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Reading10: King of the Ball

            Hearing the story of Linux’s development, it almost seems to be a case of unimaginable luck. Like, sure, Linus is a genius and the code is great and it’s a cool project that people just wanted to get behind, but it also just seems like everything… worked out for them. Linus didn’t want to deal with the business parts? Someone stepped in. There wasn’t anyone to do user graphics? Someone else stepped up. The situations almost seem army-of-the-dead-esque; how can there be enough bodies to fill all these tasks with competent code? I guess my assessment is that there’s too much luck for it to be just luck. If Linux had to happen at just one time, in just one way, in order for the right people to support it and for it to take off, then I don’t think it would have been the massive thing it was, and I don’t think it would be the massive project it is today. Sure, maybe Linux came onto the market before some other huge open source project, and people weren’t busy d
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Reading09: Birth of a Nerd OS

My CS perspective of Linus’ story: Wow, this Linus guy is super cool and impressive. My normal human perspective: Okay, this dude is a loser.             I like background stories; I generally think they’re really interesting. And upbringing and culture usually end up explaining well the decisions that the influential person makes later in their life, so it’s nice to have that perspective. Here it was interesting to hear about Linus’ motivations for keeping Linux free, about how Finnish social stigmas against greed was part of it. I also just love old computer stories, hearing about how so-and-so had to pay off this computer and use this hardware and wrote this influential piece of code because they had to make their janky computer do this one thing that they needed and that wasn’t supported in that day and age. The CPEG in me loves the old-school stories. Is his personal life mess super relevant to computer science knowledge or education? Probably not. Is it still
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Reading07: The Noosphere

            I think the primary driver for people to contribute to open source is that they have some level of caring about open source. Either they have an ideological stake in open source, think it’s the greatest thing ever and that it should be promoted at all costs, or they really like the work or programs that come out of open source and want to be involved because of that. I don’t think anyone is driven into open source developing because they want something to feed their ego. But once they’re invested, I think it’s very logical that a developer would start caring about what the people of this community think about them. When you care about projects and the code and the process, once you’re invested, it only makes sense that the esteem and reputation that is the currency in the open source world would acquire more and more meaning for you. The reason that ego-based motivations aren’t advertised broadly isn’t so much that it’s ineffective, as ESR thinks, but beca
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