When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · October
· · · · 25 (2 entries)
Politeness and Cluelessness · I was just getting ready to knock off when Jonathan posted a piece with all sorts of thoughtful remarks about the Java constituencies (note plural), and a passing reference to “binary extremes” in reference to these remarks by Richard Epstein, in the Financial Times no less. James Governor has already given Epstein a few well-deserved whacks, and I’ve been trying to think of something more creative to say than “This clueless windbag doesn’t know what he’s writing about.” Among other things, he offers blue-sky speculation (aka FUD) about what might go wrong with the GPL but hasn’t yet. Then he confuses committers with committees, in fact using the phrase “central committee” to suggest the smell of Commies under the bed. Ludicrously, he asserts that “Open Source... cannot scale up to meet its own successes.” Uh, well, Linux, Apache, gcc, OpenOffice, Mozilla... feh. Crucially, he apparently hasn’t noticed that Open Source is fun to do, and an excellent peer-group status enhancer; fun and peer-group status being approximately the two most powerful stimuli known to Homo Sapiens. Jonathan offers clues (check out the trailing hyperlink) but I think I’ll just stay with “doesn’t know what he’s writing about.”
