The Meme Hustler - Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk

I have mixed feelings about the (intellectual, sometimes snob troll/badger) Evgeny Morozov. Yet, I've read him enthusiastically for years. On par, he's important. Nothing wrong with sharp dissent.

Despite perhaps carving his own "media empire" by knocking Silicon Valley - he speaks truth. Always worth reading.

This is the BEST essay I've read in a long time, and genuinely sorts out the history between "open source" and "free software".

I had no idea Tim O'Reilly actively barred Stallman from his early conferences, which crucially helped create the competing open source community.

Morozov is an extremely well-read intellectual (often requiring Wikipedia to grok his allusions) -- he's an important counterbalance to Silicon Valley stupidity (or perhaps, lack of broader education).

HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.

Whew, I read 4500 words, then paused to see how many more I had to go, and quit at that point. (As you will see from this comment, I'm pretty patient with length, but Morozov defeated me.)

Here's my review of the first 4500 words:

1) There's a lot of really fucking useless ad hominem. Offensively useless, offensively voluminous. Do you actually have something substantial to say about the man, or is it just linkbait? Oh, I see. Anyway, after the first ten paragraphs, I just assumed that the author couldn't be trusted in his analysis of O'Reilly, the person.

Oh, and there's some hilarious ranting in the first paragraph or four about the offensively bland jargon of silicon valley PR machines. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the article (even less than the ad hominem on O'Reilly).

2) Morozov makes a case that O'Reilly is more interested in Randian entrepreneurship than in user freedom. I'm not clear how fair it is to tar O'Reilly with the Randian brush (obviously many HNers will say "tar?!? laud! gild!", and we can quietly disagree about that), and again, I no longer trust any assertion Morozov makes about O'Reilly. But certainly some people exist who are pro-open-source but anti-free-software (especially anti-stallmanite), and many of them are laudable and reasonable people.

3) Further on free software vs open source, there's a useful discussion about how Stallman is interested in ends, but open source (and perhaps O'Reilly) is about means. Particularly interesting is how, in an era of desktop software, licenses were an important means to Stallman's ends, not an end in and of themselves. If you confuse the means for the ends, then in an era of cloud computing, you might say "oh these licenses no longer matter so the ends are accomplished", but of course that's emphatically not the Free Software position. And maybe we should give serious consideration to the free software position. (I think we should give serious consideration to the free software position!)

4) As Morozov points out, "open" is a slippery word, and he has some citations of O'Reilly using it in hilariously slippery and demagogical ways. I think this is a good point, and I hate that kind of slippery reasoning-by-analogy. Morozov says "Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as 'open'". Well, that's true, Morozov, but I can think of a word that's slipperier and sexier: "free". (It's still super-slippery and super-sex if you somehow restrict yourself to the "libre" sense.) Free software advocates are forever trying to explain that my freedom to restrict what you do with software I wrote isn't freedom, and while I support that cause overall, I'm not entirely enamoured of the doublespeak inherent in the branding.

And at this point, I ran out of patience with TFA. Maybe I'll come back to it later, read another 3000 words, and add another comment.

Avalanche of verbosity notwithstanding, I think there's an important thing here for hackers, buried in 15k words of bad writing. I think Stallman's movement is important as a matter of ethics. And I think the ethics-free engineering-and-business-focused open-source movement is important. And I think that hackers/coders/developers/compscientists who are also citizens should think seriously about both of these movements.

And I think anyone who says "FLOSS" is either perpetrating doublespeak, or a victim of it, because "Free/Libre Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things, which only-sometimes have common cause.

The comments on this article is that it is: "without...a thesis or a point", "hadn't...anything substantive", "stylish", "smooth-talking"

This is exactly what the author is saying about the Silicon Valley hype machine, with notable commissars like Tim O'Reilly. For myself, I'm glad the Baffler is sticking its first pin into this balloon full of hot air.

I understand why this article goes over the heads of most of the readers here. In the seventh paragraph it says "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101". Do you understand what he means by saying that? Do you know who Bernard-Henri Levy is? Do you know why the Baffler crowd holds him in contempt? Can you give a detailed explanation of the disagreements between the New Philosophers and the post-structuralists? Most Baffler readers can answer these questions, and it is assumed that someone reading the article could fully answer what "O'Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Levy of Route 101" means. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the article, and can not dismiss it other than to say you don't understand it.

As far as verbosity - Noam Chomsky often says if you repeat popular propaganda bromides, you can just stop there. If you say something counter to the cultural hegemony, it will need a long explanation, footnotes, multiple references and so forth. This is one reason articles like this seem long, if he is making a point about O'Reilly, he will have to point to multiple instances of things O'Reilly said, to nail down the case he is making.

Yes, it's a long-ish article but it covers a lot of factual ground (it's in effect an O'Reilly biography from a very critical perspective). It contains a lot of historical detail that is interesting in its own right; the author has done a lot of research, down to digging up some notebooks edited by O'Reilly in '76. There's a good summary in smacktoward's comment below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474090