May the source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Softpanorama: (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Note: In the Switchboard below all links to additional pages are in bold, for example Donald Knuth is a link to a special page devoted to Professor Knuth, the author of TAOCP and TeX.
This page is devoted to the critique of Raymondism which is a revision of Stallmanism that advocates commercializing of open source movement. It views the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomena without rose-colored glasses. I am convinced that we need to understand both strong and weak points of OSS and the former is impossible without the latter. Both exists.
The main point here is that the idea of sacrificing yourself to save humanity is very seductive to certain types of individuals. Probably instead of saving the world it is often wiser to learn to live in it. The latter is also more difficult.
| ...the idea of sacrificing yourself to save humanity is very seductive to certain types of individuals. Probably instead of saving the world it is often wiser to learn to live in it. The latter is also more difficult. |
ESR's paper does has historical value but it was mainly used as a "manifesto" used to teach "open source" converts how they should look at their place in the Movement. Specifically, ESR promotes the view that "open source" is a marvelous utopia. Like all the great utopias, it is free of personality conflicts and everyone freely works for the Common Good under the benevolent dictatorship of el Linusimo.
Paradoxically in "free vs open source discussion" I am on the RMS side (Stalmanism side, if you wish ;-) and I think that RMS is right by saying that he's not sure to what extent the Free Software is compatible with corporate desire for profit. It's much more straightforward and truthful to say it that way, rather than jump over the head trying to sell open source projects to the highest bidder as ESR attempts.
There is one terminological problem: some people (RMS is one example) distinguish free software ("free software"="GPL-based software" in RMS interpretation ;-) from Open Source (umbrella term that includes BSD license, Artistic license and LGPL), some do not. Open source is snappier, clearer, less ambiguous, and close enough to the same thing. As such it's preferable to the 99% of people. I know that RMS disagree, but so be it. And actually if you are semantic fundamentalist you can see the GPL has problems with coercing the word "free" (that's why so much material on GNU site is devoted to it ;-). BSD license is more free that GPL in both "free like in beer" and "free like in freedom" meanings of this word.
The principal advantage of open source means that for simple programs the possibility of adapting program for your needs largely compensates for the shortcomings of this program. Of course you need to be a programmer to use this advantage, but the programming code is useful for adaptation only if it is really short and simple. You can convert any open source project into an analogy of closed source project just by overcomplicating the code base. That means that commercializing of open source ("Linus revolution") is internally contradictive undertaking as Red Hat behavior clearly demonstrates. As RMS said:
... I would choose a bare-bones unreliable free program rather than ... reliable proprietary program...
Again the key advantage of open source for me that "bare-bone" open source program does have additional value that might compensate for many other real or perceived faults. This opportunity is not automatic and to a large extent disappear with the growth of the size of the program. So KISS principle is of paramount importance for open source.
Again it's important to understand that the principal advantage of open source exists only up to certain amount of lines in a program. That's why scripting languages are so important and Perl, TCL, PHP and Python, not Linux can be considered to be flagships of open source. Linux is a pretty conservative reimplementation of Unix that introduced almost nothing new into operating system kernel design. And BTW Unix introduced at least seven: C language as system programming language, hierarchical filesystem, pipes and a set of pipes friendly utilities/filters, regular expressions, devices as files, shell as the mother of all modern scripting languages, first built-in TCP/IP stack). If one compares Linux with BE OS, Inferno or even with OS/2 and Amiga one can see that in major design decisions Linux is an extremely conservative OS. As Rob Pike noted in his "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf) Linux can be considered as a sign that computer science research became irrelevant and he claimed that the whole situation in OS design is generally bad and requires action.
The second important point is that Raymondism statement that open-source software as a new economic force for producing software is inherently or inevitably superior to alternatives is plain vanilla Vulgar Marxism. As I mentioned in My responce to the letter by Paolo Pumilia to the FM:
I would like to reiterate that ERS's views on the economic superiority of open source are close to vulgar Marxism with it's economic determinism. Contrary to your impression "vulgar Marxism " is a legitimate scientific term. As Professor Robert M. Young stated in his work "Marxism and the history of science" [see R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (editors), Companion to the History of Modern Science. (1996), pp. 77-86.]:
"The defining feature of Marxist approaches to the history of science is that the history of scientific ideas, of research priorities, of concepts of nature and of the parameters of discoveries are all rooted in historical forces which are, in the last instance, socio-economic. There are variations in how literally this is taken and various Marxist-inspired and Marxist-related positions define the interrelations among science and other historical forces more or less loosely. There is a continuum of positions. The most orthodox provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure. This is referred to as economism or vulgar Marxism."
All in all, I tried to communicating a more objective message that can mobilize developers by giving them a clear sense of what OSS is about, what are major pitfalls and difficulties and how to avoid them or at least lessen their influence on the project. I do not propose ready-made answers in the best CatB fairy-tale style, I have more questions that answers. Anyway, Brook's Law is not negated by a fairy-tail about a dog and pony show project (Fetchmail) by a true believer who cannot even understand that this project should use a scripting language instead of C [I assume you've heard of Brook's law].
My approach to researching this phenomena is to consider OSS as a vital part of Unix Renaissance with Linux as one of several free kernels (and like FreeBSD and Solaris kernels is too complex in the latest incarnations and far from being the best available Unix kernel; it's probably dead last in quality and architectural refinement among the three kernels mentioned above).
Special attention is devoted to the limitations of the OSS because I strongly believe that understanding limitations of OSS is probably one of the most important component of general understanding of OSS phenomena. For example I think that attempt to complete with NT in both client and server space for Linux will harm the kernel development and introduce the level of bloat that is comparable with Microsoft with corresponding problems in stability. Also contrary to CatB I think that there was a process of switching of the development of kernel from volunteers to paid developers, the process that started around 1997 and was mainly completed after 1999 Linux IPOs. I suspect that since Linus Torvalds became Transmeta chief PR person it's simply incorrect to think about Linux kernel as a pure volunteer-driven project as CatB tries to present it. Similarly it's incorrect to think about ESR as a volunteer Linux evangelist since his election to the VA Linux board. Actually ESR is an extremely well paid Linux evangelist that contributed a lot to the Linux Gold Rush. And there were some Gold rush victims. Sound that this has nothing to do with open source? Read on. Here is the message that I had found on the Linuxtoday forum about "absurdly rich" Eric Raymond:
|
|
I tend to think that 'Sudden Wealth Syndrome' is applicable not only to children of rich (In working class neighborhoods, a kid might say "My daddy can beat up your daddy," but in the neighborhoods of "Sudden Wealth Syndrome" the brag is "My daddy can buy your daddy."). And cosmic valuations and consolidation frenzy is only one danger to be aware of. The second one is financial problems including shady accounting practices to justify them, no real business plan, etc. It's really sad, but greed is greed even if it's connected with open source. One can expect press releases like "The company denied that it expects to find evidence of financial irregularities either in its revenue recognition or expenses". May be accompanied by resignation of CFO, CEO or both. Who just a little bit overstep regulations trying to turn a profit. The Me use Linux too IPO open sore Linus open ebiz ASP solutions satire aptly described crazy atmosphere of this gold rush bubble that partially was inspired by Raymondism (See Linus Midas Touch for more information):
The final destruction of what used to be a charming little OS scene arrived today, Monday, December 13, 1999.
Linuxtoday is spewing forth "me-use-linux-too-IPO-open-sore-Linus-open-ebiz-ASP-solutions" press releases from every backwater, buzzless Joe Q. Corp with a hotmail account...
OS figureheads are being courted for interviews with a veracity that is usually reserved only for pathological child molesters and internet CEOs...
Forty thousand "Embedded Internet eSolution Firewall Privacy Biz Remote" solutions are being deeply discounted to the five people who care enough to add one more yeahd00ditssecure.pl script to their boxes...
2-bit players are buying half-bit companies without a dime to their names just to get at the word Linux in their press releases...
Along with research materials and a collection of critical materials about the Cathedral and the Bazaar(CatB) I authored two papers on the subject. the first of them coined the term Raymondism as a negative phenomenon connected with naive, on the border of blind-folded chauvinism, view of OSS. I see it as an attempt to create an open source mythology and rally people around it (like semi organized high demand cult) that leads to the loss of credibility on the movement, and betrayal of trust of people who support it. See also What is Raymondism and Commentary to the First Paper on OSS problems.
Of course not everybody would agree with my views (actually ESR even reacted to my first paper in a rather revealing as for his own personality way) but I think that my concerns are pretty legitimate to think about them even if you disagree. See also responses to the first FM paper It's interesting to note that most responses are limited to just one day October 8, 1999. News last just one day in the atmosphere of information overload ;-)
I understand perfectly well that it's easy to refute my statements citing ERS's other papers and he really revised some of his most utopian views expressed in CatB in his later papers. The problem with such defense is that ESR's views are pretty much opportunistic and eclectic. Therefore radically different approaches happily coexist in his papers and as any opportunist he switches between mutually incompatible views as a matter of convenience. For example he often advertise his closeness to anarcho-capitalism, ironically called "libertarianism" in the USA (an eclectic political movement often called anarchism for the rich). But in many papers including CatB he is much more close to the anarcho-communism -- a variety of pre-Marxist grassroot communist philosophy. For example the idea of a gift economy that he advocated in CatB is extremely close to anarcho-communism and no amount of words or citations can refute this fact.
As J.Salinas put it in his response to LinuxWorld Eric Raymond's tips for effective open source advocacy
Surely, the real reason that Free Software took off in 1998 is that it had hit a critical mass, and re-labelling it as OpenSource probably made very little difference in practice.
The truth is that the GNU effort had been adopted by Unix users and, more importantly, by academic institutions, at an increasing rate during the late eighties and nineties, and this produced a critical mass among "those in the know" by 1997/98 that made it inevitable that Free Software would be noticed and make inroads.
Eric Raymond may want to have been more important, but really his attitudinising was just a component, albeit valued, in the inevitable flow of events, and not the decisive factor.
The take up owed everything to the CS students during the previous N years who had been taught on Free Software, and respected the model, pushed it, and sold it. ESR was just one of those people who pushed it around. Nobody where I worked had ever heard of him or of OpenSource. But they did know about Gnu and Emacs. These constituted the practical elements that made recognition of Free Software inevitable.
That's my theory, and I am sticking to it.
Nikolai Bezroukov
Note about disappearing sites: after dot-com fallout, many interesting Web sites are gone. That means that some links in pages can be broken. Please try to use Goggle, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link and, if you are successful please mail us a correct link. See HOWTO search the WEB.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It might help, but it cannot replace the best teachers and the best books.
| 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 |
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 |
O'Reilly Whence the Source Untangling the Open Source-Free Software Debate
This circumstantial evidence makes it pretty easy to perceive Stallman's generous, virtuoso effort as the technical foundation of the movement. Throngs of Free Software Foundation enthusiasts do, and thus seem to implicitly accept his radically socialist ideology as the One True Philosophy of source code liberation.
But there's another problem: Stallman wasn't the first.
Years before he or Eric Raymond ever hit on the idea of liberating source code, the UNIX operating system was being developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. As a government-regulated monopoly, AT&T was barred from competition in the computer industry. Though UNIX source code was not then "free" in either the FSF or OSI sense, it could be licensed at nominal cost.
Universities were among the first to take advantage. As a result, UNIX ended up in the hands of hundreds of collaborating academic programmers. In particular, the UNIX effort at the University of California at Berkeley spawned a West Coast hacker culture to rival Stallman's MIT cohort. Ultimately, the student programmers at Berkeley created their own variation of the operating system so potent that it became a major fork in the UNIX lineage -- the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of BSD UNIX in modern computing. Not only did it beget many key features of all future versions of UNIX, but it was also under the BSD flag that UNIX met the Internet (though at the time it went by its more ancient name, Arpanet). Much of the most common system software surrounding the TCP/IP protocol was developed at UC Berkeley, and was introduced to the world as part of BSD.
In the years since, BSD has enjoyed not only a substantial commercial run, but has also found its way into a commerce-free distribution of its own, one to rival Linux. Though not as popular or mediagenic as Linux, FreeBSD can nevertheless be widely found on the machines of hobbyists, ISPs, and major corporations alike.
So the shared source collaboration concept had received significant validation long before Raymond or Stallman showed up on the field. That would make AT&T the unlikely mother of the movement, having quietly accomplished the feat with neither Stallman's righteous rhetoric nor Raymond's theoretical grandstanding.
As one Slashdot author(see #192) put it:
It is a fairly good critique the whole essence of which, IMHO, can be phrased like so:
...Bezroukov does attack ESR as much as having his name in the article name. Why? Because ESR represents exactly this naive, on the border of blind-folded chauvinism, view of OSS. ESR, propaganda is one thing, reality is whole a lot different. |
(to save space it was considerably edited and shortened; see the last beta version)
My responce to the letter by Paolo Pumilia to the FM
I would like to reiterate that ERS's views on the economic superiority of open source are close to vulgar Marxism with it's economic determinism. Contrary to your impression "vulgar Marxism " is a legitimate scientific term. As Professor Robert M. Young stated in his work "Marxism and the history of science" [see R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (editors), Companion to the History of Modern Science. (1996), pp. 77-86.]:
"The defining feature of Marxist approaches to the history of science is that the history of scientific ideas, of research priorities, of concepts of nature and of the parameters of discoveries are all rooted in historical forces which are, in the last instance, socio-economic. There are variations in how literally this is taken and various Marxist-inspired and Marxist-related positions define the interrelations among science and other historical forces more or less loosely. There is a continuum of positions. The most orthodox provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure. This is referred to as economism or vulgar Marxism."
The second paper A second look at The Cathedral and The Bazaar is explicitly devoted to the critique of CatB (or to be more exact the version of CatB published in First Monday). I do feel that Cathedral vs. Bazaar model is primitive and incorrect.
This paper can be considered a continuation of the earlier paper Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research. One of the important aspects of the previous paper was a critique of the description of Open Source software (OSS) as a revolutionary phenomenon and argumentation that it is just another form of a scientific community. The publication of Eric Raymond's new book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (O'Reilly) makes a fresh and critical review of his most influential paper The Cathedral and The Bazaar (CatB) that is central to this book even more necessary. This his paper provides an overview of the weaknesses of the CatB (the idea of inapplicability of Brooks' Law, the idea that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", the view of the source code as the best thing since sliced bread, etc.) as well as the more coherent demonstration of the fact that the bazaar metaphor is internally contradictive and that in some parts Linux can be considered as belonging to the Cathedral model, while Microsoft can be considered as belonging to the Bazaar model. The complex nature and pitfalls of status competition are discussed. Along with a critique of CatB views, a more objective picture of the status competition in the OSS environment is provided.
As one of the founders of Cygnus and prominent GNU C compiler developer, Michael Tiemann said in his recent interview:
Now, Eric Raymond wrote a very popular piece called The Cathedral and the Bazaar that contrasts those two development models. Abstractly, he brings up a lot of very interesting points, but I would not say we've discovered the truth yet about GNU versus Linux, in terms of development models. There are cathedral aspects to Linux and bazaar aspects to GNU. Eric Raymond's story makes for interesting reading and raises interesting points, but in my mind, having been part of the cathedral model, those points are much more theoretical.
If Eric Raymond were absolutely correct about the cathedral model, it would have been impossible for a 23-year-old to download the GNU C compiler and two weeks later spin out a brand-new port to a completely new architecture - and, after signing the FSF assignment papers, have it accepted back by Stallman. That's not the cathedral model. The cathedral model is "centralized everything," with somebody dictating: "We're going to put the narthex here, and the nave there, and the chancery over here." I did six ports of the GNU C compiler in a year while writing the GNU C++ front end. Other people used those data points to say, "Well gosh, if this guy can do it, then so can I." And that really caused the whole blossoming of the GNU ports. The GNU compilers from Cygnus support over 150 different host-target combinations, and they can theoretically be configured to support over a thousand.
So I don't think it's fair to characterize the GNU tools from a purely "cathedral" point of view. I really think there are elements of the central control and the haphazard-and-serendipitous development models at work there.
See also:
Short Introduction into Lysenkoism -- my (very limited) attempt to describe this very complex phenomenon.
Open Source Chronicle -- some research materials for the paper. Very raw
Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers alpha version
Softpanorama Lysenkoism and Pseudoscience Page -- problems in the academic research
[ Nov 27, 2002] Google Search raymondism -- pretty amusing views from some Linux enthusiasts ;-)
From: Angerthas.Daeron (daeron@demon.com)
Subject: Max Burke spreads Microsoft fud
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
View: Complete Thread (4 articles) Original Format
Date: 2002-11-27 08:28:39 PST
In a previous post Max Burke (mlvburke@%$%#@.nz) wrote the following :<snip> ".. # Before I get flamed for this, please understand that a holy war, "Linux uber alles" of sorts, is a self-defeating strategy. I hope that there is a healthy "silent majority" of the open source community (that why I actually am writing this FAQ) who are just writing code as best they can, and/or submitting patches bug reports. But that does not mean that we can just ignore the ranting and raving of the zealots. But the public tend to define the open source community in terms of its most outspoken members which in this particular case means zealots... http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/Bla_faq/raymondism.shtml .."He accuses us on COLA of promoting a holy war and of being zealots. He points to a web page to back up his arguments. It's written by one "Nikolai Bezroukov" of Kiev University of commerce and economics, Ukraine which makes him eminently qualified to comment on the issue. I make this point as Mr Bezroukov himself doesn't think Linus Torvalds is qualified to give opinions. He purports to be an unbiased commentator but from the tone and content I for one suspect his motives. I had not been aware of it's existence so here is a belated response. Firstly I am not a zealot. I am just a user of the technology. I come here to disguise Linux with like minded individuals. The same cannot be said for Mr Burke and others with the same hidden agenda as himself. I suspect that they are in fact disguised proponents for the Microsoft Corporation. I guess you knew that already. I don't use the Microsoft product and can go for ages without mentioning it. I have no axe to grind either way. What I do object to is these WinTrolls coming over here pretending to engage in dialogue. But secretly trying to undermine the Open Source Community in general. It cannot be a co-incidence that the language, deceptions and mis-information they use is strikingly similar to the product coming out of Redmond. You might suspect that it has been written by the same people. It's also strange how most of the fud mentioned here at one time or another bears a striking resemblance to that web page. It's remarkable how they are all so ON MESSAGE. There has been a change of tack recently. Rather that the direct assault they are going for a more suttle approach. In the web page referred to above the author one "Nikolai Bezroukov" resorted to the personal attack. Referring to something called "Raymondism". This I assume is a gratuitous personal insult aimed at "Eric S. Raymond" author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" amongst other things. "Raymondism" can also be refered to as "childish diseases" and "bad advocacy" he informs us. He defines the affliction as "naive .. blind fold Linux chauvinism ("Linux uber alles")". The quotes are himself quoting himself. Linux advocates he don't agree with are just like Nazis - (it's the German quotation - get it !). What he does like is "a credible OSS advocacy" - what this is he doesn't say. O.S.S ".. can play a positive role in developing countries .." he says, get that people ? Some colonials might have a use for it. Don't even think of going head to head against W2K. He attacks ERS for ".. primitive anti Microsoft rhetoric ..". http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,384326,00.html ".. Since Jan. 1998 Eric Raymond successfully promoted "open source" as a distinct and slightly anti-Stallman movement. See for example his interview with Smart Reseller Straight From The Source where Eric was called a Godfather of Linux ;-) .." There was no reference to a "Godfather of Linux" in the quoted article. Is this a case of someone making up their own quotes again ? I've tried to find the quote on google but to no avail. He also quotes ESR and attacks him because some of the same arguments could be applied to Microsoft. Here he betrays his true position, not as an "objective" reviewer of OSS but as an apologist for the Microsoft corporation. This me-too-ism runs through the article(s). I'm curious as to his motives for this hatchet job on OSS. He even quotes Pope Boniface VII at one point to bolster his arguments. OSS you see - it's the devils work ! ".. At the same time the movement is still in its early stages (and not last days, as some predict) .." Who ever said OSS was on its last days ? Nobody. You print a falsehood only to retract it in the same sentence. This bares similarities to an "Ericism". Are they by any chance related ? ".. What ESR and Co failed to realize is that people who are developing and using Solaris, Novell and Microsoft products are also professionals and many of them are of a caliber far superior to the author of low to middle-range open source products like EMACS editor macros, a mail utility, and like ;-). For any intelligent professional an open demonstration of arrogance naturally creates a strong negative reaction, a backlash that is damaging to the movement credibility and future .." Why is such a superior company desperately trying to gather cudos by comparing themselves to a bunch of sandle wearing OSS advocates. The words Inferiority Complex comes to mind. See how he has to rope in Solaris and Novell to bolster his arguament. I suspect neither of them would be quick to defend the beast. Again he tacks a negative signifier on to the end of the sentence possible in the hope that no one would notice. This again reminds me of a typical fud posting here. See how he gets 'author' 'low' and 'open source products' together in the same sentence. For such an expert on OSS the only apps he can think of are "EMACS" "editor macros" and "a mail utility". A Microsoft defender accuses the OSS movement of "arrogance". Has he ever heard the expression Pot Kettle Black ? The only war is the one being prosecuted from One Microsoft Way. OSS people have neither the time or the inclination to mount "WARS". He uses the word on more than one occasion. Bill Gates may be at war with the rest of the world but that's his own paranoia. ".. The same problems exist with primitive anti Microsoft rhetoric .." er the TRUTH ! This arrogant bastard then goes on to abuse Linus Torvalds ".. technical judgments are very suspect .. things about which he actually has very little real knowledge due to the specifics of his career .." Could Mr Bezroukov please enlighten us as to his own qualifications. As he is not impressed with Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond" or Linus Torvalds. There is an old football expression around here - if you can't go for the ball then go for the man. We can be sure which philosophy fires up Bezroukov - go for the man. ".. We should suspect any OSS advocacy that includes the following features .." Is that the royal we or do you have an invisible friend sitting on your sholder as you type ? ".. open source software .. is called economism or Vulgar Marxism .." Get that folks OSS is communist. YOUR ALL A BUNCH OF NO GOOD COMMIES ! Sorry I lost it there for a minute - to continue. We can take it that Nikolai has embraced the one true Church of the All Mighty Dollar and as such is displaying all the zeal of the convert. The Good Lord loves a believer. ".. See Is "Vulgar Marxism" a legitimate scientific term .." - Answer NO it's just more of the same abuse from a vulgar troll! ".. concealment of the facts about the true economic origin of .. (OSS) .. products .. 'taxpayer-funded' (university-funded) .." Do Microsoft see the Universities as a threat now. 'my god there are people actually thinking there - without a licence' Didn't his BillNess use an unauthorized terminal to bash out code in his early years - all paid for by his college ? ".. Linus Torvalds was financed .. remunerated him quite nicely .. most highly paid developers in the Unix word .." What is the point - are we supposed to feel jealous. Yes he makes money. He probably lives in a house eats food and sleeps in his own bed. Bezroukov cannot support his position on it's merits so he trashes the personal reputation of OSS advocates instead. Do these people have no integrity ? ".. disrespect of other developers .. especially Microsoft .." - Finally we come to the kernal of the matter. We've hurt their feelings. Sitting hunched out there in Redmond hacking out "Dog Food" all day is bad enough but getting maligned by your peers - that really hurts. " Instigation of hatred of the members of the commercial community is unproductive and unethical .." OH The irony ! Blackmailing and intimidating your own commercial partners is also unethical. Getting lectures on ethics from you people is ludicrous as well as insulting !
Linux Kernel Mailing List, Archive by Week Closed-door develop
http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/index.shtml
CatB in a new light. This fall Raymond has been touring Europe promoting his book. He most kindly made his way by Trondheim where he gave an unforgettable series of speeches. In one of these speeches he poses the question why nobody had articulated the bazaar mode of development prior. He says there are a handful of intelligent, articulated hackers that had already observed the phenomena, but none had spelled it out. Why is that? Raymond asks. His suggestion is that hackers like to think that their success in developing software is due to their own brilliance. All hackers liked to think so, and that is why nobody had tried to look into the matter more closely before Raymond did.
Let's permutate Raymonds question a bit, and ask: why is it that the hacker community is not questioning the apparent flaws in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar'. Paul Feyerabend writes:
There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examinations questions start dealing with problems solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory.
Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points turn into slogans; debates with opponents become standardised and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presupposes what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success; but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution. (1993, p. 30)
Answering almost with Raymond's own words: can it be that we hackers like to think that the success of our software is due to a genial, new way of development that we have come up with ourselves? Is it truly so? CatB is not a software engineering essay. It is an anthropological study. However, it contains material about the bazaar, the hackers' way of doing software engineering. Central traits to the bazaar is the open process, the freedom to do with the code what each individual developer wants, and a high degree of
cooperation. Raymond mentions Linux as an archetypal bazaar, yet in a letter to the author David Miller, a central Linux developer, writes:Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 18:40:06 +0200 (CEST)
From: David S. Miller\> is it so that you core Linux kernel developers are doing much of the discussing and
\> planning outside of the Linux kernel mailinglist?It is true to a large extent, and in my opinion it's the gem that keeps us at such high productivity rates.
It's a surefire method by which us core developers can obtain the best signal to noise ratio. Discussions happen
more efficiently and productively when you know you're talking to someone with a clue and you don't get barraged with responses from folks who are perhaps not so clueful and not so weathered on the topic as the core developers.
I.e. there is a mismatch between the map and the terrain, the map here being Raymond's bazaar and the terrain being how things work in the real world. While there is an open forum, areas for community building, the development in itself is being done in a closed
fashion. The results, i.e. the source code, is up for public review, so the product itself is still open. The process, however, is a closed one, and it is the process more than the product that Raymond emphasize as the bazaar model.
Critical Review of Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of The ...
Open source has many benefits which can be pretty inviting. However, it does have its limitations or downfalls as well. One idea here is the principal value of simplicity. The availability of source code is useful but the ability to look and modify the tool diminish rapidly with the growth of the code base. Very large and complex open source projects are probably as closed as proprietary commercial projects of the same size.<![if !supportFootnotes]>[1]<![endif]> Another criticism is that open source does not automatically provide quality feedback. More emphasis is put into development; information and instructions on how to use a particular piece of software are hard to understand or non-existent. One of the major criticisms is that the pool of talented developers that can spend their time on open source projects is very limited and as such open source software projects usually suffer from lack of development resources and luck of feedback. While everyone pays tribute to Linux's original author, Torvalds, as "a benevolent dictator" guiding Linux kernel development, no one has a very clear idea of what would happen if he were to retire or otherwise disappear from the scene. Most open source projects (probably 90%) have just one main developer.<![if !supportFootnotes]>[2]<![endif]> Even highly popular projects like Linux have problems with attracting volunteer developers for particular tasks and now essentially switch to paid developers model. Quality feedback for open source software projects is difficult to get and is usually insufficient for guiding project development.
While Raymond tells us that "the more the merrier is the rule in an open source project" and Stallman bemoans the scarcity of programmers, Jamie Zawinski, formerly of Netscape and of the Mozilla project disagrees. "The dynamic of development inside a company is definitely different from development in an open source way. However, I don't think that saying 'adding programmers makes it later' isn't true for open source projects because of their (alleged) lack of deadlines: I think that it's true (in any sense that it is true) only because the definition of 'programmer' is slippery in that case. If you have a project that has five people who write 80% of the code, and a hundred people who have contributed bug fixes or a few hundred lines of code here and there, is that a '105-programmer project?'"
What Zawinski and others have seen is that in such undertakings as the Apache project, Linux Kernel, and other large software projects, the bulk of the work is done by a few dedicated members or a core team -- what Brooks calls a "surgical team."
"In most open source projects," says Zawinski, "there is a small group who do the majority of the work, and the other contributors are definitely at a secondary level, meaning that they don't behave as bottlenecks."
Zawinski goes on: "Most of the larger open source projects are also fairly modular, meaning that they are really dozens of different, smaller projects. So when you claim that there are ten zillion people working on the Gnome project, you're lumping together a lot of people who never need to talk to each other, and thus, aren't getting in each others' way."
Brian Behlendorf of Apache and of Collab.net agrees. "We don't consciously think about it, but I think that the philosophy of keeping things simple and pushing out almost anything extraneous or nonessential to external modules has been followed fairly carefully in Apache. We've also been fairly successful (I think) in 'federalizing' the Apache process to sister projects."
Bezroukov agrees that modularity is essential, but there are limits: "For example if a project logically consists of three parts and we have two developers, than adding third developer can be highly beneficial -- the structure of the project will now correspond to the structure of the team. If the project is decomposable into three major parts and we add fourth developer, the effect will be much less."
"What truths do the majority flock about? It is the truths that are becoming obsolete. For when a truth is so old, it is on good way of becoming a lie. A normal truth is viable for no more than 20 years, and yet that is when the majority takes it to them and recommends them to the society as wholesome spiritual fuel."
- Dr. Stockman in Henrik Ibsen's drama 'An enemy of the people'
A great deal of sociological and anthropological studies has been performed on the hacker community, but there is scarcely any research on the community's software engineering practices. CatB was the first essay to specifically address the community's practices. However, it is still very much an anthropological study dealing with some aspects of software engineering, but with emphasis on the anthropology. Another strain has been to focus on the social dynamics of the bazaar (< >). Nicolai Bezroukov is the first to address the software engineering perspectives of CatB in a critical manner. Unfortunately his two articles suffer from being the first efforts at formulating a systematic and thorough critique of Raymond's observations.
Books such as Levy's Hackers and Raymond's The New Hacker Dictionary show that the hacker community loves to tell and hear cool and neat stories and epics of great deeds of hacking. There is almost something tribal about how these stories are told. I believe anyone who has ever been part of a community of hackers can remember how the oldtimers late at night with everybody sitting around them, told epic stories of great hacking achievements. Not only their own, but those of the hacker lore like the Story of Mel and the Magic Button. How these legends are being recounted, almost ritualistic, to the listeners undivided delight. (Incidentally, I don't think it is a coincident that so many of us hackers are into fantasy and sci-fi literature, but that's only my personal little anecdote).
Where am I going with this?
I am of the opinion, that CatB isn't free of recounting great deeds of hacking. Wouldn't it be great if a loosely knit group of hackers, with no Dilbert managers at the top telling them what to do and how, could create an industry strength operating system? It's the total liberty trip, that which most software engineers dream of. Nobody is told what to do. Everybody's code is equal. And at the top the maintainer is simply coordinating this mob by giving credits where credits are due. That is basically how Raymond portrays the bazaar. Reality seems in fact to be somewhat different, more like herding cats (as Bruce Perens once observed).
Linux, to take an example, has a small, devoted core developers team very much like Brook's surgical team (Brooks, 1995). Looking at other highly successful open-source projects, the same pattern seems to be true. Look at the PHP-project, for instance. A small core of developers, previously known as the PHP core developers team. (interview with Stig S. Bakken) Apache likewise, although not as articulated. If this is so, in what way is the bazaar different from the cathedral?
The real difference between Brook's surgical team and the Linux community is that the job of debugging and testing is moved out into the open. The community becomes a massive debugger team. Not only are they performing white-box tests of the code, they're in fact willing to do the most crucial of all testing: that of real-life use. This makes the community an invaluable asset in finding bugs. The advantage of an open-source system is that it attracts skilled engineers who like to delve into the code and fix things when something is wrong. This way, not only does the community report bugs, but to a certain extent the users themselves fix the bugs as well.
I do not doubt Raymond's sincerity when he calls Linux a bazaar, but......
This fall Raymond has been touring Europe promoting his book. He most kindly made his way by Trondheim where he gave an unforgettable series of speeches. In one of these speeches he poses the question why nobody had articulated the bazaar mode of development prior. He says there are a handful of intelligent, articulated hackers that had already observed the phenomena, but none had spelled it out. Why is that? Raymond asks. His suggestion is that hackers like to think that their success in developing software is due to their own brilliance. All hackers liked to think so, and that is why nobody had tried to look into the matter more closely before Raymond did.
Let's permutate Raymonds question a bit, and ask: why is it that the hacker community is not questioning the apparent flaws in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar'. Paul Feyerabend writes:
There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examinations questions start dealing with problems solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory.
Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points turn into slogans; debates with opponents become standardised and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presupposes what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success; but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution. (1993, p. 30)
Answering almost with Raymond's own words: can it be that we hackers like to think that the success of our software is due to a genial, new way of development that we have come up with ourselves? Is it truly so? CatB is not a software engineering essay. It is an anthropological study. However, it contains material about the bazaar, the hackers' way of doing software engineering. Central traits to the bazaar is the open process, the freedom to do with the code what each individual developer wants, and a high degree of cooperation. Raymond mentions Linux as an archetypal bazaar, yet in a letter to the author David Miller, a central Linux developer, writes:
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 18:40:06 +0200 (CEST)
From: David S. Miller
\> is it so that you
\> core Linux kernel developers are doing much of the discussing and
\> planning outside of the Linux kernel mailinglist?
It is true to a large extent, and in my opinion it's the gem that
keeps us at such high productivity rates.
It's a surefire method by which us core developers can obtain
the best signal to noise ratio. Discussions happen more efficiently
and productively when you know you're talking to someone with a clue
and you don't get barraged with responses from folks who are perhaps
not so clueful and not so weathered on the topic as the core
developers.
I.e. there is a mismatch between the map and the terrain, the map here being Raymond's bazaar and the terrain being how things work in the real world. While there is an open forum, areas for community building, the development in itself is being done in a closed fashion. The results, i.e. the source code, is up for public review, so the product itself is still open. The process, however, is a closed one, and it is the process more than the product that Raymond emphasize as the bazaar model.
Admitting our knowledge of the facts are limited, is a giant step towards gaining greater knowledge."
- Benjamin Disraeli
Very little serious research has been devoted to the bazaar model. The first effort at criticizing the bazaar model, not on the model's own terms but in a larger context, was Nikolai Bezroukov's two articles in First Monday (www.firstmonday.org). The first article Bezroukov claims that there is nothing new to the bazaar model. Rather it is merely a special case of academic research. The essence of the second article was to refute Raymond's proof that Brooks' law did not apply to the bazaar model, and to answer Raymond's flaming response to his first article (also printed in First Monday). As the subtitle to his first article indicates, 'Critique of Vulgar Raymondism' (emphasis by the author), Bezroukov is trying to address the growing orthodoxy within the open source movement.
The problem with both of Bezroukov's articles is that they both lack empirical data on which his theories are founded. While CatB is based on Raymond's own experience with Fetchmail and some insight from the Linux development, Bezroukov's two articles have no such foundation. His criticism is at times to the point, but have no underpinning in facts and therefore hard to consider as more than an educated guess. At other times Bezroukov shows a lack of understanding central terms such as the difference between the cathedral and the MIT style of programming as described in Richard Gabriel's essay ???. Bezroukov seems to mix together the MIT style programming with that of Raymond's cathedral building. Gabriel proposes the idea that there are two widely different coding styles within the hacker community: that which relies on correct looking code and that of the 'worse is better' approach. The MIT style relies on simple data structures and complex code, while the 'worse is better' approach says its more important to understand the (...)
The greatest weakness of Bezroukov's two articles is his efforts at trying to fit reality into a model. He poses the question: is Linux really a bazaar? A closer look into Linux reveals that it does not fit into Raymond's description of a bazaar. But if Linux does not fit does that mean that Linux is no bazaar? Instead of revising and updating Raymond's two year old bazaar model, Bezroukov disqualifies Linux as a bazaar. It is not the theoretical model that should form the blueprint of reality, but reality that is to be represented by the model. When Raymond says Linux is a bazaar, then Linux is a bazaar even though it does not fit into Raymond's model. The bazaar theory has to be changed instead. Linux is the yardstick here, not the model that was written to explain Linux. That this happens is probably because both of Bezroukov's two articles lack the proper empirical foundation. This is the very core of any critique of Bezroukov, that they form no more than educated guesswork. As Feyerabend points out (1993, p.26) "Discussion of incompatible facts will therefore lead to progress. Discussion of incompatible hypothesis will not." This is the pitfall that Bezroukov steps right into.
What Bezroukov is doing, however, is to point out where Raymond's theory simply does not add up. Apart from random comments refuting the bazaar model totally, Bezroukov is the first to take the model seriously and criticize it in a serious manner, not on the model's own terms but in a larger context. As such, what he is doing is important in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the model. Whether he hits the mark or not, it forces us to rethink what has too long been taken for granted. In that light, Raymond's flaming rebuttal (Raymond, 1999b) is therefore a good sign of the open source movement's growing orthodoxy.
1.10.2. Bezroukov
Little research has been devoted to the bazaar model. The first effort at criticizing the bazaar model, not on the model's own terms but in a larger context, was Nikolai Bezroukov's two articles in First Monday (www.firstmonday.org). The first article Bezroukov claims that there is nothing new to the bazaar model. Rather it is merely a special case of academic research. The essence of the second article was to refute Raymond's proof that Brooks' law did not apply to the bazaar model, and to answer Raymond's flaming response to his first article (also printed in First Monday). As the subtitle to his first article indicates, 'Critique of Vulgar Raymondism' (emphasis by the author), Bezroukov is trying to address the growing orthodoxy within the open source movement. The problem with both of Bezroukov's articles is that they lack empirical data on which his theories are founded. While CatB is based on Raymond's own experience with Fetchmail and some insight from the Linux development, Bezroukov's two articles have no such foundation. His criticism is at times to the point, but have no underpinning in facts and therefore hard to consider as more than an educated guess. At other times Bezroukov shows a lack of understanding central terms such as the difference between the cathedral and the MIT style of programming as described in Richard Gabriel's essay. The greatest weakness of Bezroukov's two articles is his efforts at trying to fit reality into a model. He poses the question: is Linux really a bazaar? A closer look into Linux reveals that it does not fit into Raymond's description of a bazaar. But if Linux does not fit does that mean that Linux is no bazaar? Instead of revising and updating Raymond's two year old bazaar model, Bezroukov disqualifies Linux as a bazaar. It is not the theoretical model that should form the blueprint of reality, but reality that is to be represented by the model. When Raymond says Linux is a bazaar, then Linux is a bazaar even though it does not fit into Raymond's model. The bazaar theory has to be changed instead. Linux is the yardstick here, not the model that was written to explain Linux. That this happens is probably because both of Bezroukov's two articles lack the proper empirical foundation. This is the very core of any critique of Bezroukov, that they form no more than educated guesswork. As Feyerabend points out (1993, p.26) "Discussion of incompatible facts will therefore lead to progress. Discussion of incompatible hypothesis will not." This is the pitfall that Bezroukov steps right into. What Bezroukov is doing, however, is to point out where Raymond's theory simply does not add up. Apart from random comments refuting the bazaar model totally, Bezroukov is the first to take the model seriously and criticize it in a serious manner, not on the model's own terms but in a larger context. As such, what he is doing is important in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the model. Whether he hits the mark or not, it forces us to rethink what has too long been taken for granted. In that light, Raymond's flaming rebuttal (Raymond, 1999b) is therefore a good sign of the open source movement's growing orthodoxy
"This paper provides an overview of the weaknesses of Eric Raymond's (ESR) paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) as well as the more coherent demonstration of the fact that the bazaar metaphor is internally contradictive. It is also to a certain extent a reaction to the publication of Eric Raymond's new book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1999). In this paper a more objective picture of the status competition in the OSS environment is provided." FreeBSD is mentioned as "reference implementation" for Linux, as a quality OS ("For Linux, I see no breakthrough in quality in comparison with Solaris or FreeBSD") The other relevant quote: "Without this level of political support [Slashdot, LinuxToday, etc.]it is possible that FreeBSD (traditionally the OS of choice for ISPs) would have been more popular.... I would just like to stress that the Linux press serves as important leverage against competitors like FreeBSD and its role is completely overlooked in CatB." Jordan Hubbard is positively sited in the paper.
MORE: http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=351 LINK: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/index.html
Linux Today First Monday A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar
"Open source is a very interesting and influential phenomenon. It is especially intriguing to me because I believe that it can play a positive role in developing countries. In order to ensure its long-term sustainability we need to see it "as is" and clearly identify possible pitfalls as well as open source's strong and weak points. Fundamentally, we need a reliable map of the open source environment."
"The publication of Eric Raymond's (ESR) new book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary...makes a fresh and critical review of his most influential paper even more necessary. Besides The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB), several papers by ESR are included in this book. None of the papers are so well written, influential and important as CatB. It is no wonder that The Cathedral and the Bazaar is sometimes considered as a Manifesto of the Open Source Movement. This paper will try to analyze just CatB."
"In my earlier paper I argued that the bazaar metaphor is internally contradictive. In this paper we would like to concentrate on the entire CatB paper and try to dissect the main ideas of CatB."
|
|
Slashdot
|
|
Attention: here is Webliography to the paper. Due to its volume it was not included in the text
Computers, Operating Systems, and Applications -- Module Resources -- The Ohio State University, School of Journalism and Communication.
Living in the Information Age (JComm140) is a five-credit course meeting twice a week in a brand new hi-tech teaching and learning space. All the resources for accomplishing the tasks associated with the course are available at this website. We learn about the technology, markets and policies of the digital environment while practicing how to use many of the tools required to correspond electronically and make hyper-text documents for the world wide web.
Open Source Software as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism) by Nikolai Bezroukov offers a point by point critique of the "revolutionary" claims made by some OSS leaders and supporters. The article is from a peer-reviewed journal (might be a source for your Final Group Project) called First Monday. Here's the abstract:
"Eric Raymond's bazaar model provides a too simplistic view of the open source software (OSS) development process. This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm for OSS development. Open source software development should better be viewed as a special case of academic research. Viewing OSS this way probably can lead to a better understanding of open source phenomena."
The paper is included as a reference in the curriculum for the BA/BSc Information and Communications third year unit "Sociology of Cyberspace" (BICS3.6) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), England. The tutor on the course is Bernard Leach of the Dept of Sociology. Here is the relevant quote from http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/sis/bics99/polecon.htm :
South-Western College open-source software policy debate Can open-source software survive?
Nikolai Bezroukov, "Open-source software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism)"
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/991012_index.html
In this online document, Nikolai Bezroukov provides a critical review of the arguments used by Eric S. Raymond in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Bezroukov discusses a variety of practical problems associated with implementing open-source software development.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - The correct path for Software Development by Thillai@altelco.net Student paper
The Cathedral model represents the traditional commercial software development style, using small teams, tight management control, and long release intervals. The Bazaar model represents the style of releasing early often involving a large number of pool of developers working on the product. It challenges the traditional software engineering models of using a large team of developers and testers. It challenges established norms like "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" (Fred Brooks, 1975, p.91). This paper deals with these interesting theories and examines the pro and cons of both models.
L'Etat d'Internet 1999 - Logiciel libre, « open source » et Linux
It's interesting to note that most responses are limited to just one day October 8, 1999. News last just one day in the atmosphere of information overload ;-)
[Oct 8, 1999] Linux Today: First Monday Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research
[Oct. 8, 1999] First Slashdot discussion Academic Criticism of ESR's The Cathedral & The Bazaar
selection of letters
[Oct. 8, 1999] ESR Response to Nikolai Bezroukov -- If you compare that response with his infamous Shut Up And Show Them The Code it's clear that ESR is pretty predictable -- yes, of course, Nikolai Bezroukov has no clue ;-). I also think that one of the important difference that distinguish civilized people from the rest of mankind is tolerance. This response was also republished in First Monday. Here are some interesting parts (bold italic is mine -- NNB):
| That's really funny. It looks like ERS does not understand what the scientific term Vulgar Marxism means; moreover extremes meet and his anarchic capitalism (Libertarianism) is really close to anarchism |
...There are many sins of which I can reasonably be accused, but the imputation of "vulgar Marxism" won't stand up to even a casual reading of my papers. In CatB, I analogize open-source development to a free market in Adam Smith's sense and use the terminology of classical (capitalist) economics to describe it. In HtN I advance an argument for the biological groundedness of property rights and cite Ayn Rand approvingly on the dangers of altruism. And the entire body of tMC develops the thesis that open-source development and the post-industrial capitalism of the Information Age are natural allies.
| Poor "friend of the free market". Now he really reminds me the heroes of a similar story where BSD logo was found "deeply and personally offensive" ;-). |
In fact, I find the imputation of Marxism deeply and personally offensive as well as untrue. While I have made a point of not gratuitously waving my politics around in my papers, it is no secret in the open-source world that I am a libertarian, a friend of the free market, and implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism).
| I do not think that EST overlooked something. He wanted to sell OSS to commercial companies and pretty much succeeded by becoming a member of the board of VA Linux and making good money on IPO. It does not look like he overlooked "the practices of scientific community". He just looked in the completely opposite direction ;-) |
Mr. Bezroukov then proposes an analogy between open-source development and the practices of the scientific community as though it is something I have culpably overlooked. Apparently he somehow missed the fact that two sections of HtN are largely devoted to exploring this connection and suggesting sociopsychological reasons for it.
| The question "To what extend Weinberg "egoless programming" make sense in OSS environment ?" is subject for discussion. See my second paper for more info. |
...Somehow Mr. Bezroukov's has missed, or ignored, those sections of CatB which explicitly relate the Linux bazaar mode of development back to Gerald Weinberg's "egoless programming" and earlier open-source communities including the MIT AI lab and Berkeley. He has also failed to address those portion of HtN in which I relate open-source development to the history of experimental science and engineering, or the section of tMC in which I suggest an analogy between current developments in open-source world and the preindustrial system of aristocratic patronage for the arts.
| A really harsh conclusion, but a very nice quote indeed. The problem with any such quote is that it is like a rubber stamp: you can stamp it on anything. There are a lot of such nice quotes and although it looks like ESR managed to defy it I would like to remind one by Voltaire that I used (in a slightly different context) in my paper: "To succeed in the world, it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered." ;-). I would agree that this is a rubber stamp quote too :-) |
... I tried hard to draw something of value from this paper, as I have from many critiques in the past. But the parts of it that are not tendentious nonsense largely repeat observations that other people (including Jamie Zawinski, Alan Cox, Andrew Leonard, and myself) have made better and sooner. I am irresistibly moved to quote Edgar Allan Poe at Mr. Bezroukov. "Your work is both true and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are true are not original, and the parts that are original are not true."
Here is a couple of interesting comments in Linuxtoday (actually the comments of ESR supporters are even more telling than more reasonable comments reproduced below; some of them are really good examples of Lysenkoism or, if you wish, cult-style behavior):
...I must admit though, ESR is the first author I've read in SOME time who will point out to you that other people's articles have no worth.
The problem with pedants, is that when you whittle away the big words, you end up with very little substance. That, I think, is what probably pissed the guy off the most; the title of the other article mentions that ESR's view is "too simplistic".
Nothing pisses a pedant off more than being called simplistic; the whole point of written pedantry is to posture to a point of seeming more educated or intelligent than the reader. Strip away the big words, and you end up, often times, with very little.
| Bob Rogers - Subject: Thanks, Mr. Raymond for pointing to Bezroukov's paper (Oct 9, 1999, 05:54:00 ) |
|
[from <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html>.
this is the right reverend eric s. raymond's response to an essay by nikolai bezroukov, 'open source software as a special type of academic research (critique of vulgar raymondism),' published by first monday at <http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html>. whether bezroukov's summation of ESR's theses is accurate, i'll leave to others to decide: afaict, ESR is an insufferable blowhard devoted to puffing up trivial observations into the eighth, ninth, and tenth wonders of the world, and reading his stuff is just painful. but it does look like bezroukov called his bluff on his neo-marxistical babble about how the "industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed to be out competed from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a post scarcity gift culture" &c., &c. ESR's response? "I am...implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as co equal in evil with Naziism)" [sic '1999/10/08 17:25:42' version]. i'm very curious to hear from our presumptively more sophisticated european contingents how we should reconcile the Contradictions that are erupting in the open source world, what with gift-givers kvetching about being left out of the red hat IPO (ooh--and now VA Linux is doing one!), the so-called gift economy being revealed to be a LIBERTARIAN practice, and the peer-consultation practices of open source being traced into ur-ur-history--all the way back to the early day of the MIT AI lab!
cheers, t]Craig Brozefsky (craig@red-bean.com)
09 Oct 1999 08:30:37 -0700I can offer this selection from an old email:
So, I made myself listen to the Eric Raymond interview.
-- about 8:20 into the interview --
Dave: Let's see, Free Software versus Open Source?
Eric: Well, I think I said most of what needs to be said about that in my recent posting, 'Shut up and show them the code'
Dave: Right. There is quite a bit of controversy; alot of people are concerned that perhaps you are not really showing alot of code yourself anymore, since your doing alot of marketing.
Eric: [his voice rises, and he leans into the mic] Ah, well the difference is that my methods work, and Richard Stallman's methods don'tDave: uh, oookaaay
Eric is unaware how close to the mic he is. And then I hear it, a chilling sound. His accelerated breathing thru his nostrils.
** I stop the mpg **
http://linuxtoday.com/volt/streams/volt_1999-07-01_esr.mp3
Forward it to about 8:20 into the interview.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
And for those who can't sample the sound live, a description from an old alt.cyberpunk post:You must hear that sound. It will hurt. You will be afraid. After he says this he does not realize how close to the mic his little bottom-feeder mouth is, and the sound of his breath gives him away. I cannot describe the sound, except to say that it is horrifying: a nostril-flaring, face flushing, heart racing, palm sweating breath. Truly the demonic version of the pear-shaped mouth-breathers revolting rasp. I fear for his children. It's always the surplus, like the breath, that gives away the game.
Put that in your high-speed data pipe and smoke it ya Kontent wankers.
--
Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
"riot shields. voodoo economics. its just business. cattle
prods and the IMF." - Radiohead, OK Computer, Electioneering# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
A Critique of the Bazaar, with a Postscript by GodwinLast year, Eric Raymond wrote the influential "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which expounded on the philosophical underpinnings of the Open Source movement. He paralleled the old corporate method of software development with building a cathedral and open source development with a collaborative bazaar. This week, Nikolai Bezroukov wrote a scathing critique of that paper entitled "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism)", complete with allusions to "vulgar Marxism". While Nikolai clearly needs a course in remedial paper titling, his criticism has set off an amusing tempest in an academic teapot, with Eric Raymond taking Nikolai to task for adding "almost nothing useful to the debate". Consider it the entertaining philosophical equivalent of a World Wrestling Federation cage match. We should note that the Nazis have been invoked, which means that the debate is officially over, at lest according to the commonly mis-quoted dictates of Godwin's Law.
Raymond: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/index.html
Bezroukov: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html
Response: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html
Godwin's Law: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/
[Oct. 9, 1999] ESR comes under fire Ars Technica News archive (10-99)
The Online Journal First Monday has posted a criticism of Eric S. Raymond's famous open-source manifesto, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The criticism piece, written by Russian professor Nikolai Bezroukov, is supposedly one of the first "academic" criticisms of CATB to appear on the 'net. The posts on /. in response to the article were generally positive, and it seems that most of the Linux community welcomes any serious academic critique of Raymond's work. Raymond, however, posted a short and largely dismissive response to the piece. He cites and responds to various one-line excerpts from the piece, in order to show that it's mostly "tendentious nonsense." Regarding Raymond's response, one slashdot poster commented, "w00p!!! I g0tz the f1rst p0st!!!" (Just kidding, though what's really there is even more annoying :)
My take: Having read CATB and The Magic Cauldron, I can see where Bezroukov completely misconstrued some of Raymond's points. For instance, according to Bezroukov, Raymond thinks that "open source is a completely new progressive phenomenon (bright future of mankind) with no analogs in history." This is completely backwards, in fact. What Raymond loves to do is to make (bogus) analogies between the OSS movement and some other social and/or historical phenomenon, in order to show off his wide-ranging erudition. (See his comparison of OSS to the pre-industrial system of aristocratic patronage of the arts. He completely misunderstands the Hellenistic practice of rich families commissioning monuments in the public square.) The problem with the First Monday piece is that Bezroukov is neither a sociologist, nor a historian (he's a CS professor), and it's sociology and history that Raymond most egregiously mangles. -Hannibal
[Oct. 10, 1999]ESR Responds to Nikolai Bezroukov -- Slashdot discussion of ERS's letter. A lot of Marxism/socialism/national socialism related letters, so relevant information is difficult to extract.
See also Selection of letters Here is a couple of interesting comments:
| This is a learning opportunity (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 09, @12:40PM EDT (#286) |
| Aspects of this are dead on, some are off base, but ESR and the rest of us should learn from this document, as it contains the first sensible criticism of the OSS community EVER |
Rob Lanphier <robla@real.com>
I can totally understand why Eric isn't a fan of Nikolai's paper. The paper sets up Eric as a straw man to be bounced around, and hey, I've been there. Having a cartoon caricature of your beliefs criticized is just frustrating and doesn't seem terribly useful, since one can't learn anything personally from such a critique.
However, I think that Eric misses the value in such a paper. Nikolai's paper answers the question "what are the risks in embarking in an open source development project?", and is the most focused and complete answer I've seen so far. That's very valuable from an advocacy perspective, because advocates need a single URL to point to for a thorough treatment of this frequently asked question. Otherwise, a properly skeptical skeptic won't believe that all of the homework on the subject is done. Are there better treatments of this subject available that are as complete and focused on the question at hand? I think that this document provides a very good starting point if a better document doesn't exist. Even if a better document does exist, this points out some useful anecdotes and quotations worthy of inclusion in any answer to the risk question.
...In an ill-tempered article Nikolai Bezroukov has mounted a personal attack on Eric Raymond, author of The cathedral and the bazaar and well-known Linux luminary. Raymond is accused of promoting "an over-optimistic and simplistic view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or to be more exact, vulgar Marxist) interpretation of software development".
...Raymond, who is an OSS evangelist, has only begun an examination of the open source phenomenon, and he can be prone to make generalisations that are too specific. He assumes that "a wealth surplus" makes it possible for many programmers to live in "a post-scarcity gift culture". To a fair extent this is true in the US, but the fuller facts are that many players live on the bread-line with absolutely minimal income. Raymond's analogy that the cathedral is analogous to the place where traditional, proprietary programming takes place, while the bazaar is where open source software (OSS) development occurs, is very helpful but it was not intended to be a formal, rigorous approach to defining open development processes.
...There are better methodologies to refine models like the cathedral and the bazaar, but Bezroukov is not the man for the job. The disciplines that perhaps offer most value are psychology, for the individual motivation aspects, and sociology for providing a framework for describing the organisational issues. A glance at sociology texts such as Henry Mintzberg's The structuring of organisations points out that in an Adhocracy (for that is probably the best pre-existing structural description of the open source movement), Hedberg et al described the "palace" and the "tent" instead of the cathedral and the bazaar - and this was in 1976 in Administrative Science Quarterly. Perhaps the difference between Bezroukov and Raymond could best be summarised in a speculation: that Bezroukov would argue against such a "palace and tent" model delineated by professionals in organisational structure, whereas Raymond would be delighted to know that he had independently discovered something that had in general terms been previously described.
Last year the magazine First Monday published a research paper by Eric Raymond, one of the most active participants of the Open Source Project and a Linux guru, devoted to the principle of the development of the open source software. Raymond analyzed the process using the development of Fetchmail as an example and came to a very optimistic conclusions about the feasibility of software development using this particular method.
Last week (after more than a year after initial publication of Raymond’s paper) Nikolai Bezroukov, who also is a participant of the Open Source Movement, published a paper Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research where he wrote that “…I have become painfully aware of the overly optimistic and unrealistic views on open source held by students and partially even by participants like Eric Raymond.”
The greatest advantage of open source, Bezroukov wrote, can be realized in its use for education. If the task is to create a high quality product quickly, than Linux development model is not suitable for the task. The Linux community reacts slower than it is necessary to the market changes; there is no clear organization of the project, absence of hierarchy in the community attracts people who do not understand much programming, but who want mainly to talk about how tasks should be done, and so on.
We can continue the list of disadvantages of such a community, but there in no necessity in that. In reality this is another example of an old conflict between commerce and utopia in their extreme manifestations. On one side stands the strictly structured commerce structure that is profit oriented and which might consider employees to be one-task mechanisms. On the other side stands a large community of people who have all the disadvantages of the crowd in performing a certain function, but who permit a person to work on what he/she wants and have the right of being something more than a one-task mechanism. The experience of software development for Linux during the last several years demonstrates the feasibility of such an approach. What do you think?
| firstMonday: Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism)- |
|---|
|
[Oct 26, 1999] The letter by Paolo Pumilia to the FM. See also My responce to the letter
I have some comments on the article by Nikolai Bezroukov, "Open Source Development as a Special Case of Applied Science".
I have to say that the article by Nicolai Bezroukov falls short of my expectations both in style and content. I do not appreciate references to Marxism and forced interpretation of Eric Raymond's work. The first two sections recall political slogans, aimed at inducement rather than understanding. It does not help to grasp the open source phenomenon. The style is so in contrast with the rest of the paper that the reader should discard those passages to pursue his/her reading.
On the main contents of the paper, I was able to appreciate several interesting points in Bezroukov's work. But I am particularly disappointed by the author's insistence on the similarities (that are evident) between open source and scientific methods. Open source projects are often developed by programmers in their spare time, with personal financial support, gathering interest from the outside, so that people or firms can use the final product. If a way could be devised to transfer this feature to the traditional scientific world, a complete upsetting of the relation between science and people surely would follow.
Finally, let me note that, at the end of Bezroukov's article, I can't find any sound justifications of those prejudices stated at the beginning.
Paolo Pumilia
Magenta (Milano), Italy
[Nov 07, 1999] My responce to the letter by Paolo Pumilia to the FM
[Dec. 5, 1999] First Monday Dec. 5, 1999 Letters to the Editor From: Studennikov Walery
...Your article is powerful. Of course it will help many developers to build up more objective view on the issue. It is a perfect critics and everything is 90% true. BUT it looks at the Open Source only the negative way.
I think if this article will be seen by a developer with weak independence, one will never participate in OSS projects.
The author of this letter began to participate himself in one of such projects not long ago and this article was like a bomb, exploded in the core of his heart. He will continue to go, but he was shaken in his confidence. This may be compared with telling to a small child that Santa Claus doesn't exist.
Breaking the Internet Dream and annihilating the idea of Open System and Open Software IS AN INTELLECTUAL SIN.
[????] open source by dfulton
...Cost is an important factor to the educational world in many aspects. Cost per hour of instruction, cost of infrastructure, cost of educational products, etc.; they are all there. However, in the sense of open source, schools may indeed have been to the cathedral. So much so, that they cannot separate themselves from the “church”. The reason is simple. Those who run our schools, i.e., school boards, administrators, parents, and others, are afraid or inept of the use of technology. Therefore, they pay someone else to do their job and substantiate their responsibilities. The teachers in the trenches do not have that prerogative. We have to become technologically expert.
Before Microsoft (MS) established itself as the operating system of choice, software and the code behind it came in this manner, hand to hand, computer to computer. It was IBM’s intent to retain open source distribution, but people began buying computers and marketers saw great opportunity. Thanks to you, Mr. Gates. The hallmark of the MS success has been that their operating systems are almost everything to everybody. However, that is the main reason not to have the MS operating systems. They are authored to fit everyone’s purpose without sufficient specificity. Therefore, open source software could, in theory, overcome that issue. It will be modified to fit specific purposes. The MS operating systems cannot because their source codes are proprietary, therefore, unattainable...
The implications of open source software for the future provide interest, to say the least. No longer will school administrations be subject to unscrupulous vendors who take advantage of the situation and rob our students of all of the value of their education. Yes, administrators will have to dedicate people to provide open source materials instead of relying on the business to keep our students best interests in mind. Of course, this will require a radical change in our systems and the way they run. As we all know, education is one of the last institutions to affect change due to bureaucratic attitudes.I had just begun to understand what Open Source was, and had begun to think of the educational possibilities when I read Bezroukov’s critique of “Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research”, recommended by Chip on 10/8/99. I also realize that Open Source cannot be modified to fit everyone’s needs because not everyone is capable of doing the modifications. Now I am becoming aware of the multitude of problems that Open Source may “open up.”
Seminar Digitale Gesellschaft -- Open Source (German)
L'Etat d'Internet 1999 Logiciel libre, « open source » et Linux (French)
| Re:Irking (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 31, @11:44AM EST (#43) |
| It is most likely that CMU has been pretty carefull about patents and stuff. I would think/hope that universities learned their lesson when AT&T tried fucking with Berkely about BSD. It would be pretty stupid of CMU to release something with out letting their lawyers give the go-ahead. As for /. encouraging people to download the stuff one can argue in true Raymondism that they are a mother station to a gift culture that tries to protect people from patent bullies and encourages intellectual advance. |
Paper “The Two Software Cultures and the Evolution Of Evolutionary Economic Simulation” by By Esben Sloth Andersen and Marco Valente, DRUID and Aalborg University, Denmark
The background for this paper is our work with evolutionary economic models and their implementation in a new, effective system for programming and simulating such models. The major purpose of the project is to decrease the barriers to entry to computer simulation without decreasing the quality of the work. This purpose has suggested a study of the different styles of simulation work as well as reflections on the major types of barriers to entry.
References to "DØK 2. delskursus: Open Source Software - i økonomisk og teknisk belysning"
I just did some reading of papers published on first Monday (http://www.firsmonday.org), a peer reviewed online journal.
I got some important aspects for our study; I would be glad if the psychologists on the mailing list would comment on how the ideas I found here do fit into the theoretical models like the VIET model.
I will focus on topics related to motivation, since this is the main aspect of our study. (So these are _not_ summaries of the papers.)
Be warned, this is a rather loose collection of the notes I took when reading the papers; neither I did bother nor I had the time to put them in a specific order ...
OK, here we go:
From: Open Source Software Development as Special
Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar
Raymondism), N. Bezroukov,
http://firsmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukovBezroukov claims that Open Source development can be compared to a special for of research in applied sciences. He writes that "most of the OS developers are doing it to chase a dream, not to build up their balances." He thinks that the main motivation is in fact the dream and not the competition.
I wonder how this is covered in the models we discussed recently; would it be possible to tell the difference between a motivation based on competition (possible on an individual basis among the developers as well as on a larger scale, such as Linux vs. Microsoft)?He further mentions some problems in Open Source projects:
* overload and burnout of the project leaders
* email based communications favors misunderstanding and
invites flame wars.Furthermore, he claims that Open Source model cannot compete with commercial development techniques where development speed is concerned. He says that the speedup necessary for a competition with e. g. Microsoft would result in a pressure on the developers. I will come back to this point later; in another paper, B. describe how this pressure may be put on the developers.
In B.s paper, he writes that the actual organizational structure of Linux development is not the bazaar described by ESR, but a rather hierarchical structure. (I do agree with this point; besides Linus Torvalds as the maintainer of Linux there are a lot of maintainers of kernel modules and parts.) Furthermore, he claims that the Linux development process is not democratic (I feel this can be seen in connection with the statements of the previous paragraph). If the submission a patch (a correction or extension of existing code) is dropped by Linux Torvalds (or the module maintainer), there is no chance to argue against this.
In an (anonymous) quotation, the statement is found that (at least in a certain phase), a bunch of half-skilled developers joined the project and started to discuss non-issues, thus polluting the mailing list. I think that this might be seen in relation to the concept of social loafing, although it is not clear why these people did join the mailing list. It could be either due to the wish to help Linux developers (and the ignorance of their own incompetence...) or they where driven by the wish to participate in the success story of Linux -- just to share the honor.
B. also mentions the conflict between the KDE and the GNOME project; both are aimed at the creation of an easy-to-use graphical user interface for Linux. KDE (the first project) was build on the basis of a Software which, at the time, did not satisfy the criteria of Free Software in the Stallman sense of free. This was the reason to put up a competing project based entirely on Free Software. Since we are interested in group identification, I consider it interesting to verify, in how far the purists views are related to the motivation of the developers. (To complete the story about KDE and GNOME: The KDE is, in my opinion, by far more successful and has achieved a much more mature state. Furthermore, the toolkit in question has adopted an Open Source-compatible license. Just for your information.)
From: A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar
N. Bezroukov,
http://firsmonday.org/issues/issue4_11/bezroukovIn this paper, besides a lot of other things, B. also talks about his view of communities. He writes that communities often involve status competition, and that this is not necessarily good for the group performance. He gives several reasons for this:
* Hierarchical structures and distribution of political power;
* unfair status hierarchies (favoritism) This can have really negative influence on the motivation of individuals: "Consider the pain of participating in a project where you think the leader doesn't like you."
* poisoning of the peer review process. B. relates this effect to the concept of egoless programming. It is even defined in an IEEE document: "A software development technique based on the concept of team, rather than individual, responsibility for program development. It's purpose is to prevent individual programmers from identifying so closely with their work that objective evaluation is impaired." (After B.)
I think this concept in fact is in contradiction with the possibility to identify individual contributions in the source code. Indeed, I have the impression that the concept of egoless programming is not applied in Open Source development. What do the psychologists say, is this concept sensible at all from a motivational point of view?
* danger of overload and burnout
B. mentions several reasons for this, here a few of them:
- Long term stress and high workload
- Conflict between idealistic expectations and reality
(OK, I think we cover this one with the IE-Part of VIET)
- Poor time management.
- Engaging in a rat race against commercial developers.
(See notes on development speed above.)
- Role conflicts: Private live vs. regular job vs. OS
development.
- Lack of support for developers working on the same
project.* fear of exclusion as a motivational factor
This list is not complete, but does, in my opinion, include the most important points with respect to our study.
So far Bezroukov; again, I want to stress that this is not a summary of his papers which are by far more comprehensive. It is just a enumeration of the aspects I consider relevant to our study.
On first Monday, too, I found an older (1998) interview with Linus Torvalds. There, too I found some interesting thoughts:
One of his claims is that to Linux development, the user base is more important than the developer base. He has some good reasons for this, and I think this gives us the justification to include Linux users in our statistics.
An other point he makes is that working on Linux helped him to establish a network of people "that trust [him] and know [him]", and that that sort of network is very handy.
His motivation for his initial decision to make Linux public (in a very, very early state when it was barely
useable) was that "it was a natural decision within the community that [he] felt part of".In Kiel, we recently had a discussion on the pure joy of doing something; this motive can be found in this interview as well; "look at what I've done -- isn't that neat?". Pride plays a role here too, in my opinion.
Later in the interview, he gets back to the user base; he talks about defenses between the users. Some of them are very productive and give a lot of feedback and help hunting bug, other "just use" Linux. In the interview, it does not become clear what his attitude is towards this second type of user. In connection with the statement that the user base is at least as important as the developer base, I can imagine that from his point of view, this might be some kind of social loafing again; but I am not sure how far this viewpoint is shared among developers.
Linus makes the point that Open Source development works best in areas where developers are users, too. (Maybe this is the reason why the development of graphical user interfaces for Linux started that late; earlier generations of programmers lived in environments where GUIs in the Windows and Mac sense of the world where not common.)
OK, so far from the interview. I am sure a lot of this points are already covered in our models. Nevertheless, my intention of this posting is to make sure that the results of our study not only make sense in the context of the psychological theories. It would be great if we where able to verify some of the assumptions of ESR or B.
This should be enough for today, it's quite late and I will go to bed now ;-).
Greetings,
Sven
-- Sven Niedner, http://www.theo-physik.uni-kiel.de/~niedner
First Monday October 1999
Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research
by Nikolai Bezroukov
This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm for OSS development.
| Reading through the comments is mostly a thankless task, but what keeps me going is the chance to find the rare, well-stated insight that nourishes my curiosity and understanding. Tonight, buried under yet another spasm of narcissism from ESR, and the rush to weigh in for or against him, rcade here has posed a penetrating question: "How essential to the open exchange of knowledge is the notion that none of the participants are getting rich off the exchange?" This deserves thinking about. Contributing to free software projects under the GPL is altruistic, yet it simultaneously serves one's pragmatic self-interest (not reinventing the wheel, etc.). So we find self-respecting Libertarians opposing it because they smell the altruism, and other self-respecting Libertarians praising it because they are free to just take whatever they need. Resentment arises when we ignore contrary aspects of the situation, and instead try to defend an oversimplified, one-dimensional conception. Thus the ironies. Free-marketeer Raymond writes "C & B" to explain our all-for-one, one-for-all operating system project to the capitalists (who don't get it), then gets testy when the socialistic aspect is pointed out. I think his essays have been valuable contributions, but I doubt that he would admit that they are classic propaganda and are intended to function as such. This is why Bezroukov's use of the terms "vulgar Raymondism" and "vulgar Marxism" were guaranteed to get ESR's goat. Raymond and his groupies reacted predictably to the "Marxism" part, because their point-and-click political simplemindedness fails to understand that the term "vulgar Marxism" refers not to Marxism itself, but to ignorant charicatures of it. It is just such ignorant charicatures of free software that Raymond has worked to correct. ESR's counterblast, and most of the comments, seek to divert us from the core of Bezroukov's essay, which is the analogy between free software development and academic scientific research. Notice the different strategies: "C & B" sets up oversimplified, polarized extremes and advocates one against the other. Bezroukov takes several aspects of the two phenomena and condsiders how they are alike and how they differ. Propaganda vs. inquiry. |
| Very well put. Popular vs scientific writing (Score:2) by Morgaine on Saturday October 09, @02:59AM (#1627907) (User #4316 Info) |
| That is a very clear and precise description of the main problem in ESR's writings --- well said, Jon. ESR's role probably serves a useful function for those that believe that horses will die unless led to water, but it is a million miles away from the antiseptic dissection of a complex subject that one would and should expect in a rational scientific study. From what we've seen so far over the years, that won't change, so I suppose we'll just have to lower our expectations or look to more dispassionate commentators whose analyses are less dogmatically coloured by personal preferences in other areas. None of this should really surprise us though. There has never been much in common between the popular press and the scientific press in other walks of life. We have our own popular press and our own self-styled popular writers, and we should acknowledge them as such and no more. |
Sorry, but due to size this part of the page was moves to a separate file.
Copyright © 1996-2004 by Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. Submit comments
This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
Standard disclaimer: The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the author present and former employers, SDNP or any other organization the author may be associated with. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose.
FreeBSD Mail Archives "As to fetchmail: it is an abomination before God. If someone in the press ever paid for an audit of the source code, the result would refute the paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to such an extent that it could damage the Open Source movement, which has pinned so much on the paper, in ill-considered haste."
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2001 23:49:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: roam@orbitel.bg (Peter Pentchev) Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: UUCP must stay; fetchmail sucks (was list 'o things) Message-ID: <200102172349.QAA11724@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20010217173019.A431@ringworld.oblivion.bg> from "Peter Pentchev" at Feb 17, 2001 05:30:19 PMNext in thread | Previous in thread | Raw E-Mail | Index | Archive | Help
> Just a minor comment-with-a-question. What is UUCP used for - mainly mail? > If so, then here's a datapoint - about two years ago I took part in > converting an existing UUCP mail transfer config to one using fetchmail. > Quite simple - invoke fetchmail -d from the PPP link-up script, kill it > in the link-down script in such a way that it sends a QUIT to avoid > message duplicates. There were a couple of other issues too, but in > the end, it all started working, and it's been working flawlessly for > the past two years. UCP belongs in the base system; you can skip the rest of this, if you are not interested in the gory details of UUCP vs. fetchmail. UUCP is the UNIX-UNIX Copy Program. It is used for copying files around. I formerly used it to copy TCP/IP and other packages to SVR4 boxes, since it was faster to do it over a null-modem cable than to use floppies. Primarily, it is used for email and usenet in areas of poor connectivity. The UUCP 'g' protocol is much more forgiving of noise than PPP or SL/IP over the same noisy connection. -- A tangential diatribe on the unsuitability of fetchmail ------- As to fetchmail: it is an abomination before God. If someone in the press ever paid for an audit of the source code, the result would refute the paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to such an extent that it could damage the Open Source movement, which has pinned so much on the paper, in ill-considered haste. ESR has constantly maintained that fetchmail is "not an MTA", and he is right: it could be, but it's not. When mail is delivered to a POP3 maildrop, envelope information is destroyed. To combat this, you would need to tunnel the enveleope information in headers. Generally, sendmail does not support "X-Envelope-To:" because it exposes "Bcc:" recipients, since fetchmail-like programs generally _stupidly_ do not strip such headers before local re-injection of the email. Without this information, it can not recover the intended recipient of the email. The fetchmail program delivers this mail to "root". The program has another bug, even if you elect single message delivery (in order to ensure a "for <user@domain>" in the "Received:" timestamp line. The bug is that it assumes the machine from which the download is occurring is a valid MX for your domain. Many ISPs use one machine to do the virtual domain expansion, and another to do final deliver into ISP hosts POP3 maildrops. The net effect of this is that it attempts to use the "for <domain-account@isphost>" stamp, since it does not reverse-priority order "Received:" timestamp lines. Similarly, fetchmail fails to order headers in "confidence" order. This means that, given an email with a "valid" (MX matches in the "by <MX>" and a "for <user@domain>" exists) "Received:" timestamp line, a "To:", "Cc:", or "Bcc:" line, or an "X-Envelope-To:" line (which must be configured, and which is terrifically screwed up by qmail, requiring un-munging), fetchmail -- takes the first one it sees, not the most correct one. Using the "To:", "Cc:", or "Bcc:" lines ("data") to do the delivery buys a spammer the ability to relay mail, though the route it must take is rather circuitous. It also means that if the "Bcc:" was properly stripped before handing the RFC 822 message to an MTA, or if you are a list recipient, that data is useless for recovering envelope information. This means that root gets all mailing list mail from lists which do not do recipient rewriting (like the SVBUG list does), and root also gets all mail addressed to non-existant local users that was intended for particular local users (all SPAM and all mail that was requested but not sent specifically targetted to a particular user, via email header data). Unfortunately, ESR would not accept patches for the mistaken MX problem, nor for the preference order problem, nor for the tunneled envelope information stripping problem. He seemed to be too busy with speaking engagements, and has since declared fetchmail to be in "maintenance mode", in order to demonstrate a recognizable commercial software lifecycle for an Open Source project, to give business the warm fuzzies. -- End diatribe ------------------------------------------------ UUCP, comparatively, avoids this whole mess, by not destroying the envelope information, which normally exists only on on a mail transport (in SMTP, this is the "MAIL FROM:<addrspec>" and "RCPT TO:<addrspec>"; in UUCP, it's the control file contents). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
"Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer."
---Eric S. Raymond
(http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/raymond-e-1.html)
Shut Up And Show Them The Code
Several years ago ESR's advice to RMS , no less, was to "shut up and show them the code". Let us apply the method of the master to the master himself, by examining the code that backs up the grand declaration that heads this page.
Core Linux Developer?
Hmm, easy to check. Let's see, shall we?
$ sed -n '/Eric S. Raymond/,/^$/p' /usr/src/linux/CREDITS
N: Eric S. Raymond
E: esr@thyrsus.com
W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO
D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode
S: 6 Karen Drive
S: Malvern, Pennsylvania 19355
S: USA
So: terminfo database, maintainer of; three howtos, writer of; fetchmail, coder of; A bunch of emacs macros, coder of. Core Linux developer, did he say? Core Linux developer, even?
Fetchmail
"one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work". That had me puzzled. Then the penny dropped: translated out of ESR-speak, this means "I wrote fetchmail"! In reality he didn't, he took over an existing program called "popclient", and added some bells and whistle, but let's leave that aside. The work doesn't really match the self-description, does it?
... ... ...
"Hacking Social Systems"; or, how to lose friends and alienate people
ESR's announcement of his CML2 project on linux-kernel sparked the first of several flame wars on the subject. These were notable for our hero's complete lack of ability to work with other people. Matters came to a head when ESR adopted some rather "cathedral-like" tactics . Eventually, kernel hackers simply gave up trying to reason with him .
"Note that kbuild 2.5 and CML2 are independent, each can function without the other, complaints about CML2 have nothing to do with kbuild 2.5."
---Keith Owens, kbuild maintainer
(http://www.kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=127)So CML2 would seem to be finally dead and buried .
Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Raymond?
The Jargon File
The original jargon file was maintained on MIT-AI for many years before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hackers's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print ESR picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary.
Picked up, updated... and destroyed, in one hacker's judgement. Another goes so far as to say that "the "author" stole the Jargon File fair and square.".
Although the "author" is a noted advocate of "Open Source" (that's Free Software to you and me), the production of successive versions of the jargon file is not open. That's bogus.
Cathedrals, Cauldrons, and... Charlatans
ESR, notwithstanding his limited experience (see above), has written copiously on the right way and the wrong way to do software development. But his three long essays are summed up nicely in one phrase: "Vulgar Raymondism" .
An entry you'll never see in the "jargon file":
Raymondism: The deluded belief that free software defies Brooks' law, has fewer security exploits than non-free software and that just because thousands of people have access to the source code those same thousands of people will actually examine it."
And Then He Finally Lost It
"Now, you have an unprecedented opportunity to witness one man's descent into insanity online. Apparently having begun his "journey" by dressing up as James Bond and pretending his CD is a gun, computer nerd Eric S. Raymond has been on a slide into insanity ever since.
"His descent into insanity is exemplified by a series of posts, so self-evident in their detachment from reality, that they really require no commentary. Over at his site, Raymond has been going through the motions of putting together an Idiotarian Manifesto or some such. He's been trying to get the words right, trying to work out whether the terrorists, who he defines rather broadly, are "feral beasts" or "rabid dogs". This manifesto is the latest in a long line of ridiculous offerings from Raymond, beginning with his series of factually-challenged screeds ranting and raving about the evils of Islam and the hitherto unknown spectre of "Islamofacism"."
Read more at Warblogger Watch .
ESR Watch
Sun Jun 8 2003
From NTK comes this blast:
Good to see the increasingly eccentric ERIC S RAYMOND keeping himself occupied these days. His latest tweaks: a version bump or two to the JARGON FILE, the ancient hacker bible of which he is current custodian. But how steady is his hand on the sacred tome? Worrying is esr's recent inclusion of unfamiliar terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GandhiCon", which on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself. And esr's current expansions of hacker dialect is curious too. New terms include "fisking" - a term pretty much restricted to the warblogosphere, and defined by your impartial host as "Named after a Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment". Also included is "anti-idiotarianism", as in Eric's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto, a fascinating call to arms that implies "Anti-Idiotarian" means "To be against listening to anyone who would tell you you're sounding like an idiot these days". Finally (and not included in the changelogs), Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous description as "vaguely liberal-moderate" to "moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism)". Go tell that to the Kuro5hinners, Eric. Recalling Raymond's familiar defence of previous changes, "rather than complaining that I am 'rewriting history', help me write it!", let it be noted that if someone did want to fork the Jargon File, now would be the time to do it. Raymond's previous googlejuice at tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new, reformatted and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the top Google slot. Ha, ha, as we apparently all say, only serious.
Mon Jun 23 2003
Even though Eric Raymond makes the hypertext freely available, he does not make the tools and masters that generate the hypertext freely available. It's bogus, and there's no apology. That's not very open-source.
Open source is designed to advance the intellectual property of the corporation at the expense of effort by individuals outside the corporation. As such, it falls under corporatism, as defined in John Ralston Saul's dictionary The Doubter's Companion.
Copyright © 1996-2004 by Nikolai Bezroukov. www.softpanorama.org was created as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) in the author free time. Submit comments
This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is placed under the copyright of the Open Content License(OPL). Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
Standard disclaimer: The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the author present and former employers, SDNP or any other organization the author may be associated with. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose.
Created June 1, 1998; Last modified: October 17, 2004