source, much of which I agree with. However, there's one bit of pushback that really needs to get out there. There's a lot more to commercial software than Microsoft. To the extent that people frame the conversation as Microsoft or open source, they cripple the non-monopolist commercial vendors. Apple, for example is neither Microsoft or open source. Nor is IBM, Macromedia, Adobe, Oracle, Sun, AOL. And weblogs, like the one you're reading now, are generally managed with software that neither comes from Microsoft or open source developers. Now you may think either MS or OS will crush us, but stop and think, do you really want that to happen? Would you prefer that independent developers be able to make a living writing software? I know, Eric Raymond told you that there were other ways to make money developing software. Unfortunately, those techniques don't work for end-user software, the easy to use stuff, for individual people. The only thing that works there is developers charging users for the product. We can afford to give you a lot of source, but not all of it.
-- Dave Winer, Scripting News

Very few people are willing to take truly contrarian positions on Open Source -- that is, to make well-reasoned arguments against the prevailing "Cluetrain" bullshit-wisdom that's dominant on the 'net right now. Dave Winer does, though I don't always agree with him; but Bruce Sterling does it too, and does it better (which shouldn't be surprising, he makes his living at writing and Winer doesn't).