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In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson
- christefano 19y agoThis is an incredible essay by one of today's leading techgnostic writers. It's the earliest writing I know of that talks about the commoditization of software regarding open source projects.
- leoc 19y agoThe "Halloween documents" (I and II) by Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen were talking about it the previous year: they were written and leaked in 1998. http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
- eru 19y ago"This page originally continued with an anti-Microsoft jeremiad. On reflection, however, I think I'd prefer to finish by thanking the principal authors, Vinod Valloppillil and Josh Cohen, for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general. I suspect that historians may someday regard the Halloween memoranda as your finest hour, and the Internet community certainly owes you a vote of thanks."
- Readmore 19y agoThis is a really great essay. I go back and read it every year or so. There is actually an 'updated' version, not done by Stephenson but with his blessing. It takes into account the rise of OS X (which Stephenson loves) and updates some of the other arguments. Here is the updated text http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html
- eru 19y agoGreat for people we read the original first, too. As the update consists of clearly marked comments.