Re: [Israel.pm] Mission Statement for a New Company based on Voluntarism-taken-to-Extreme

On Fri, Apr 13, 2007, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote about "Re: [Israel.pm] [hackers-il] Mission Statement for a New Company based on Voluntarism-taken-to-Extreme":
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 11:44:58AM +0300, Tzahi Fadida wrote:
> 
> > Don't confuse implementation and design :). To the best of my knowledge, linus 
> > may have implemented many ideas in FOSS but did not invent those
> > ideas.
> 
> So, how many projects have you worked on with Linus? Because from
> where I stand, Linus is a far better designer than implementor, and
> he's a great implementor.

My original point (before Shlomi replied and Tzahi's replied to it) was
that while Linus is a gifted engineer (which you split into two kinds
of gifts, "design" and "implemtation"), he spent and still spends most of
his time on engineering, and a minority of his time (although of course not
zero) "philosophizing" on free software licenses and their social effects,
on the effects of patents on innovation, on expanding free software's
philosophy to other areas of intellectual property (text, music, etc.) and
other areas of life in general, and so on.

Not spending most of his time philosophizing doesn't say anything bad about
Linus (some may even say it's a *good* thing!) but I think it can hardly be
denied.

On the other hand, there are people in the free software world that *do*
spend most of their time philosophizing, theorizing, and writing texts - not
software. This includes Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond (ESR), and a bunch of
others, many of them not (yet?) famous. There are even groups trying to work
together on free software philosophy, like the german Okenux, trying (in very
broad terms, that may do them an injustice) to somehow combine the best ideas
of marxism and free software.

I've heard more than once remarks like "Who's that Eric Raymond guy, and
what did he do - write the measly Fetchmail application?", or "Who's that
Richard Stallman, and what right does he have to preach to us after he wrote
a lousy editor 20 years ago". Ignoring the inaccuracy of these "facts" for
a moment, the important point is that these "philosophers" (or theorisers,
writers, bloggers, or whatever you want to call them) really wrote less
free software in the last decade than other people (like Linus). This is
because they spent most of their time on free software philosophy. It doesn't
make their ideas any less valid. Sometimes, it makes their ideas even more
worth listening to because their ideas have been well-researched, well-
thought out, and well written.

Of course, not everybody that has a lot of free time and writes something
is worth listening to. Hitler's book (and again, I hope I'm not invoking
Godwin's law ;-)) was written while he was in jail, and had a lot of time
to think on his hatred to Jews and come up with all sorts of insane theories
and plans. This is why peer review and hind-sight by the next generations is
important in philosophy, as in any other academic field. Kant (just to use
an example given by Shlomi) is remembered today not because of some arbitrary
reason, but because his peers and successors thought that his theories were
interesting, important, and that we have something to learn from them, even
if not all of them are considered 100% correct. Just like Newton's is still
considered important to learn, even though later generations found that in
many cases, his laws aren't actually correct, and have been ammended by
relativity, quantum physics, and so on.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Friday, Apr 13 2007, 26 Nisan 5767
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Those who beat their swords into
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |plowshares will plow for those who don't.