reading 08: the noosphere

I believe that most programmers contribute to open source out of passion. The might start using a tool or application that they greatly admire, and the sheer beauty of it makes them want to be a part of it. More specifically, one could say that it is a mix of ambition and admiration that brings open source to life. I think that admiration inspires one to improve applications and share it with more people, whereas ambition inspires one to seek association with the project. In my opinion, admiration is the better of the two, but both are objectively good as they each help open source.

I found ESR’s list of taboos rather interesting. I had never read about the “strong social pressure against forking projects” or experienced the pressure myself. In fact, when I first made a website, I forked GitHub’s personal-website repository, and the README even encouraged users to fork the project. I suppose that certain applications need to be forked by the users to function, but I do see why forking certain tools would be strange. And when people do fork projects, there’s probably a good chance that they don’t really end up contributing to the living project as they are more focused on their own forked one. The next couple points are more clear to me. I think it’s obvious that a moderator should be involved (even if only to review) in distributing changes to a project. And removing a person’s name from a project history clearly undermines all their work, which they should forever receive credit for. I guess in the past I have maybe learned something from someone’s code that I then integrated into what I was working on. I feel as though I should have given them credit, but I really didn’t think too hard about it. In the future, that’s something I should definitely be more considerate about.

I wanted to comment on a couple of rules that ESR details regarding hacker culture. Here is the first:

Utilization is the sincerest form of flattery—and category killers are better than also-rans.

If we consider a really impressive program that no one is really compelled to use, then is it even good at all? This rule basically points out that a program is really only as good as how useful or functional it is. Of course, some projects might not get enough exposure to really make them big, but maybe it’s just natural for the best programs to be brought into the light by one way or another. Linux is a testament to that. Here is the second rule that stood out to me:

Continued devotion to hard, boring work (like debugging, or writing documentation) is more praiseworthy than cherrypicking the fun and easy hacks.

Sometimes we have to bite th bullet and accept the smaller tasks that need to be done. I fully agree that subjecting oneself to accomplishing these small tasks is worth more praise than doing all the fun stuff. Otherwise, we would simply be left with neat programs that many people wouldn’t be willing or able to learn how to use on their own.

Ultimately, open source has a very diverse community that should seek to be inclusive to people regardless of their motives. I find the hacker humility wonderful, but I almost wish that humility wasn’t embedded in hacker culture as it might dissuade certain programmers from contributing.