Comments on: It’s too darn hot – open source and WGA

By: Henrik's personal blog

Henrik's personal blog — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:29:21 +0000

Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA)…

Matthew Stibbe schreibt über WGA:
“As The Register points out, the only advantage here is Microsofts. Its a bit like the East Germans who called the Berlin Wall an anti-fascist protection barrier.”
Hier ist das Original….

By: Matthew Stibbe

Matthew Stibbe — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 07:12:20 +0000

All interesting comments. I picked my words carefully about the open source community. I’m full of admiration for their selfless dedication and the results of their work. But I can see nothing that in the world that is designed to encourage ‘citizen programming’. I ran a software company for ten years and I know the tendency of programmers to develop tools and user interfaces for themselves. Where is the Basic or Hypercard of today? Where is the mass of citizen programmers? If a high school kid today wants to write a program about Vikings trading around Europe (as I did at 13) how do they do it on their Playstation or Mac? Perhaps this is why applications for computer science courses have declined by 50% in the UK over the last five years.

By: Jeff Winkler

Jeff Winkler — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 03:39:14 +0000

I object strongly to your use of the phrase “pulling up the ladder” re: open source.
Open source is just what it says.. fact is, only a tiny fraction of people are interested in learning/developing code. I often use open source apps and only look at the code as a safety measure if there are problems.
There are zillions of resources (see showmedo.com as an example) to learn to program on the web..it’s certainly a challenge to stay current and undergo paradigm shifts every 5 years (I worked in Hypercard too), but that’s not due to anyone pulling up a ladder.

By: The Digital Beest

The Digital Beest — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:42:41 +0000

Interesting Site…

but possibly not for non-word-geeks
Matthew Stibbe’s Bad Language looks like fun. He’s got interesting ideas about writing, specifically, and the world, generally. Hell, he even had a post (only the second of his that I’ve read so f…

By: A.J. Van Beest

A.J. Van Beest — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:34:54 +0000

I’m down with Phil (above). As someone who screwed around in fourth-grade summer school writing silly games in basic, then again in high school putting physics presentations over the Red Hot Chili Peppers in HyperCard, I think it’s easier than ever to do neat things with your own computer. Not only are all the tools out there to do anything from video editing to database construction to hard-core programming, you can almost always find something that’s both free and good.

I think there are two hard parts to getting going, though; both involve choice. There are so many cool things to do, where do you start (and how do you keep going when cool thing A gets a little hard, and cool thing B is *so very* cool)? And once you decide what to do, how do you decide what tool to use? I figure that in both cases the answer is to choose and jump. You can always make a more informed decision next time.

By: Håkon

Håkon — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:29:23 +0000

There is nothing puzzling about the term ‘Open Source’. Everyone have the freedom to read and modify the source code. That doesn’t mean that everyone need to have the ability to understand it. Modern software has grown more and more sophisticated, and it takes hard work and dedication to learn to write good software.

Open Source makes software development a dialogue, where anyone can make the system evolve. Most projects enable non-programmers to participate through bug report systems, etc.

There are many similarities between Open Source and democracy. Everyone should have the right to participate to some level, but everyone shouldn’t have to learn about the intricacies of foreign policy and tax law. Like the differences between the democratic practices in different countries, each open source project has it’s own interpretation of how outsiders should be involved. Unlike politicians, software developers can choose to ignore people screaming “Wireless support FTW!!!11one” or whatever on Slashdot. I often wish this was true in politics also …

By: Media UnCut

Media UnCut — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:42:57 +0000

Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage Spy Program…

What is very interesting is that Microsoft can pretty much any information it wants to by changing the query remotely….

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 13:09:19 +0000

I don’t know about that. I remember programming BASIC in the “good old days” but it was really because, aside from producing grade school book reports, there was really nothing else to do with the machine. There wasn’t a great deal of interesting software, so you just played around with what you had.

I would argue that earlier coders climbed up the ladders and installed escalators behind them. There are so many resources available for getting started that the biggest struggle one may have is on picking which escalator to take. Coding may be a whole lot more complicated than it was, but the the tools are there to get started and the reward would seem to be far richer software with vastly shorter development times.

By: Bruce Jack

Bruce Jack — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 10:33:59 +0000

I agree, both of these terms remind me a little bit too much of Orwell. It’s such a pity he was so right…