{"id":5005,"date":"2013-07-28T17:14:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T21:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5005"},"modified":"2014-03-06T04:10:40","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T09:10:40","slug":"victory-is-sweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5005","title":{"rendered":"Victory is sweet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since the open-source rebranding in 1998, I&#8217;ve been telling people that &#8220;open source&#8221; should <em>not<\/em> be capitalized because it&#8217;s an engineering term of art, and that we would have achieved victory when the superiority of (uncapitalized) open source seeped into popular culture as a taken-for-granted background assumption.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a thriller writer named Brad Thor who I never heard of until he publicly offered to buy George Zimmerman any weapon he likes as a replacement for the pistol the police impounded after the Trayvon Marin shooting.  What Thor was really protesting, it seems, was the fact that Zimmerman didn&#8217;t get his pistol back when he was acquitted; instead, the federal Justice Department has impounded it while they look into trumping up civil-rights charges against Zimmerman.<\/p>\n<p>This made me curious. The books are pretty routine airport-novel stuff, full of exotic locations and skulduggery and firefights.  Like a lot of the genre, they have a substantial component of equipment porn &#8211; lovingly detailed descriptions of weapons and espionage devices.<\/p>\n<p>Amidst all this equipment porn the characters casually use &#8220;open source&#8221; (specifically of encryption software) as a way of conveying that it&#8217;s the best available.  And the author writes as though he expects his readers to understand this.<\/p>\n<p>Victory is sweet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since the open-source rebranding in 1998, I&#8217;ve been telling people that &#8220;open source&#8221; should not be capitalized because it&#8217;s an engineering term of art, and that we would have achieved victory when the superiority of (uncapitalized) open source seeped into popular culture as a taken-for-granted background assumption. There&#8217;s a thriller writer named Brad Thor&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5005\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Victory is sweet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mr-famous-guy","tag-open-source","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5307,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/5307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}