[nycbug-talk] lame...real lame Andy

[Isaac Levy]

Morning all,

Andy Hertzfeld's statements hit me like this little fictional analogy:

Not so long ago, in a place not so far away, a part-time anti-logging  
activist, who was lucky enough to grow up in privileged America- where  
things like Jobs and Food is plentiful, came to my South American rain  
forest to spike trees, and help stop clearcutting.  On the way he got  
all sorts of feel-good warm-fuzzy feelings from the trip, and perhaps  
truly believed he was doing something good for the world, but he was  
totally unaware of me- In this analogy I am an indeginous person who  
LIVES in that rain-forest, and *whops*, I tried to cut down a spiked  
tree and got seriously mamed.

--
Go Andy!  If you really care about what your talking about in Open  
Source, you'd shut your mouth and put your energy to good use  
elsewhere- (perhaps by getting involved and gleaning an understanding  
of how somebody in your position could ACTUALLY HELP open source  
development).

I'm urked because articles like this add to the white noise that hurts  
ideas and businesses carried by people who are actually WORKING today  
in the front lines of open source.

Andy, if you ever read this and are in the NYC area, I'd love to sit  
down and buy you a drink and explain my thoughts further.

Rocket-
.ike

--
BTW- todays AM coffee produced quite a rant below, perhaps valid for  
the archive, but there's a snip re. Mach/MKLinux for anyone interested.  
  Feel free to disregard it and move on to fun/interesting threads-  
insomuch as what follows really isn't doing anything constructive about  
this situation, it's just me ranting...




On Jan 12, 2005, at 1:41 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> On Jan 12, 2005, at 0:59, Pete Wright wrote:
>
>>> From the news.com.com interview with Andy Hertzfeld:
>> http://news.com.com/How+the+Mac+was+born%2C+and+other+tales/2008 
>> -1082_3-5529081.html?tag=st.num
>>
>> How would things be different for Apple if they switched to Linux  
>> from FreeBSD?
>>
>> Technically that doesn't make much of a difference at all.  
>> Commercially...
>> The more free software on the system, the more alliances it would  
>> allow them
>> to make with companies like IBM, and some of the other open-source  
>> systems.
>
> The question's premise is kinda bogus to begin with.  "... they took  
> FreeBSD and layered their proprietary OS on top of it to get some of  
> the benefits of open source."  Originally it didn't have FreeBSD at  
> all, it was BSD code they inherited from NeXT.  There is a lot of  
> FreeBSD code shoved into the Darwin kernel and userland, but it's  
> nothing anyone who knows what they're talking about would actually  
> call FreeBSD.  Linux has *BSD code in it too, and we don't call that  
> FreeBSD either.
>
[snip]
> The microkernel they developed for Darwin derives from the work they  
> did for MkLinux, after all.  IBM does support Mac OS X, especially  
> their compilers and the Java stuff.

To my knowledge re. Mach and MKLinux, I never worked at apple, but  
after hacking around with MKLinux years ago- I'd think that one reason  
Apple went with the BSD userland (and many other conventions), was that  
MKLinux suffered from a lot of higher-level components being kindof  
wonkie (Linux userland, which came from a lot of BSD and other more  
ancient stuff).
Basically without a Linux kernel, it wasn't technically even a Linux.
But back then, they seemed to be focusing on Mach development, so it  
didn't matter so much what the userland was composed of- they weren't  
'doing anything' with it yet- just development.  Once they went to  
start *using* the OS for products, it seems they simply went straight  
to the source with a lot of things to keep it clean and sane, much of  
what followed came from the BSD world and NEXT- (and this incidentally  
ends up being where there are actually a few completely synchronized  
source trees between FreeBSD and Darwin today.)

--
Re. Andy Hertzfeld, I'll agree with Bob, but perhaps throw in a bit of  
a cheap shot here, trendy Linux and GPL ideology is easy enough to tout  
when one has cashed in their Apple startup stock in 1984 :)  Andy  
obviously hasn't been involved with any tech. at a low level for a long  
time, and it doesn't seem he's really ever been around UNIX in a  
serious capacity- so I'll just write off his statements and not  
personalize this, as I can appreciate anybody who says:

"Maybe even a better word is love. You fill the product with love and  
then people will love it."

But I gotta say, Andy is being dangerously misleading here with his  
Open-Business and 'Apple should use Linux' rant.  I'd say he truly  
doesn't understand the industry anymore at this level, (and certainly  
not at a technical level).  In his criticism of Steve Jobs, and  
Openness, it seems he's not aware of nice moments where Jobs/Apple  
tried EXACTLY what he proscribed, years ago even, ala Open Firmware?
http://www.openfirmware.org/
As usual, when things work well, they become transparent and are easily  
forgotten...

--
With all that said, I still work my tail off for a living, and shut off  
when someone tells me ANYTHING about just HOW I should be free.  If  
it's free, aren't we free to be un-free with this freedom?  Does every  
good thing for humanity come from freedom?  Isn't the history of UNIX  
about open freedom before anyone ever uttered the words 'Open Source'?   
It's about the tech- it's about doing positive stuff- it's about  
hacking.

I also find it ironic when people who have been part of massive wars  
over propriety (um, the original Macintosh and Mac OS in Andy's case?)  
dive headlong into the GPL, (which I'll dare call totalitarian  
freedom).
Guess it's not too strange, since both of these seem to be stabs at  
some sort of control/power in the end.  Perhaps this need for  
control/power en' masse comes from anxiety produced by the increased  
speed and change that tech. brings with it as a side effect, and Andy,  
in this context, is simply advocating things that help keep a firm  
continuing grasp on technology, in order to maintain a firm  
understanding of the world around us.
The only reason it pisses me off is that his mis-statements directly  
and negatively affect my free use of open technology, and I don't know  
if it affects him either way.

General ike GPL rant:
Bottom line, (and a bit of a stretch here), is the FSF going to sue  
somebody for infringing on GPL code for something that thrives in the  
context of some closed IP market, yet happens to, say... save millions  
of lives in that context?  To me, no one ideal can be successfully  
applied to every problem, (even the BSD's).

Or, another example, what if I wanted to make a closed internet-like  
network of my own, starting in my neighborhood, perhaps.  Do I have to  
let everyone in?  Do I have to use tcp/ip even?  What if it 'succeeds'  
and people use the thing to some positive end?  I mean, if I'm having a  
dinner party, am I obliged to invite every one of my neighbors?  What  
if that would be prohibitive because I couldn't possibly cook/buy the  
same gourmet dinner for 100 people that I could for 10?  Should that  
stop me from having the dinner in the first place?  Hell no.

I'd argue that not everything done by committee succeeds, and sometimes  
an idea needs to live within the focus that a closed environment can  
bring to reach useful fruition.  That stated, closing any environment  
too much creates an ingrown environment that is bound to fail on it's  
own (digital security is an easy contemporary example here.)

I mean, the territory that purist GPL idealism gets into here is the  
kind of idealism that turns quickly into imperialism at the worst, and  
disrespect at the least.

*sigh*

On to perhaps more constructive thoughts-
.ike