It’s great when you have a weekend where you read two strangely profound statements that make you think.
First yesterday I stop over and read this brilliance from Rands, the “holy duh of weblogging“:
After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, “What is a weblog?” The painfully simple answer is, “A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet.”
Then I’m reading the guestblog on boingboing – which has been surprisingly well authored by John Dvorak – and read this great comment about what the OSS community truly revolves around (not by John, but one of his readers):
“OSS is an important effort to replace ‘for-profit’ motives (with it’s material rewards) with ‘for-ego’ motives (with it’s emotional and psychological rewards). It’s a restatement of capitalism’s thesis (‘private vice begets public virtue’) for an industry in which the participants feel the immaterial rewards for one’s self (prestige) are equivalent to, or greater than, the possible material rewards for one’s self (money).
Vanity is the driving force behind OSS, as is greed behind closed-source software. Try to use someone’s OSS code without attributing original authorship, and you will see how quickly your quaint “community” devolves into harsh campaigns of public remonstration towards the violator. It is of primary importance that original authorship always be identified.
This is not the hallmark of a communal environment; it is indicative of an environment in which everything is okay as long as people get credit for what they have contributed to a project. In other words, people in this community are not driven by altruism over greed, but by fame over obscurity.”
Vanity is the driving force behind OSS, as is greed behind closed-source software. Try to use someone’s OSS code without attributing original authorship, and you will see how quickly your quaint “community” devolves into harsh campaigns of public remonstration towards the violator. It is of primary importance that original authorship always be identified.
This is not the hallmark of a communal environment; it is indicative of an environment in which everything is okay as long as people get credit for what they have contributed to a project. In other words, people in this community are not driven by altruism over greed, but by fame over obscurity.”
Just something to chew on this Sunday morning.
