Work
Off to Orlando for educause, to talk about playlists. Have started using playlist as a research scratchpad, creating a ‘hacking philosophy’ playlist that I hope might be useful as the outline for an essay at some point.
Lots of folks at the office are going to WSIS, despite it being in Tunisia, a known internet censorer. Sounds like they should have much fun.
Have been given responsibility for a reworking of our website. Should be an interesting task.
Open Bits
Very awesome to hear that gnomefiles has 1000 apps now. I’ve had my disagreements with Eugenia, and I wish some of gnomefiles’ ad revenue went to the foundation, but gnomefiles on balance is a critically important tool for gnome and gnome users, and I eagerly await 2000 and 5000 and more.
Heard about gobby from a wikipedian the other day. Am looking forward to the next release, and looking forward to more such applications. C’mon, gocollab :)
Enjoyed another dinner with smart people last night; met Alan Taylor of Amazon Light fame.
Have started on the outline of an essay I’m almost certain to never write on Marxism and Free Software-ism; the historical parallels between Stallman and Marx (deep perception of existing problems; created vital, influential movements; managed to offend nearly the entirety of those movements) have always intrigued me (and makes me predict that Free Software as a movement will flourish, as Marxism did, once Richard steps back from the scene). But I’d never considered until the past few days the possibility of doing the historical research to do a more complete parallel analysis of the movements. I think one could do some pretty interesting comparisons there- study marxism’s historical dialectic as it competed with the capitalist meme, compare and contrast ours as we enter the still relatively early memetic/dialectic competition with proprietary software. The punch line, of course, is that capitalism very definitely beat pure Marxism, probably for decent reasons, though it has adopted (coopted?) many of the insights of Marxism. The point of the essay/exercise would at least partially be to predict what aspects of free software/open source will be coopted by ‘traditional’ software development and why, and do what ends.