Great insight from Matthew Yglesias:
The habit of insisting that only the right and the left have “ideologies” and that people in the center don’t is one of the absolute most frustrating elements of conventional political discussion in the United States. The fact of the matter is that “centrist” ideological taboos have been the big story of the Obama administration. That starts with the imposition of an arbitrary cap on the size of the stimulus bill, it continues to the utterly merciless and fanatical centrist opposition to the existence of any public option, to the Fed’s refusal to undertake further monetary easing, to the unwillingness to contemplate really stern measures against bailed-out banks and their executives, and on and on and on.
The idea of a “centrist” ideology is easiest to apply to the “left-right” political spectrum in the U.S., but it holds true in other areas as well (e.g. proprietary versus open). While the “correct” answer is often between two extremes, that’s not always the case. People who tend to favor shades of grey are not necessarily more reasonable, just more prone to picking shades of grey.
I’ve decided to leave my current job at Linden Lab. Those of you interested in the ins-and-outs of Second Life may want to look at my post to “sldev” (our open source development mailing list). It was a tough decision to leave, and even tougher to make without having my next move totally nailed down, but so far it feels like the right decision. Ask me in a couple months how I feel 
Without going into too much detail about what I’m working on, suffice it to say that it involves open source in a pretty big way. Even if this immediate opportunity doesn’t pan out, the scope of stuff I’ll be looking at is going to be pretty narrowly focused on facilitating the creation of open source software. I’ll write more here as things get clearer.
I just set up a mock election on Selectricity, just to see what it could do, and was pleasantly surprised that they created a very simple interface for creating Schulze/Condorcet elections that pretty much anyone can use. I tried getting to this point a few years ago with Electowidget, but sadly didn’t get to a usable enough place (nor a maintainable enough site).
Tags:
condorcet,
elections
There’s a bit of a flamewar going on right now between the main PulseAudio developer, and another Linux desktop developer who grew frustrated by some very real problems caused directly and indirectly by it. PulseAudio is the latest of many savior technologies that promise to make audio on Linux not suck. I’m actually pretty optimistic that the fifth(?) time’s a charm here; there’s a lot of very sensible things about the design.
Anyway, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote a series of blog posts culminating in “PulseAudio: I told you so“. In these, he documents his frustration with being given the runaround when trying to point out PA problems that he ends up debugging to the point of finding and/or filing several bugs/patches in various bug trackers. PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering had enough, and posted to his blog with a long rebuttal, claiming that Stedfast’s blog post “flamed my software and hence me”. It’s a pretty run of the mill developer flamewar, which only caught my eye because I’ve had a few frustrating problems with PA myself and was hoping to learn more.
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This article in CIO Magazine touches on things that you should look for in choosing open source software:
- Project stability: Can you trust the project to be there when you need it?
- Project support: Can you get support when you need it?
- Internal software management: Does your company know what open-source programs it’s using? How it’s developing and deploying them both in-house and to customers?”
I’m not so sure that these problems are truly bigger problems for open source as they are for software in general. When people in companies select a new piece of software (for use as a standalone product or as an integrated component of a larger system) they miss one important thing: it is much more like a hiring decision than they probably realize. Many of the considerations people make for new employees (reputation, cultural fit, how they are to work with) are equally applicable to new software components and systems.
(CIO article via Matthew Aslett @ The 451 Group)
Here’s a description of the organic open source panel at OSCON (which I’m participating in): “The OSI’s Open Source Definition attempts to set the minimum bar for a software license to be considered “open source”. However, there’s much more to a software project than just the license. Are software projects dominated by a single company still open source? Does a project need to be ‘organic’ to be truly open source? What does “organic” even mean in this context?”
My answer to the first two questions is “yes, of course projects dominated by one company are still open source, and no it doesn’t need to be ‘organic’”, where “organic” is (arguably) defined as a project which the first release included source, and is generally characterized as by a distributed development team with no single company truly in control, and “inorganic” is generally code that started off life as a proprietary effort. Yay, panel concluded, thanks everyone!
No? Ok, the line of questions above implies a question of quality, and there are very real qualitative differences between “organic” and “inorganic” open source…..
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Tags:
foss,
organic,
oscon
Matt Asay wrote a blog post “Cash, code, or free-riding in open source communities?“, which was a good post on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about myself. He used the term “free-rider” which caused a well documented uproar.
I’m saddened by the sense of entitlement inherent in the uproar. What’s wrong with asking members of a software community to do more than just use the software? Personally, I feel that if I can endure the twice-a-year NPR pledge drive banter (which centers around making “free-riders” feel bad), I can deal with being asked to throw a little something back to the authors of the software I use. In the end, just like NPR, no one is obligated to donate, but no one should fault them for asking, because it’d suck if no one did donate.
Some of the negative responses to this article exhibit a behavior that is gets under my skin as someone who is in a similar boat as Matt. It seems fashionable these days to bash on the vendors associated with single-vendor open source projects. Do we really not want to see more vendors release their source code, or do we instead want the investment dollars to go toward the creation of more proprietary software? Don’t we think that skeptical proprietary software purveyors look at that kind of thing, and think “wow, glad that’s not me!”? I realize that most community members are aware of the nuance and hard problems, and its often the blowhards that are the most vocal, but often, the blowhards go unchallenged. Why should we let them feel cool about doing trashing those people making an honest effort? Like Savio Rodrigues, I want to see open source software production get a larger percentage of the overall investment in software than we’re seeing today.
Dave Neary has a great blog post about Sun trying to do the right thing. It was refreshing to read this, and quite insightful. I’ve been watching the naming debate with some interest, if for no other reason than this is a conversation I’m quite interested in pushing my view in, and it helps to have a shared vocabulary.
I can’t help but think that the Linux vs OpenSolaris debate is like if two candidates for the Green Party got into an Obama vs Clinton style fight over the Green Party nomination. The free software community is going to have a tough enough time winning in November, so to speak, without scaring off the newcomers.
A little bit of work talk. I’m going to be speaking tonight (January 31) at the Seattle Social Media Club about Second Life, along with my co-worker Greg Tomko-Pavia (aka Periapse Linden)
Jeff Barr at Amazon, who has been doing really innovative work promoting Amazon Web Services using Second Life, and Brian White, the author of Second Life – A Guide to Your Virtual World.
If you’d like to show up, please RSVP for the event. It’s happening in downtown Seattle at Text100
The writers strike has temporarily saved me from staring zombie-like from my slouched position on the couch, and instead has me typing zombie-like from a differently-slouched position on my couch. After seeing a couple of mildly amusing clips from on-strike writers (from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I was curious enough to poke around the writers’ website and see them make their case. Regardless of the merits of the strike, the writers are in a much better position to make their case than they were the last time they did this.
But I think it’s a lot worse than writers with extra YouTube posting time on their hands. There’s a piece in the L.A. Times about how non-Hollywood money is starting to find good writers (via pmarca)
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I like reading Paul Kedrosky’s Infectuous Greed blog, even if I think he occasionally says some things that are completely moronic. One reason I do, though, is the occasonal food for thought, like this post on inflated house prices.
Yale economist Bob Shiller says in the weekend issue of Barron’s that he’s still looking for 20-30% housing price declines over the next 5-10 years — including in untouchable cities like San Francisco and New York (and I’ll include Vancouver)
He goes on to quote the article, talking about the relocation that’s occurring. Some folks left comments that pointed out that there are always going to be people drawn to jobs in hot markets like New York or San Francisco, but I know of at least one San Francisco-based company that’s looking to hire outside of the city.
For those of you wondering what I’ve been doing at Linden Lab, now I can tell you.
Hazel has reached the developmental milestone Rob and I are calling “Spookyfish”. For those of you who don’t watch South Park – one of the characters, Stan, gets this pet goldfish which turns out to be evil and kills people. No – that’s not Hazel’s new trick (more…)
Google’s social networking site Orkut was the coolest thing since sliced bread back in early 2004. It was a social network that actually had interesting people on it. It had a fun user interface. And then, the reliability problems kicked in, and then the Brazilians invaded every corner of it. So just about everyone I know pretty much abandoned it. I never had the heart to take it out of my bookmarks, so I would still check it every so often, confirming its still pretty much dead.
Flash forward to late 2006…
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The Weekend – Sept 9th and 10th
We rented a car for the weekend to see some things we couldn’t get to easily by walking or public transportation. Saturday we went north and crossed the Golden Gate bridge into Sausasilto before heading south to check out west San Francisco. On the way over to the bridge we drove by Ghiradelli square where the annual chocolate festival was going on but had to miss out on the party. Oh rats! (more…)