To be fair, the "true origin" story is a little misleading. A bunch of douchebags wanted credit for Stallman's work and basically threw an underhanded hissy-cow to try to undermine him to co-opt his position. There was a pile of exaggerated (or often fabricated) stories thrown at the FSF. Commercial players came in to support the attack with a whole range of motives -- from wanting something more corporate to an "arm both sides" mentality to undercut the movement.
While I agree with your point, I'm not sure the alleged history supports it very well. It's a pretty ugly piece of the movement's history.
Now, that was two decades ago, those people are gone, and OSI is a very nice, good, and friendly organization today.
Nope. Open Source is a trademark precisely to avoid this sort of misuse. It's not a "what it means to whomever" sort of deal.
That was done in part due to intentional (and damaging, if ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to undermine the meaning of terms like 'Free Software' by Microsoft back when the FSF was a fledgling movement and Microsoft was an evil empire.
I don't mean to imply negative things about the company. The license is still a heck of a lot better than fully proprietary -- I love the product in part for that reason -- but it's definitely not 'open source' or 'free software' as the headline implies.
For example, if the Russian School of Math, or Kumon, wanted to adopt this calculator and software (commercial use, tutoring center), they'd be breaking the license.
I can't speak for this situation, but I was involved in situations with corporate crime at high levels. People were very cognizant of what was in email and what was verbal.
When I considered whistleblowing -- what started as little spiraled out of control -- and looked over evidence, there was very little.
One attorney at the company was fired for putting the wrong thing in writing.
It's an interesting project, but I'd never rely on it without some idea of what the goals are. Why isn't it open source? What's the business model? Will you charge me $1000 in two years, once I become dependent? Will it stay online in two years? Etc.
There's a certain transparency lacking.
It's fine to say "It's free for now, and will be $0.50 per month once mature" or "We plan to make it free for open images and charge $5,000 for proprietary use" or whatever. Or "We'll support it by doing machine learning to find naked images and pay for it by hosing a porn web site." Or "I'm developing this until I can sell it to the highest bidder."
But there needs to be some answer as to what the goal or business model is.
I like the caption: "Liberty Writers News founders Paris Wade, left, and Ben Goldman work at their apartment in Long Beach, Calif., on Nov. 14, 2016. Stuart Palley For The Washington Post"
I like the caption: "Liberty Writers News founders Paris Wade, left, and Ben Goldman work at their apartment in Long Beach, Calif., on Nov. 14, 2016. Stuart Palley For The Washington Post"
I'll anti-vouch for Route53 for personal use. I use AWS pretty broadly, but with something like DNS, I like having a little bit more support if things go wrong. Amazon won't do much without a $upport contract.
It's fine for business use with a support contract.
git and mercurial are a million times more clever than a state-of-the-art DCVS like bitkeeper. It's a new data structure. It's a brilliant data structure. It's robust in ways even distributed databases aren't. It's fast. It's simple. It's clean. It's elegant.
git made several additional breakthroughs in terms of working in terms of snapshots instead of diffsets, keeping much less data, and performing many computations late rather than early. In essence, these result in a system infinitely more flexible and expandable than prior version control systems. Adding new ways to change the source code in CVS required a whole new data format (SVN). In git, that's a minor change.
The full power of git hasn't been anywhere close to exploited yet. The data model is very general-purpose, fast, and robust. It can do much more than just source control.
If someone, of either gender, whom I was hiring as a designer, went into "advanced learning theory and the use of metaphor and semiotics along with the theoretical foundations of design patterns," my response would be to consider them non-technical and not hire them.
And "technical," for a designer, means CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and similar.
Minolta had rather astonishingly good lenses, actually. They had a number of oddballs, from an STF lens (great bokeh) to a tiny 500mm autofocus mirror lens (with very good image quality -- not the reputation mirror lenses have), and many others.
And conversely, I've seen people from cultures with different communications styles substantially and unfairly discriminated in the industry for not matching 2016 American business culture. I've found Germans (and Finns!) to be particularly discriminated in this regard, primarily because those are highly technical cultures, but with different communication styles. However, anyone who grew up in the inner city, in African American culture, in Irish Catholic culture, etc. is likewise stigmatized and labeled as rude due to what is a cultural communications difference.
I absolutely hate tips in Lyft. I wish the service just cost 15% more. The Uber experience is just slicker. Hit a button, get in, get out, and the only impediment is rating. Tips, you have to guess amount ($1? 15%? 20%?) and it's always an extra step. I'd be 100% Lyft if they killed tips or let you opt out of tips/opt into recommended tips.
Or if they were very optional. But they feel obligatory. I wouldn't mind the ability to pay extra.
1) I really like this, for transparency, clarity, and design.
2) The actual numbers there are a little bit scary. 0.03% equity grant? That's tiny. It's basically worthless.
When did startup equity get so tiny? I'm not singling eShares out here -- just broadly speaking. That means that if eShares exits past a billion dollars, those shares won't even buy a house in the area....
Boyfriend in hospital doesn't qualify as 'sick leave.' FMLA is very narrow. I've been down a similar hole once in my life before. I was sickened and shocked. One emergency in my whole life. Nominal top employer. Senior position there. Zero support.
This was completely predicted by Peter Thiel in Zero to One. There's a common set of personality traits, a little related to Asperger's, where one works from first principles, is less influenced by what other people think, has less groupthink, and is more comfortable being outside of social norms.
This is a trait shared by entrepreneurs, engineers, and extremists. There's a high overlap between the three.
Social norms are powerful. People outside of them often see better ways to do things (or what they believe to be such). Constructively, they might start a business to fix the world. Destructively, they might blow up what they don't like.
That's a kind of short summary, but the book explains this much more convincingly and eloquently.
Anyone who runs something like WikiLeaks will be vilified. We all have something in our past -- whether a jilted lover willing to make things up about you, or a conflict at work, or whatnot. We all have some slightly unpopular political views on some subject. At the time you get into a position where you have real enemies -- which the founder of WikiLeaks does -- those become publicized and twisted. It doesn't matter who ran WikiLeaks -- the outcome would be the same.
Source: I've been in a couple of positions of minor fame, and through a divorce. In both cases, I had enemies maybe 2-3 tiers down from Julian. My past -- factually -- is squeaky clean. I know what happened to my reputation in both cases.
While I agree with your point, I'm not sure the alleged history supports it very well. It's a pretty ugly piece of the movement's history.
Now, that was two decades ago, those people are gone, and OSI is a very nice, good, and friendly organization today.