4 ms·

Open Source is a contemporary invention introduce by Eric S. Raymond in 1997, so any failure of Ted to utilise it is a bit unfair as he was living in a differen

by tudorw 9y ago

Open Source is a contemporary invention introduce by Eric S. Raymond in 1997, so any failure of Ted to utilise it is a bit unfair as he was living in a different era. For me the key take away from Ted is the democratisation of computer use, without Ted there is a very real chance we never would have had fully functioning stand alone PC's, it was Teds discussions with Bill Lower at IBM that persuaded them there would be a personal computer market, and that as a creative media tool, it would find a home in every house, thanks Ted :) Imagine a world like now, except we only ever got dumb terminals to connect into Facebook, etc, sure 98% of the world might not notice the difference, but the flexible computing power in the hands of the 2% has massive potential, as the open source movement has adequately demonstrated!

e12e 9y ago
Eh, bsd is a bit older than that. Raymond certainly caught the buzzword wave with "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" - but he wrote it after Gnu was started, which enabled Torvalds to write/release Linux etc. Raymond offered an explanation of how Free software could be subsumed by business. If just some of Nelson's books had seen wider distribution, that might have helped a lot. It's easy to link to Fielding's thesis, because it's online: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm And I actually think some of Nelson's ideas form a fine counter to Fielding's "sales pitch" for REST. REST is all about achieving high performance alongside correctness in distributed document/media systems. But as Fielding details in his introduction: there are other architectures that make more sense for what is effectively distributed computing: when you need features beyond what REST can efficiently support. I believe Nelson had some compelling arguments for why we might want more. And if the contemporary Web is any indication, he was right. There's a place for REST-style hypertext, and there's a place for richer hypermedia. I get as angry as the next grumpy old person when a simple Web page is turned into a single-page application for no gain and considerable pain; but I also see that there are things we need beyond simple hypertext (which we've tried to fill with: excel macros with floppies as the transport medium, java applets, active-x, flash...). And there's the question of naming/cataloging. It's doubtful DNS is the best we can do.
- tudorw 9y ago
  "... all versions of BSD incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and were, therefore, subject to an AT&T software license. Source code licenses had become very expensive and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license. It was released in June 1989." That's still 15 years after Computer Lib was published so... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
  - e12e 9y ago
    Yeah, I mostly took issue with the bit about Raymond - not the idea that demanding that someone who saw micro-transactions and copyright as a means to fund authors and artist of the future should also cone up with the idea of Copyleft is a little unreasonable. Still, Nelson have had year's to reconsider - and I'd be happy if they at least could've done some reasonably priced reprints - ebooks.
    - tudorw 9y ago
      Yes, I should have made the "Open Source" point clearer, I know there's a lot of history there and I am largely ignorant of it, the gist of it was that it's not fair to think anyone sitting around in 1970 would automatically assume there would be an army of programmers willing and able to work for free, it still surprises me. Which books are you looking for, Lulu.com has a few reprints, https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type= https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type...
DonHopkins 9y ago
"Open Source Software" was a marketing term coined by ESR to discredit Richard Stallman and misappropriate and subvert his original idea of Free Software.

by tudorw 9y ago

e12e 9y ago

Eh, bsd is a bit older than that. Raymond certainly caught the buzzword wave with "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" - but he wrote it after Gnu was started, which enabled Torvalds to write/release Linux etc. Raymond offered an explanation of how Free software could be subsumed by business. If just some of Nelson's books had seen wider distribution, that might have helped a lot. It's easy to link to Fielding's thesis, because it's online: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm And I actually think some of Nelson's ideas form a fine counter to Fielding's "sales pitch" for REST. REST is all about achieving high performance alongside correctness in distributed document/media systems. But as Fielding details in his introduction: there are other architectures that make more sense for what is effectively distributed computing: when you need features beyond what REST can efficiently support. I believe Nelson had some compelling arguments for why we might want more. And if the contemporary Web is any indication, he was right. There's a place for REST-style hypertext, and there's a place for richer hypermedia. I get as angry as the next grumpy old person when a simple Web page is turned into a single-page application for no gain and considerable pain; but I also see that there are things we need beyond simple hypertext (which we've tried to fill with: excel macros with floppies as the transport medium, java applets, active-x, flash...). And there's the question of naming/cataloging. It's doubtful DNS is the best we can do.

tudorw 9y ago
"... all versions of BSD incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and were, therefore, subject to an AT&T software license. Source code licenses had become very expensive and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license. It was released in June 1989." That's still 15 years after Computer Lib was published so... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
- e12e 9y ago
  Yeah, I mostly took issue with the bit about Raymond - not the idea that demanding that someone who saw micro-transactions and copyright as a means to fund authors and artist of the future should also cone up with the idea of Copyleft is a little unreasonable. Still, Nelson have had year's to reconsider - and I'd be happy if they at least could've done some reasonably priced reprints - ebooks.
  - tudorw 9y ago
    Yes, I should have made the "Open Source" point clearer, I know there's a lot of history there and I am largely ignorant of it, the gist of it was that it's not fair to think anyone sitting around in 1970 would automatically assume there would be an army of programmers willing and able to work for free, it still surprises me. Which books are you looking for, Lulu.com has a few reprints, https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type= https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=Ted+Nelson&type...

DonHopkins 9y ago

"Open Source Software" was a marketing term coined by ESR to discredit Richard Stallman and misappropriate and subvert his original idea of Free Software.