The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization. I – OSI’s co-founder and its president for its first six years… Continue reading The right to be rude
Category: Hacker Culture
30 Days in the Hole
Yes, it’s been a month since I posted here. To be more precise, 30 Days in the Hole – I’ve been heads-down on a project with a deadline which I just barely met. and then preoccupied with cleanup from that effort. The project was reposurgeon’s biggest conversion yet, the 280K-commit history of the Gnu Compiler… Continue reading 30 Days in the Hole
Sharing the load effectively
At the end of my last post I said I was wandering off to think about scalable, low-overhead recommendation systems. It’s funny how preconceptions work. I know, I think better than most people, how often decentralizing systems to avoid single points of failure is good engineering. Yet I had to really struggle with myself to… Continue reading Sharing the load effectively
Load-Bearing Internet People
I just finished giving a talk – by remote video – at South East Linux Fest, about the Load-Bearing Internet Person problem. An LBIP is a person who maintains the software for a critical Internet service or library, and has to do it without organizational support or a budget backing him up. That second part… Continue reading Load-Bearing Internet People
Fear of COMITment
I shipped the first release of another retro-language revival today: COMIT. Dating from 1957 (coincidentally the year I was born) this was the first string-processing language, ancestral to SNOBOL and sed and ed and Unix shell. One of the notational conventions invented in COMIT, the use of $0, $1…etc. as substitution variables, survives in all… Continue reading Fear of COMITment
Contributor agreements considered harmful
Yesterday I got email from a project asking me to wear my tribal-elder hat, looking for advice on how to re-invent its governance structure. I’m not going to name the project because they haven’t given me permission to air their problems in public, but I need to write about something that came up during the… Continue reading Contributor agreements considered harmful
Live from Prague!
Live from Prague! Dave Taht, he who sometimes fixes the Internet from my basement (last week was the most recent occasion) asked me to post this “because G+ is dead”: It GPLs me
Announcing a new book: “The Programmer’s Way”
A decade and change after “The Art of Unix Programming”, I’ve decided to do another book. Actually, I have more than just an intention and some notes; I’ve been working hard on it over the last five days it and have 41 Kwords of rough-cut manuscript ready.
How to write narrative documentation
The following is a very lightly edited version of email I wrote to my apprentice Ian Bruene after he wrote documentation for his new Kommandant project that was, alas, as awful as I generally expect from programmers. I’m not training Ian for mere coding competence; he’s too talented for that and anyway I have higher… Continue reading How to write narrative documentation
On holy wars, and a plea for peace
I just posted the following to the Linux kernel mailing list. Most of you know that I have spent more than a quarter century analyzing the folkways of the hacker culture as a historian, ethnographer, and game theorist. That analysis has had large consequences, including a degree of business and mainstream acceptance of the open… Continue reading On holy wars, and a plea for peace
Hacker culture and the politics of process defense
In my last two blog posts, on the attempted hijack of the Lerna license and speech suppression in the Python documentation, I have both urged the hacker culture to stay out of political issues and urged what some people will interpret as “political” stance with regard to political correctness and “diversity”-driven speech demands. The expected… Continue reading Hacker culture and the politics of process defense
Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing
Comes the news that the Python project has merged a request to partially eliminate the terms “master” and “slave” from its documentation on “diversity” grounds. Sensibly, Guido van Rossum at least refused to sever the project from uses of those terms in documentation of the underlying Unix APIs. I wish Guido had gone further and… Continue reading Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing
Unix != open source
Yesterday a well-meaning hacker sent me a newly-recovered koan of Master Foo in which an angry antagonist berated Master Foo for promoting an ethic of open-source software at the expense of programmers’ livelihoods. Alas, I knew at once that he had been misled by a forgery, or perhaps some dreadful chain of copying errors, at… Continue reading Unix != open source
How to get started on the UPSide project
The current state of play is: We have a high-level system design and a map of the behavior states. We have a capacity target (300W for 15 mins) and a peak-continuous-load spec (400W) We know we’re going to build a double-conversion design and we’re considering a couple of alternative topologies. We pretty much know the… Continue reading How to get started on the UPSide project
How “open source” was coined
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the term “open source”. Three days before that, Christine Peterson published How I coined the term ‘open source’ which apparently she hd written on 2006 but been sitting on since. This is my addition to the history; I tried to leave an earlier version as a… Continue reading How “open source” was coined
The long goodbye to C
I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systems-programming heap – Go and Rust, in particular. I reached a startling realization – I have 35 years of experience in C. I write C code pretty much every… Continue reading The long goodbye to C
The slow birth of distributed software collaboration
This might become a new major section in Things Every Hacker Once Knew, but before I merge it I’m putting it out for comment and criticism.
A teaching story
The craft of programming is not a thing easily taught. It’s not so much that the low level details like language syntaxes are difficult to convey, it’s more that (as I’ve written before) “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind”. The posture of mind is more essential than the details. I only… Continue reading A teaching story
Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture
A G+ follower pointed me at Note on Homesteading the Noosphere by Martin Sústrik. He concludes saying this: In short: Labeling open source communities as gift cultures is not helpful. It just muddles the understanding of what’s actually going on. However, given that they are not exchange economies either, they probably deserve a name of… Continue reading Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture
Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation
Open Adventure 1.1 has shipped. There are a lot more changes under the hood than are readily apparent. In fact there have been no changes in gameplay at all, and only minor changes to the UI (reversible with the -o oldstyle switch). We (Jason Ninneman, Per Vorpaev, Aaron Traas, Peje Nilsson and I) could have… Continue reading Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation