To: E. Charters who wrote (1896 ) 12/7/1999 2:55:00 AM From: JC Jaros Read Replies (1) | Respond to
E.- In political solidarity with Neal Stephenson who is battling CTS, I'm devoting this week entirely to the command line. In fact, I'm doing it through Minicom on the shell.
In doing this, I started having image withdrawl, so I turned on C-Span2 where they had Oscar Brand (I know, you weren't planning on getting from Neal Stephenson to Oscar Brand so fast). Anyway, he was there doing a converstaional history of American political campaign songs (regular America - down here) with his guitar.
The CSpan geek asked a poingant question of Oscar Brand regarding the quality of songs from professional songwriters, versus the quality from what he called (interviewer) 'the folk process'. It occured to me that that's more than an apt metaphor for what goes on with freeware development. I like folk songs, but they're not inherantly better than popular songs. The best thing about them isn't that they're better songs. The best thing is that they're free. We've always had this 'folk process'. It's embedded in our culture. There is a convergence with Linux between this cultural folk process and a tradition of engineering which is a highly cooperative community.
--The business of global communication is probably the MOST cooperative development community the world has ever known. All throughout the Cold War, with perhaps the exception of one day (and maybe not even then), scientists in the east andscientists in the west exchanged technology freely.
I don't know where this is going, I'll turn it into a post sometime. I need to go stoke the fire and look at it (click it, or something).
-JCJ
