Linucon: Larval Mode panel
I think the name Larval Mode comes from the Hacker's Dictionary where it means the state of being a novice programmer or techie. An open source ideological leader Eric Raymond and "one of the unsung heroes of the internet" John Quarterman were the panelists. It seems they must have assumed that the primary audience will be high school students and otherwise young people seeking career advice. And judging by the age of the audience they may have been right.
Eric Raymond starts by asking the audience what they want to hear and why did they come here. It turns out nobody has any specific questions or specific goals for coming here. So Eric and John Quarterman don't know what to talk about. John Quarterman threatens to talk about risk management. Apparently that's his favorite topic. This threat actually makes the audience to come up with some questions.
Somebody wonders if there are still a lot of hackers? Eric says, a whole lot, if you use that word -- he screams -- CORRECTLY! He is adamant about a distinction between hackers and crackers. He tries to estimate the size of the open source community (which, of course, more than anyone else can claim the title of hackers) and says it grew way, way beyond the most optimistic estimation he had in 1980s.
Eric muses on how easy it would be to write a virus that would do not just something wimpy and uninspired like copy itself to everyone in your mailbox or turn your computer into a spam-sending zombie, but would wipe out computers around the world. He thinks there's nothing to keep Al Qaeda from getting smart and writing that kind of virus. He thinks it's only a matter of when, not if, they do it.
In fact, John Quarterman says, terrorists in Chechnya had already started to wage cyber-warfare. They tested out an idea of attacking petroleum pipelines (via computer networks) and suddenly Rusia had a referendum on Chechnya's independence. (I personally haven't read any such story in the news, but it's not like I follow each and every news tidbit.)
Eric and John draw an interesting parallel between open source model of operation and terrorist warfare. An organization like Al Qaeda operates at local levels; a group of people try out a tactic; the media picks it up and reports it; then other cells can see what the world's reaction to this tactics is, so they can modify and improve on it. And that, Quarterman says, is a lot like open source modus operandi. Programmers try out various ideas and the indication of how successful they are deemed to be is whether they pick them up or not.
Then an audience member brings up Eric Raymond's CUPS rant. This leads them into a discussion of documentation. Eric says, documentation written by programmers lacks not detail -- that it has aplenty -- but motivation. You can find the list of every single option that a program may use, but not things like, umm, what it actually does and what kinds of tasks you may need it for. Or examples of usage that would show how to accomplish those tasks. This has to do with typical programmer's personality, specifically, their detail oriented-ness. John Quarterman says that as good as that trait is, someone needs to be able to see how the details fit together. Someone who has more like an artist's personality.
A perfect program, Eric says, would not just have options; instead of that, it would be self-configuring. He gives an example of how he accomplished that in a program he worked on for most of last year, called GPSD, a GPS daemon. I hope to provide more detail on it when I transcribe the tape. The details are already lost on me because I never had to solve similar problems and don't have enough background in that specific area to understand the details. Suffices to say that he wrestled with two issues: there may be more than one application that needs to communicate through the port that the GPS device is plugged into; and that the communication protocols of GPS devices are proprietary, poorly desined and crappy. Or something like that.
Then someone asks the panelists, at the risk of boring the audience, could the panelists tell what they've done recently and how they got where they are today. Eric says, ummm, this could actually be an interesting question to high school students. For some reason it is assumed that most people in the audience (all 15 or so of them) are high school students seeking career advice. And indeed some of them are young enough to be so.)
Eric says he was just lucky to notice something that was very obvious. Scientific community always worked based on principles of transparency: not only your results but also your thought process had to be open to your peers so that they would be able to review and critique it and find possible errors. So why couldn't software design and development work the same way? So he brought this point to the public attention, giving rise to the open source movement, and the rest is history. He became famous doing that and ruthlessly exploited his fame, not for his own gratification, but as an instrument with which to make a difference. Or so he says, heh heh. :-)
John Quarterman says: The open source community needed his Lenin!
ESR. Eh... Eh.. but he was evil! I don't wanna be evil!
John Quarterman. How about Tom Payne?
ESR. I like that better.
Open source has also been compared to the protestant reformation, and in that analogy Linus Torwalds is Luther and Eric Raymond is Erasmus.
Many more things were said. Far from being a narrow-focused geek, Eric Raymond is a polymath in that he seems to know a lot about various scientific subjects. He is well versed in economics and often shares snippets and examples of economic theories that show how ecoomics often works in counterintuitive ways. But those snippets will have to wait until I listen the tape recording.
In the picture (click for a bigger image): A robot known aas Eric's Robot in the Austin Robot Group exhibition at Linucon. I guess that means Eric Raymond made it?
More images here
Eric Raymond starts by asking the audience what they want to hear and why did they come here. It turns out nobody has any specific questions or specific goals for coming here. So Eric and John Quarterman don't know what to talk about. John Quarterman threatens to talk about risk management. Apparently that's his favorite topic. This threat actually makes the audience to come up with some questions.
Somebody wonders if there are still a lot of hackers? Eric says, a whole lot, if you use that word -- he screams -- CORRECTLY! He is adamant about a distinction between hackers and crackers. He tries to estimate the size of the open source community (which, of course, more than anyone else can claim the title of hackers) and says it grew way, way beyond the most optimistic estimation he had in 1980s.
Eric muses on how easy it would be to write a virus that would do not just something wimpy and uninspired like copy itself to everyone in your mailbox or turn your computer into a spam-sending zombie, but would wipe out computers around the world. He thinks there's nothing to keep Al Qaeda from getting smart and writing that kind of virus. He thinks it's only a matter of when, not if, they do it.
In fact, John Quarterman says, terrorists in Chechnya had already started to wage cyber-warfare. They tested out an idea of attacking petroleum pipelines (via computer networks) and suddenly Rusia had a referendum on Chechnya's independence. (I personally haven't read any such story in the news, but it's not like I follow each and every news tidbit.)
Eric and John draw an interesting parallel between open source model of operation and terrorist warfare. An organization like Al Qaeda operates at local levels; a group of people try out a tactic; the media picks it up and reports it; then other cells can see what the world's reaction to this tactics is, so they can modify and improve on it. And that, Quarterman says, is a lot like open source modus operandi. Programmers try out various ideas and the indication of how successful they are deemed to be is whether they pick them up or not.
Then an audience member brings up Eric Raymond's CUPS rant. This leads them into a discussion of documentation. Eric says, documentation written by programmers lacks not detail -- that it has aplenty -- but motivation. You can find the list of every single option that a program may use, but not things like, umm, what it actually does and what kinds of tasks you may need it for. Or examples of usage that would show how to accomplish those tasks. This has to do with typical programmer's personality, specifically, their detail oriented-ness. John Quarterman says that as good as that trait is, someone needs to be able to see how the details fit together. Someone who has more like an artist's personality.
A perfect program, Eric says, would not just have options; instead of that, it would be self-configuring. He gives an example of how he accomplished that in a program he worked on for most of last year, called GPSD, a GPS daemon. I hope to provide more detail on it when I transcribe the tape. The details are already lost on me because I never had to solve similar problems and don't have enough background in that specific area to understand the details. Suffices to say that he wrestled with two issues: there may be more than one application that needs to communicate through the port that the GPS device is plugged into; and that the communication protocols of GPS devices are proprietary, poorly desined and crappy. Or something like that.
Then someone asks the panelists, at the risk of boring the audience, could the panelists tell what they've done recently and how they got where they are today. Eric says, ummm, this could actually be an interesting question to high school students. For some reason it is assumed that most people in the audience (all 15 or so of them) are high school students seeking career advice. And indeed some of them are young enough to be so.)
Eric says he was just lucky to notice something that was very obvious. Scientific community always worked based on principles of transparency: not only your results but also your thought process had to be open to your peers so that they would be able to review and critique it and find possible errors. So why couldn't software design and development work the same way? So he brought this point to the public attention, giving rise to the open source movement, and the rest is history. He became famous doing that and ruthlessly exploited his fame, not for his own gratification, but as an instrument with which to make a difference. Or so he says, heh heh. :-)
John Quarterman says: The open source community needed his Lenin!
ESR. Eh... Eh.. but he was evil! I don't wanna be evil!
John Quarterman. How about Tom Payne?
ESR. I like that better.
Open source has also been compared to the protestant reformation, and in that analogy Linus Torwalds is Luther and Eric Raymond is Erasmus.
Many more things were said. Far from being a narrow-focused geek, Eric Raymond is a polymath in that he seems to know a lot about various scientific subjects. He is well versed in economics and often shares snippets and examples of economic theories that show how ecoomics often works in counterintuitive ways. But those snippets will have to wait until I listen the tape recording.
In the picture (click for a bigger image): A robot known aas Eric's Robot in the Austin Robot Group exhibition at Linucon. I guess that means Eric Raymond made it?
More images here