Re: Re: [Israel.pm] Is University Really Necessary?
"Nadav Har'El" <nyh-TS7m/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.hackers.israel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Sun, Mar 25, 2007, ik_5 wrote about "[hackers-il] Re: [Israel.pm] Is University Really Necessary?": > Personally, I believe that the open source world gave us something > great: The ability to show the rest of the world our code, and the > ability to learn from others without the need to be part of an "elite" > group. I like to point out parallels between free software and the academic world. In both worlds, people are judged and ranked by what they publish (source code and papers), its quantity, quality, and impact. In both worlds, people are expected to publish their results in a way that their followers can replicate and build on (in software, this means publish the source code, not binaries). In both worlds, there's a lot of politics, people getting ahead because they know the right people or were at the right place at the right time, but ultimatively, those who really succeed are the ones who really excell at what they do, and really had great ideas that changed the world. So in my opinion, nothing in the academia is more elitistic than in the free software world. Just as graduates from one university are considered "more desirable" than graduates from another university, so are programmers on one project (say, the Linux kernel) often considered "more desirable" than programmers on a different project (say, a clock applet). Just like the academia in its hundreds of years of existance has defined several "ranks" of people (such as students, doctors, professors, etc.), so does the free software world, with its concepts of "committers", "maintainers", and so on. In one medium-sized free software project I've been interested in, there's a clear separation of one guru, several steerers, a bit more committers, and a larger crowd of people sending patches. Ataining the status of "committer" instead of just being a patch-sender, is highly coveted in this project. This is not all that different from a lowly PhD student attaining a position, becoming a professor, and so on - it's just (for medium-sized projects) much easier. -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Mar 25 2007, 7 Nisan 5767 nyh-TS7m/[email protected] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A bird in the hand is safer than one http://nadav.harel.org.il |overhead.