I enjoyed reading this book; a lot of nuances I didn’t quite get before is explained – like the ongoing grumbles between the “Free” and “Open” camps, what KDE and Gnome is, why there’s a Wayland and why despite it being better I have to keep going back to X11 instead. I also read this book to try and gaze into the crystal ball to see if we could perhaps learn from the mistakes of the earlier FOSS developments as we build the Metaverse. I add some questions regarding that after some of the highlights below.
p18
In a 2004 article titled “Open Source’s Lessons for Historians,” Ensmenger pointed out how FOSS communities provide “new ways for ethnographers and political scientists to think about the process of self-governance.”
This is probably the main reason why I am interested in FOSS. There are limitations, for example that FOSS easily exists in a abstract world, while there is a materiality in the physical world that adds multiple layers of complexity, and the continuing lack of participation by women and minorities, but I think there is so much to learn from this open way of collaborating that we should apply broader.
p19
Steven Weber did an ethnographical study on FOSS as “a real-world, researchable example of a community and a knowledge production process that has been fundamentally changed, or created in significant ways, by Internet technology.”
I now seek to apply this in a physical world example.
p22 – why have such ideological battles over code?
On their own, the utilitarian dimensions of code do not explain why FOSS programmers and users have so passionately debated one another and their counterparts in the closed source ecosystem. Being able to borrow and reuse code, as FOSS developers do, is a convenience. It saves time and is arguably more efficient. But it is not important enough on its own to motivate rational people to stake personal reputations and fortunes on FOSS code when closed source software can be just as profitable. Programmers could still program and computer users could still run their code, even if all code were closed.
What they would lack under those circumstances is the sense of exerting control over their world.
I really appreciate this being said so bluntly, and I am sure many of my FOSS colleagues would deny and debate this, but it’s true. It’s a power struggle. This hassling really irritates me to the point that I leave (rage-quit, ghosting, I’ve done it all), and I definitely don’t want this “revolution” metaphor to enter my work. To be pragmatic as an alternative is equally hard, however, because this power struggle would keep pushing for compromises that may not help the wider ecosystem. How I hope to navigate it is through subsidiarity, pluralism and interoperability. Meaning, in your sphere, you do what you want, as long as it doesn’t impact others negatively. When it starts impacting others, find a way to interoperate with them. Balance the loss of efficiency with the pragmatic ability to interoperate, and then we can see what settles out over time, and then at that point we can set a standard or come to a compromise or whatever. As I delve deeper into this, I can imagine all sorts of problems creeping in, as hinted at by this article title. But, I’m excited to learn more.
p26
the story of FOSS closely parallels other revolutions of recent centuries.
the FOSS revolution’s origins can be traced to marginal figures who seethed with resentment against mainstream modes of software distribution in the 1970s and early 1980’s
p38 – Unix novelty
basic storage tools, system processes, and shell utilities
I’m wondering how we can learn from the beginnings of computers, and the FOSS journey, in how we look at the metaverse. What are the basic building blocks? What are the equilavent pieces to the “basic storage tools, system processes, and shell utilities”? (Later on I realised that perhaps Apache may be more appropriate, with it’s web-based focus)
p40 – early collaboration
developers and users at other locations, ensuring that the best innovations found their way back into the main code base
p42 – technical vs user-centred mindset
Like some FOSS hackers today, the anticorporate Unix enthusiasts hoped to provide the world with software that was free to be the best it could be technically rather than software that business managers deemed to be the most profitable or the easiest to sell to a mass market.
What does this say with regards to usability? Openness to non-technical contributors? I think with the use of personal computers (PC’s) and the power of mobile computing that the early FOSSers did not foresee, this technical focus is no longer appropriate for the movement as a whole. Or, perhaps said in a different way, a technical focus is perhaps not the most appropriate focus for metaverse development?
(There’s a recent artlicle that maybe explores this – Metaverse Unveiled: From the Lens of Science to Common People Perspective)
p43 – early Unix
core design philosophy of the operating system—which emphasized modularity and the principle that each part of the system should focus on doing a specific job and doing it well. At the time, that approach represented a novel way of thinking about operating system design
How does this translate to the “whole system rethink” that the Metaverse seem to demand?
p43 – Unix was unsupported so contributors had to rely on each other:
dependence also fostered greater cohesion and a sense of being different from other parts of the computing world.
p44 – non-commercial, academic roots of Unix
the consent decree ensured that Unix would remain a research project and also that Unix development would depend on a decentralized community of global collaborators.
(The maturity of open source beyond academic circles may have damaged this decentralised ways of collaborating.)
p46 – hacker ethic
broadly defined, involves a commitment to creativity, exploration, collaboration, and transparency
hackers are curious, open-minded programmers who view software development as a creative, healthy endeavor that can make the world a better place; they are not cyber-criminals
p50 – descriptions and divergent definitions of hacking
That is why, for example, nonelite members of the FOSS community have described the GNU General Public License, which governs Linux and many other major FOSS projects, as a tool designed to “force users of the code to obey the hacker ethic,”
As I was reading this book, I was thinking about what Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth personifies. To me, Stallman is the epitome of ideology, “does not play well with others”. The book is fair to him and the immense value he added to the FOSS scene, but he irritates me and I think the general consensus seems to be he poisoned his legacy. So to me (helped along by conversations with friends), the extreme of ideology, when you forget about the other axes of the triangle that is forming, is unproductive (the polite word for it). Linus just wanted to have fun. And he got a long way with that. Perhaps thinking of him as just fun is as unfair as thinking of Stallman as a weird old guy, but such is the illustrative stereotype. Fun on it’s own, at its extreme, when the ethics or function is not considered, is irrelevant. Then there’s Mark Shuttleworth, who wanted to do good, but as a businessman his first concern is profit. Shoving him equally unfairly into that stereotype, at its extreme, a focus on, let’s call it efficiency, is unsustainable. And so through this I created the trifecta of FOSS (dramatic drumroll):
Then, I got distracted by the logos, and reddit to the rescue, again. I so deeply wish FOSS understood the value of good design. Goes further than logos, but, includes logos. Sigh. So let’s leave the logos out:
Then I wonder, as we move into the “next iteration of the internet” as the Metaverse could be called, could there be a transcendent middle? If this was not a flat triangle, but a pyramid, what would the characteristic of that fourth one be? This question popped up after looking at those three … Western white guys. What would a different type of person have imagined? What else is out there?
OK, navel-gazing aside, back to the book.
p52
The goals of increasing public accountability, resisting arbitrary authority and access controls, and rewarding individuals based on the quality of the contributions they make to the common good rather than on arbitrary characteristics such as race or social status have fuelled revolutions and engendered the political norms of numerous modern societies.
p54
The suggestion that hacker culture and the hacker ethic are extensions of academic practices—and that this is why FOSS culture, which was shaped by hackers, varies in many ways from the proprietary software world of commercial business interests — is not new. Nikolai Bezroukov produced what remains the most explicit articulation of this idea in a 1999 article (which is not directly referenced in the book and I can’t quickly find, but the title seems intriguing! ” Open source software development as a special type of academic research: Critique of vulgar Raymondism” – and the inevitable spat afterwards). Getting distracted again, while there is obviously a lot of good in Raymond’s Cathedral and Bazaar thinking, and while I’m sure he’s more nuanced, I think we definitely do not take account of conflicting viewpoints enough, and certainly don’t learn enough from them. That Bezroukov is Russian is already a valuable cultural counterpoint. Anyway.
FOSS development could be best understood as “a special type of academic research” rather than something never seen before, more like a regular scientific community than some [open source software] apologists would like to acknowledge.
p61
… a commitment to pragmatism ensured much success. Yet it also demonstrates the short-sightedness from which the first FOSS revolutionaries suffered in some respects, especially regarding modes of organizing software development and the significance of the emerging personal computer (PC) market.
p63
Unix as a platform for exploration, sharing, and creativity – what is the equivalent to the metaverse?
p64
One of the most significant innovations of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation in the 1980s was to pioneer a way to sell support services related to free software, showing that FOSS could thrive within a commercial ecosystem even if the code itself was not for sale.
p68
the distribution of software over the Internet changed the stakes of computing and introduced new paradigms into the hacker culture.
p72
the Open Software Foundation formed at a time when the word open referred to software standards, not source code.
other segments of the hacker community expressed little enthusiasm for the initiative
(certainly history repeating itself with the metaverse standards)
p91
GNU showcased free software’s ability to cross political and cultural borders freely. That strength continues to distinguish FOSS from many proprietary software products today, which are often not as readily adaptable for different language groups …
p91
For many programmers, writing code is more exciting than writing clear, concise descriptions in natural language that explain how to use the code. Yet because even other programmers rarely can understand how a particular software program is supposed to work simply by glancing at its code or executing machine code created from it, software that lacks sufficient documentation is difficult to use in a serious way.
p94 – other open stuff
Universal Index, a project to build a database of copyright-free information
Project Gutenberg, a major hub for distributing free electronic texts
p105 – microkernel disagreements – an example of how different things can be developed, perhaps co-exist or need to wait for their time to come?
p112 –
The development of commercial ventures related to free software helped GNU to position itself as more than a charity that gave away something. Instead, it generated products that were available at no cost and yet fed a thriving economic ecosystem.
p117
It would be unfair to criticize Stallman for his decision in the mid-1980s to create a free version of Unix rather than something that catered to the PC community. At the time, Unix and institutional computers from companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) remained the platforms on which the greatest innovations were taking place within research communities. They were also the environments hackers knew and loved. It took several years before falling prices for PC hardware, the proliferation of affordable software programs for PCs, and the growing use of the Internet by individuals outside the research and programming communities brought these machines to the fore of the computer world.
Nonetheless, one wonders what would have happened if Stallman had set out in 1984 to create a free replacement for MS-DOS rather than Unix. The system he would have built would almost certainly not have been as powerful, from the perspective of developers, as the one GNU actually became. And Bill Gates’s marketing acumen may well have thwarted its success. But if a good, free PC operating system had existed in the 1980s and PC sellers and users had adopted it for use with their systems, the monopolistic dominance that Microsoft later established over much of the computer industry may well have been nipped in the bud.
So, what can we learn from this going forward? As applied to the metaverse?
p121 – how Linux was different in culture to GNU
But coding for GNU was no more fun than coding for any other project.
A new generation of hackers dreamed of an operating system that would combine the allure of a free version of Unix with the accessibility of PC hardware.
p125
Geographically as well as technologically, Torvalds grew up in a very different world than that of the generation of programmers who preceded him. His background helped him to think in new ways about old programming problems.
It also suggests part of the reason that Torvalds readily embraced a decentralized, Internet-based approach for developing Linux—even though such a strategy would have seemed anathema to most professional programmers at the time, weaned as they were on Brooks’s law.
p126
To Torvalds, building a Unix-like operating system for the PC seemed like the obvious thing to do from the start, a characteristic that distinguished him in a crucial way from the hackers of Stallman’s generation.
How are the current generation of hackers different? What are their considerations and challenges?
p127
the Internet also served as his lifeline for communicating with developers and exchanging ideas, … distinct from programmers at universities … where they were at the centers of their respective hacker universes. In contrast, Torvalds was in a remote galaxy.
p127
… just as the kernel he developed (Linux) existed on the margins of the mainstream software culture of the early 1990s, defying the norms of both proprietary and free software programmers alike.
When I ask what is the Linux for the metaverse, this is what I mean, what could be the thing that defies the norms of both proprietary and free software people?
p129 – Mimix as a sort of precursor to Linux
Minix, which he coded from scratch entirely on his own, was to provide his computer science students with a Unix-like operating system whose source code was much less expensive than Unix’s code.
What can be the Mimix for the metaverse?
POSIX, an acronym for Portable Operating System Interface (with an X added in traditional Unix fashion)
p169
Torvalds’s project was different in several key ways from other collaborative, Internet-based development efforts. First, because Linux was completely free of cost, programmers who donated code to Torvalds could reap what they sowed without having to pay a penny. Second, Linux came of age as email access became widespread and the Internet ceased “being an enclave of a few research universities,”. That lowered the barrier to participation.
Third and most important, at least in Torvalds’s own view, was that the community of programmers who contributed to Linux early in its history was not based at a single institution or derived from a core group of original participants.
p169
There was no historical insider group,” Torvalds told me, “so we were a lot easier to approach if you came from a DOS/Windows background, for example.” He added, “there was no cabal, it was easy to send me patches, I wouldn’t have stupid paperwork rules like a lot of other projects had, and it really was a much more open project than a lot of software projects that preceded it.”
p172
One of the main acts in the revolutionary script is the moderate phase. In this part of a revolution, consensus prevails, and competing parties find enough common ground to establish a new, stable order. The moderate phase tends to precede and be less exciting than the dramatic, battle-ridden periods that usually follow. But it is generally during the moderate stage that the most productive and enduring revolutionary changes arise.
(clearly we’re not there yet in Metaverse terms. We’re not even sure if Metaverse is revolutionary. Should it even be?)
p180
Distributions like Debian GNU/Linux appeared in the earlier 1990s in response to concerns that the free software world was coming under the sway of commercial entities intent on privileging profit-driving usability over software freedom.
p184
In the early 1990s, the GNU software suite and the Linux and BSD kernels sufficed for building basic operating systems that were suitable for technically inclined users who were comfortable working from a command line. As the decade progressed, however, more sophisticated programs—ranging from enhanced user interfaces to office productivity applications—appeared. They made FOSS a compelling offering to a much wider demographic of users.
p184 – graphical user interfaces, with X and then the move to Wayland
The first software to extend the functionality of FOSS systems beyond the bare essentials was X Windows, a framework for building graphical interfaces on Unix-like systems.
p186 –
X provides only the backend that developers need to build graphical applications. It does not include the code that draws elements such as windows, toolbars, and animations on the screen. The type of program that does the latter is called a desktop environment. GNOME and KDE’s are (FOSS) examples of desktop environments.
This got me thinking, could this “X and desktop environment” be adapted for a Metaverse context? And the short answer is hell yes!
(OMI Discord conversation, branching into the composable metaverse channel discussing Stardust)
also p261
In the 2010s, Ubuntu acquired a distinctive technical profile by adopting original components like the Unity desktop environment
p198
In most ways, it is not surprising that FOSS enjoyed its greatest successes during the 1990s in the Internet market. Of all the technology sectors at the time, the Internet depended most closely on the principles and practices that were central to FOSS developers. The Internet was a decentralized, collaboratively maintained network. It functioned because open standards and protocols allowed computers that were built with different hardware and ran diverse operating systems to send email, files, Usenet posts, and eventually HTML-based Web pages to one another. “The Internet is, in many ways, the original Open Source venture,” as one set of chroniclers wrote in 1999 in an essay about what they called the “Open Source Revolution.”
A few of us just feel like FOSS got stuck in the 90’s.
p199
In this sense, it was significant that the Apache Web server succeeded spectacularly in making FOSS code a key part of the Web in the mid-1990s.
p205-
Apache Software Foundation has thrived since its creation more than fifteen years ago. By 2016, it hosted nearly three hundred different FOSS project
I was wondering how Apache could link with Metaverse stuff?
p206 – TIL about Samba:
Samba, which was and remains licensed under the GPL, became an important tool for resisting efforts by proprietary software companies to “lock in” customers to their products by making them incompatible with third-party solutions.
Samba was also significant as the first major FOSS project to confront challenges that arose from closed protocols rather than closed code. Unlike the developers of Linux and GNU, Tridgell and his team were not working to create new networking software that would replace proprietary solutions. Their goal was instead to discover the details of the protocol that defined how Windows computers exchanged information over the network, which was not publicly documented. Samba increased, rather than undercut, the market share of a proprietary networking protocol—albeit by offering a FOSS alternative to the closed source software that Microsoft distributed.
p207 – TIL PHP originated to mean Personal Home Page.
p208 – MySQL (which I will forever say as MySquiggle.)
MySQL’s appearance filled a crucial niche in the burgeoning FOSS software stack for the Web. It provided a FOSS solution for storing data, which an Apache server could then retrieve and deliver over the Web in response to commands from PHP scripts. Running on top of a Linux-based server, Apache, MySQL, and PHP constituted what systems administrators came to call a ==LAMP stack==.
p214 – IBM and open
2000: IBM public endorse Linux. The company viewed Linux as “a major force in IT and moving IT to the next generation of the Internet business,” particularly because he believed that open, standards-based systems were the future.
IBM and metaverse?
p225
a view on FOSS: that these initiatives were not sufficiently utilitarian to serve what many people deemed to be the true goals of the FOSS revolution – which, for them, was about making coding more efficient, not fulfilling an ethical obligation.
p227 – some notes on the Open – Free conflict
open source as an alternative to free software
p233
the Free Software Foundation’s rhetoric about morality and user freedom. Like others in the open source camp, Raymond emphasized the utilitarian efficiencies of bazaar-style development rather than ideological issues.
p234 – Mozilla
p251 – How awesome is this sentence?!
Other than a violent encounter between Torvalds and a penguin in an Australian zoo (which gave rise to the Linux mascot, Tux), the FOSS revolution lacked the bloodshed of the French Revolution.
p251
FOSS has become even more successful than many of its proponents fifteen years ago could have imagined by conquering markets like mobile devices and cloud computing.
p253 – since the 90’s
the emergence of the Android mobile operating system; the introduction of Ubuntu GNU/Linux; the advent of the OpenStack operating system for cloud computing; and the use of FOSS in embedded computing devices.
p255
WebKit rendering engine – what is this? useful for Metaverse thinking?
p257
To Google, open referred to the collaborative nature of the development and marketing ecosystem surrounding Android
p263
Through the Ubuntu initiative, Shuttleworth hoped to resolve what he called “a deeply unhealthy situation in personal computing,” which was Microsoft’s near-monopoly in the early 2000s over the operating-system market for PCs. As a result of that situation, Shuttleworth believed, access to affordable quality software was limited, as was the availability of programs that catered to users outside of dominant linguistic or cultural demographics.
p264
what made Ubuntu and Canonical different from the FOSS initiatives that preceded them was just how far Shuttleworth and his collaborators were willing to go in prioritizing pragmatism over free software ideology.
p266
“too many good projects” in the FOSS space “have been completely hijacked because they didn’t have any mechanism to calm” tensions between competing factions within the generally decentralized infrastructure of FOSS communities.
I’m not sure if Canonical does this better, but the point is valid.
p269
because the cloud blends together servers, storage software, and desktop computers that often run different types of operating systems, it demands a high degree of interoperability.
Open standards and source code that can be freely shared are therefore a vital resource for building clouds that are agnostic with regard to the types of devices that comprise or connect to them.
p270 – OpenStack
Although analysts continue to debate whether OpenStack is yet ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, the platform is indisputably the most important FOSS component of the evolving cloud-computing ecosystem.
p275 – Free culture
Broadly defined, the term free culture refers to the idea that, to maximize the creative and productive potential of individuals, society should remain open, transparent, collaborative, and unfettered by the restrictions of traditional copyright or arbitrary hierarchy.
Creative Commons was novel in that it was the first organization to apply, in a systematic way, ideas that had been born in the FOSS community to society more broadly.
p277
Wikipedia adopts a production strategy for text that is similar to the bazaar-style development model behind most FOSS code today.
historian Roy Rosenzweig
p277
Yochai Benkler has persuasively argued, the new “networked information economy” has placed “the most important components of the core economic activities … in the hands of the population at large” for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
So is there a new networked information democracy? Or politik?
Highlighted References
Raymond, “Goodbye, ‘Free Software’; Hello, ‘Open Source,’” http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html; Williams, Free as in Freedom
Hall, Digitize 120
Kathryn Zickuhr, “Who’s Not Online and Why,” Pew Research Center, September 25, 2013, accessed April 28, 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-why