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

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

#71

Post by nsomething »

danso wrote: post #30

Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for old media. Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker: http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-s... Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News: http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 > I don't think we should ban them…

That's funny, I said the exact opposite to my friends comparing this piece to Gladwell.

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

#72

Post by marshray »

Stuff like this is just weird:

What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.

I wonder if this makes more sense if you've never used or written free and/or open source software.

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

#73

Post by kragen »

zeteo wrote: post #65
bcantrill wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to read it, but my brain kept powering itself off as a self-defense mechanism. Then I tried to skim it, and it started getting worse, e.g.: "Another apt example of O’Reilly’s meme-engineering is his attempt to establish a strong intellectual link between the development of Unix [...] and the development of open source and the Internet." At this point I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to clean…

>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?

Morozov is wrong; you just don't know the history.

Keith Bostic has gone on record as saying that he was inspired by Richard Stallman to try to make a fully free version of BSD. The GNU tools were a crucial tool on every Unix by the mid-1980s, and indeed played a major role in making Unix useful. While you can argue about whether it was a good idea to try to rebrand Stallman's "free software" movement as "open source", it doesn't make sense to argue that Unix was somehow unconnected to the free software movement.

Furthermore, there was already a movement afoot to build software under free-software licenses in commercial companies many years before the Open Source Initiative was founded: Sun, DEC, HP, and so on, were members of the X Consortium, which continued the development of X-Windows as free software many years after its original (academic) maintainers had stopped; Cygnus effectively took over maintenance of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain from the GNU project by about 1990; Sun published NFS, Yellow Pages, Sun RPC, and so on under free-software licenses starting in the mid-1980s, and later funded development on Emacs; Lucid forked Emacs to form the basis of its IDE, giving us XEmacs and its high-quality open-source C compiler, lcc. None of this was "regular academic sharing of ideas" — while these were companies with academic roots, they were judged by standards of business, not academia — and it all happened on Unix.

And many of the people who built that open-source software that made Unix what it was were also founding members of the Open Source Initiative.

At the same time, there was perhaps an order of magnitude more programmers using IBM PCs under MS-DOS. The only significant open-source software I can think of from this era on that platform is the various open-source FORTH systems. There was lots of user-group and BBS-scene software, but it was usually distributed without source, or occasionally with source, but under "no commercial use" licenses — you could maybe even put the IBM PC BIOS source code into this category. There were occasional exceptions — the WaZOO source code from Opus, say, or PC-HACK, ported from Unix — but not many.

So I think that it's perfectly fair to describe the "code sharing involved in Unix" as a unique nascent movement, separate from the "regular academic sharing of ideas", which at some point decided to (mostly) call itself the "open source" movement.

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

#74

Post by kragen »

zeteo wrote: post #29
potatolicious wrote: post #3

Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was ac…

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

It also covers a fair bit of nonfactual ground that purports to be factual :)

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

#75

Post by kragen »

crisnoble wrote: post #22
potatolicious wrote: post #3

Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was ac…

They could have at least provided IDs for the paragraphs so I could book mark where I left off. At 16,729 words I don't think you can call this a single serving read.

That's like 50 pages. An hour or so. (I skipped to other tabs too, I admit it.)

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

#76

Post by kragen »

danso wrote: post #30

Evgeny Morozov is just a poor man's Malcolm Gladwell, and one focused solely on being contrarian to anything future-thinking, which makes him a darling for old media. Here's a recent interview with him from Gawker: http://gawker.com/5990608/a-discussion-with-evgeny-morozov-s... Here's he talks about something he thinks he read on Hacker News: http://gawker.com/5990608/?post=58282779 > I don't think we should ban them…

Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it would to him.

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

#77

Post by kragen »

dechols wrote: post #33

The author invents new words regularly in this article. Stephen King's "On Writing" talks about this, and I'm paraphrasing: "Writers who invent words are bad writers."

You would think that if he did it "regularly" you could have come up with at least one example.

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

#78

Post by kragen »

Tim's short rebuttal from over on Google+ is worth repeating (https://plus.google.com/+TimOReilly/posts/Q8EqCQJstBE):

> He could just have easily picked out a narrative that highlighted all the criticisms I've made of Silicon Valley "solutionism" (his current bete noir). If he'd really done his research, he would have found Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute, which I published all the way back in 1995 in a first attempt to get people thinking about the ambiguous gifts that technology brings us. He could have also discovered my distaste for Libertarian fairy dust, my warnings about loss of freedom in the cloud era (which I started making back in 1999, before they became fashionable), or my arguments for the moral basis of both corporate and government decision making.

By the way, how pathetic is it that only 18 hours after this item was posted to HN, it's already off the front page of the site, and the conversation here is nearly dead? That's virtually guaranteeing that most of the comments will be made by people who haven't read the article.

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

#79

Post by mr_spothawk »

pnathan wrote: post #46
potatolicious wrote: post #3

Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was ac…

Several points were being made, as I can tell from a single reading. Note that I don't claim to do anything more than summarize, and that, probably badly. Read the original to rebut/clarify my take... - The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that. - Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaga…

Additionally: the author does not support O'Reilly's (or any "Randian" for that matter) politics.

That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is.

Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either.

The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.

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

#80

Post by mr_spothawk »

mturmon wrote: post #55
CleanedStar wrote: post #27

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…

Thanks for this counterpoint to the glib dismissals around here. The message of the article is hard to hear if you already have ideological commitments to the transformative potential of entrepreneurial activity and to the power of Web 2.0. It's a long, difficult article. So, pick something you didn't like, and dismiss it all wholesale? Too easy.

I read the article, and disagreed with half the message. The first (Specificity is important) was very good, well defended, and made me think about how I use language in my life. The second (O'Reilly is a shill for Rand) was soapboxing about a topic the writer didn't appear to understand.
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