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| Thursday, May 17, 2001 |
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Back in high school again
| | Hey, we're popular. Was it because I complained about dropping off the other day? |
Nasty Weather
| | I just looked up Santa Barbara weather at Weather.com. Suddenly, right in the middle of my screen there appeared a new window with a 740x316 ad for a "Tiny Wireless Video Camera." In an instant that put me in the market for a new weather service. |
I can't help it, okay?
| | Still writing my editorial here after 11pm. I'm so bleary that I just called Microsoft's shared source "scared source." |
And now for something completely funny
| | Here's Dave Barry on Tony Robbins. |
Mind food
| | I catch shit for crediting hackers (as I did below) with building the Net. And maybe I'm wrong to say so (I've often said so myself — that I'm wrong, that is). But never mind. Instead, look (as I instructed yesterday, but repetition is the sincerest form of redundancy) at what Dr. Weinberger says about the breed of hacker he calls the Long Beards. It's good stuff that makes ya think. Here, I hope, is some more... |
| | We all have our reasons for doing what we do. And not all of those reasons can be explained fully in economic, technical, legal or any other terms. At least not exclusively. |
| | Terms matter. They are not filters through which we view the world, but blocks with which we build what we say. When we turn what we mean into what we say, we pull words from virtual boxes of related terms. |
| | Each box of words is the unconscious subject we speak "in terms of." When we speak about software as a "product" and a "property" with "values" that we "add," we are speaking in terms of something. That something is what the cognitive linguists call a conceptual metaphor. We can debate exactly what this metaphor is, but software is a material substance comes close enough. There is a conceptual system here by which we conceive software as a material substance that we manufacture. By this concept software's nature has far more in common with a cake than with, say, an idea. |
| | In his most recent piece, Craig Mundie talks about ideas in terms of money: |
| | What is at issue with the GPL? In a nutshell, it debases the currency of the ideas and labor that transform great ideas into great products. |
| | Look at what he's talking about ideas in terms of: currency that transforms stuff that becomes products. In other words, money and manufacture. |
| | We ordinariloy don't "make" ideas. We "come up with" or "discover" them. We "express" or "convey" them, often by writing them down. If you conceive software as a material substance that a company manufactures and sells, it's pretty hard to understand the ideas expressed by the General Public License. That's because the GPL expresses a very different concept about what software is, and what it's good for. So: what do the FSF folks conceive software in terms of? |
| | The GPL uses several words as synonyms for the noun "software": "work," "code," "program"... But those are careful terms required by a contractual document. What the GPL's advocates are really saying — what they are speaking in terms of — shows up here: |
| | ...the economic argument has a flaw: it is based on the assumption that the difference is only a matter of how much money we have to pay. It assumes that ``production of software'' is what we want, whether the software has owners or not. |
| | People readily accept this assumption because it accords with our experiences with material objects. Consider a sandwich, for instance. You might well be able to get an equivalent sandwich either free or for a price. If so, the amount you pay is the only difference. Whether or not you have to buy it, the sandwich has the same taste, the same nutritional value, and in either case you can only eat it once. Whether you get the sandwich from an owner or not cannot directly affect anything but the amount of money you have afterwards. |
| | This is true for any kind of material object---whether or not it has an owner does not directly affect what it is, or what you can do with it if you acquire it. |
| | But if a program has an owner, this very much affects what it is, and what you can do with a copy if you buy one. The difference is not just a matter of money. The system of owners of software encourages software owners to produce something---but not what society really needs. And it causes intangible ethical pollution that affects us all. |
| | What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can't study or change. |
| | Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air. |
| | It's hard to nail down the exact conceptual metapor — the subconcious noun that invites the vocabulary Richard and his colleagues employ. But the adjectives are easy: software is social. It's public stuff. |
| | A couple hours ago Craig Burton called and challenged me on the issue of whether or not software — code, ones and zeroes — has a nature. I said it did. He said it didn't. We came to agree its nature is what we make of it. |
| | For the most part Richard Stallman and Craig Mundie want to make different kinds of software. In part that's because their interests are different; but the deeper reason is that they understand software in terms of very different conceptual systems. These systems are the very different conceptual places from which they advance their very different arguments. |
| | At this point it helps, I think, to at least begin to agree that these guys are arguing about different things, even if all those things happen to be made of ones and zeroes. The fact that Richard believes that owning software is a bad idea is less important than where he's coming from when he explains why. Conceptually, he is standing on the side of nature, and of society. Craig Mundie stands on the side of business — specifically, the business that manufactures, licenses and distributes software as at least a virtually material good: a product. People with no sides to take would agree that many worthwhile things have come from both sides. |
| | One MIT professor says of Richard Stallman, "if you asked me to name five people alive in the world who have truly helped us all, Richard Stallman would be one of them." |
| | I invite Craig Mundie and his colleagues at Microsoft to consider that statement. And I invite my friends in the free software and open source communities to consider the possibility that another one of those five might be Bill Gates. |
| | I'm not asking either side to agree; just to consider. Because what we need now is more food for thought. Not for FUD. |
Doc's blog, please hold
| | To finish my editorial, I need to open GoLive, which means I need to close some other apps, since the memory on this here laptop can't handle all of them at once. So I'll resume blogging in another hour or two. Meanwhile, dig this. |
Though I'm half Swedish, I give it my full support
| | Today is Norwegian Day here in Ballard, and there's a parade about to begin three floors below my window here on Market Street. |
The conversation permutes
| | Sometimes blogging is something like chat: while you're busy writing one thing, somebody else is responding to something you wrote a few moments ago, and you need to respond to that while you're busy working on the next thing. |
| | I've been writing and re-writing two things. One is an editorial for Linux Journal, in whose offices I am now sitting. The other is the item immediately below this one, which I keep expanding and revising along with the editorial. |
| | I didn't mean to post the blog until I was through writing it, but the Command-S impulse is hard-wired for me, and here this thing is, mumbling into something a little more thought-out with every new edit & save. |
| | I just went over to Scripting.com to start hunting for some SOAP links, and found Dave's latest entry is "Doc rants, and I rant back." His title: "There you go again." I want everybody to see I'm smiling as I write this, because I'm still going even though I feel like I'm not even ready to start. |
| | Garrison Keillor once said "English is the preacher's language because it allows you to speak until you think of what to say." That's exactly what I'm doing here. |
| | What I'm trying to say is exactly what Dave says here: I'm still waiting for both sides, the open source leaders, and Microsoft, to start talking about a world bigger than themselves and each other. So am I, even though everything I'm trying to write is pointing toward that world. It's a big, partly-built, inclusive world that needs everybody from the free software, open source and commercial development communities — plus everybody else with something to contribute. |
| | What I've been trying to do in the section below is write about the positive stuff two opposed parties both contribute to the whole, and need to understand about each other. I'm trying to avoid the black holes Esther Dyson once characterized as "I'm right, you're evil." |
| | I've got more to say, but I'll say it here. |
It's still about The New World
| | First there was Craig Mundie's Speech. Then there was Bruce Perens' response, signed by most of the GNU/Linux community's leading personalities. Somewhere in there was my own take on the matter. Now Mundie comes back with his own response, which concludes with this: |
| | When comparing the commercial software model to the open-source software model, look carefully at the business plans and licensing structures that form their foundations. This comparison leads to the conclusion that the commercial software model alone has the capacity for sustaining real economic growth. Intellectual capital has always been, and will remain, the core asset of the software industry, and of almost every other industry. Preserving that capital--and investing in its constant renewal--benefits everyone. |
| | Of course this continues to play as a fight. But in fact both parties are talking at different levels. |
| | The free/open folks are talking about the nature of code, and the nature of relationships involved in writing and maintaining code. But not just any code. They're talking about code that works for everybody because it belongs to nobody. This kind of code, and the philosophy that governs it, is manifested monumentally by the Net. |
| | Microsoft is talking about software as an intellectual product, and the economic good that derives from manufacturing and selling that product. This kind of business, and the philosophy that governs it, is manifested monumentally by Microsoft. |
| | What both these parties say about their concerns is both highly interesting and largely irrelevant to the other. The free/open folks don't have much use for Microsoft's business licenses, and Microsoft doesn't have much use for the GPL. Yet in fact the burden is on Microsoft to discover the virtues expressed in the GPL and other free/open licenses, simply because Microsoft now depends on the Net. Not vice versa. |
| | The GPL is fundamentally a social agreement, not a legal one. It formalizes the obligations involved in the relationships that sustain a culture that values sharing and the public good that comes from sharing. The free/open folks see this public good threatened by those who want to take its sources and make them private. This point of view is easy to percieve as anti-business. In fact it is simply far more concerned about the way code works in the public domain than in the private. |
| | The "licensing structures" Microsoft cares most about all rely on conceiving code as capital: as a manufactured good. These are easy to understand and argue about as long as one continues to conceive code only in material terms. But code is not material, and no amount of lawmaking or marketing can make it material. |
| | The deepest fact in this matter is not that software wants to be free, but that code wants to be public. Meanwhile too many of our laws and business practices cannot comprehend that fact. It's too far outside their immediate concerns. Like the core of the Earth, it's nice to have but too deep to appreciate. |
| | The problem for Microsoft is that it lives in a world increasingly built with public code that oozes like lava out of the free & open ground below everybody. This isn't core-of-Earth stuff. We're making a whole new world here. Together. And that includes Microsoft, which in fact does contribute to common infrastructure. SOAP is a good example. |
| | Indeed, much good has been produced by what Mundie calls the "commercial software model." But the Net on which all of business increasingly relies is not a product of that model, even though business is certainly involved. |
| | What these hackers know and Craig Mundie doesn't (yet), is that there is much to the nature of code that can neither be comprehended nor represented by the conceptual system Mundie employs — not because it's insufficient in scope but rather because it's operating at a higher level. It's valid only at that level. At a deeper level — the nature of software itself — the higher principles of business don't apply, for the same reason that the principles of mechanics can't describe the principles of physics or chemistry, even while mechanics depends on those deeper principles. |
| | Here's an other view. Business relies on infrastructure. It is also in a position to contribute to infrastructure. But that infrastructure is, like the air and the Sun, public stuff. And that public stuff is produced by other motivations, concerns and principles. Calling them "deeper" simply locates them at a level below the exclusive concerns of business — matters of ownership, profit and the rest of it. (And the parties who have the hardest time right now are the ones who are trying to do both: make money as a business and contribute to the public good by building infrastructure that works for everybody.) |
| | The GPL may not be a useful business license, but it's a mighty useful statement about why it was hackers, and not Microsoft, who gave us the Net. |
Flogrolling in our time
| | Turns out RageBoy® has a bit of a bookbuying problem. I found this out by reading the latest EGR, and following one of its several links to the best portal ever to grace Amazon's rapaciously clueful customer-involvement apparatus. Is there a word for being simultaneously envious and appalled? It goes here. |
| | ...some teenager puts up a page of dancing hamsters that pulls eighty-three bajillion hits in two weeks -- so many that her ISP's server melts down. Total cost: twenty-nine dollars. |
| | But does business make the correct inference from this? Does anyone in the boardroom say "Jeepers! They'd rather be looking at singing rodents than our zillion-dollar e-commerce site!" Generally speaking, this realization is strenuously deprecated. And though everyone in the organization knows it's true, giving voice to such a sentiment at any level below the boardroom constitutes seriously career-inhibiting behavior. |
But they don't make a federal case of it
| | The Washington Post discovers blogs. As usual, Ev gets good ink (or pixels, anyway). But the angle is the default one: |
| | Blogging software is spawning tens of thousands of second-generation Matt Drudges. Some of their productions resemble intensely personal diaries; others focus on career interests. |
| | No credit to blogs for changing the nature of journalism itself. But thanks to that changed nature, the insult doesn't bother me at all. |
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