Month: March 2019

There is a service called Patreon, where users can pay their favorite content creators directly, such as YouTube accounts, artists, or even freelance news agents. This bypasses the chunk that content providers and potential managers can take from the few cents you make by looking at an advertisement when consuming your favorite creators’ content. I personally support 3 wildly different content creators on the platform, one making analytical video essays, one making philosophy discussion videos, and another making sketch comedy videos. I don’t pay much, at most $5 a month, but I do it because I enjoy the hell out of their content output and I want more of that content in my life.

While Patreon and the open source community are two very different mediums, they have parallels that can be drawn. One can passively participate in the open source community by benefitting from the open source product, much like how one can benefit freely from a content creator on YouTube or elsewhere. However, for the users that really appreciate the community and want to actively support their source of entertainment, users can contribute to the open source medium or directly support their favorite content creators.

In this way, I think I can explain the motivation behind contributing to the open source community, despite the lack of necessity to do so. When one really appreciates the content they consume and want to give back in a meaningful way, they can and will. They will be a part of the “gift culture” as ESR calls it. If they don’t have the coin or the skills, then they don’t need to also. There are plenty that don’t, after all. It isn’t an expectation, but a very welcome gesture to do so.

But what if one has the coin or the skill to contribute but choose not to? Is that a critique on the person? Perhaps a little bit, but contributing is not an expectation, rather a privilege to the creators.  As stated before, it’s the gift culture, and gifts are not to be expected, rather appreciated when they come. People are absolutely entitled to keeping their rarities to themselves. If that wasn’t the case, then the patrons aren’t special anymore! If it’s a closed, paid service, then there really isn’t a difference between the appreciators and the payers. When I play Overwatch, can you spot the difference between myself and the whales that spend mounds of cash on loot boxes (ignoring the fact that I have dropped on a guap on lootboxes on ONE occasion when I needed the Witch Mercy skin)? Probably not. At most, you can identify which players have been playing since the beginning by their season sprays/badges, but no one really pays attention to those details. Or what about the people that use the AWS “Free” tier and the upper tiers? Those are usually reserved for enterprises that use the service that much to justify upgrading their tier and nobody really cares about/notices the difference.

Ooh, what a good segue to my next point. Also like Patreon, the open source community has tiers to contribution. With Patreon, a creator can set different tiers depending on how much you pay a month/per creation or what have you. These mean more perks the more you give them. This is mirrored in the open source community with the different “faces” of reputation. The more you put in, the more you receive. While higher paying patrons get more rewards, that’s hardly the sole reason to do it. Usually, the higher rankings mean a higher spot in the credit sequence, or a personalized note from the creators. They want higher prestige from the creator themselves. Like ESR explains, “if one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing, leadership ability, and other good qualities, it becomes much easier to persuade other people that they will gain by association with you”. One of the creators I support on Patreon has a Discord server where the different tiers of patrons get different color roles. I would genuinely be lying if I said I did not want a higher tier just for that role. And this is after having a horrible, horrible experience with Discord that makes me not want to visit it often anymore. Humans are weird and they want higher status whenever possible. If that means contributing to the open source community in significant ways, so be it. After all, you can talk about Linus Torvalds to almost anyone technically versed and they will know who you are talking about. That’s some fame for free that you can’t replicate.

But humans also want reimbursement for the work they put out. What’s the point otherwise? That’s the whole point of rewards on Patreon. In the open source community, that usually means reputation, but there is more to reputation than just having your name out there. There is respect behind your name when you have the right reputation. Candidly, I don’t have that much first-hand experience with the open source community, but if somebody were to talk about xtraeme, I could would know the relative weight behind that name. Basically what I’m getting at is, to sustain a healthy community, there needs to be a system of rewards to contribution. This does not always mean fame, but there needs to be some return to the contributors. But that does not mean there needs to be money involved, either. Gaining a weight to their name is more than enough in most situations.

When considering my own experience with software development, I have experienced the most success with the bazaar method of information sharing. There is free and open documentation for my many, many problems, and I don’t feel like a burden to my supervisors or instructors by being able to look it up whenever. Additionally, whenever I encounter a problem, I can bet that at least one person brave enough to ask a question on Stack Overflow or the Github community forums has also experienced this issue. A good deal of my problems is very easy to solve, allowing my software development to be more independent without being independent. It’s physical independence, which has it’s issues, but it also gives me a sense of comfort, as I’m sure it does with other people.

Another aspect of the bazaar is continuous updates, whether that is in product features or security patches, there are constant eyes on the software making sure that it meets standards, creating a rather dynamic piece of software. As Raymond argues, this is important to the development process. The number of eyes on the software are able to tame the complexity by allowing testers and developers to freely communicate and update the software and they work hand in hand. It almost seems obvious that bazaar development method is far superior. Or is it?

While it is very easy for a programmer to parrot the greatness of the open source community, a community that has rightfully earned its place in the technology community as a whole, it is still possible to confidently say that it does not solve every problem. The cathedral method has it’s definite benefits. While I prefer my own software development method to more follow the bazaar method, my experience as a user almost always is improved with the cathedral method.

Products like Microsoft Office are far superior to its open source contemporaries, of course. However, out of my software experience, I don’t spend that much time in Microsoft Word. I spend a lot of time on the internet. I like to play games from time to time. I enjoy producing music in digital audio workshops. All of these are examples of products that are created in a cathedral setting and me, as a user, LOVE these products. Granted, I have to pay for them, whether that is money or my personal information, but I pour hours into these products and it just brings a blast.

But why? I believe a big part of that is a consistent voice. Sure, the community behind Linux Mint are creating this dynamic operating system that I like to use, but I don’t want a dynamic gaming experience all of the time. Sometimes, I want to throw Smash Bros Ultimate and know EXACTLY the game I am playing. Granted, in this day and age, there are periodic updates, but the core gameplay is the same. And, having a user base that effectively stress tests the software every day, finding all the holes they can possibly exploit, is the same as having a plethora of eyes on the software, except the progress of updates is unbeknownst to the user base, which is fine. I don’t always need to know what’s about to happen. Sometimes I just like to play some music on Ableton without being up to date on the upcoming features.

So, in essence, I prefer the bazaar method of software development when I am the one programming, but I much prefer the products that arise from the cathedral method. As for the method of the future, I think the future can maintain both methods, much like it does today. Both methods can grow and evolve at their own rate. Sometimes that will be independent of each other, but there will likely be crossover between the two, much like the eyeballs keeping the software in check applying to both the open source community and stress testing users. Maybe someday, a third method will emerge that will also hold elements of both prevalent methods, but I don’t think one will dominate over another.

Modern hackers, like Paul Graham, got rich by selling a piece of software for a high price to a customer that was willing to pay big bucks for it, in his case Yahoo!. Was Graham’s Viaweb worth the $49 million? Possibly, possibly not. I don’t know how much of Yahoo!’s success has to do with their acquisition of Viaweb, but during the dot com boom, that piece of software meant more than it would have been before or after that period.

There’s an element of timing that goes with successful startups. Had Graham tried to sell Viaweb in 2018, or somehow in 1910, we would not be reading his compendium of essays. Graham speaks of a handful of qualities necessary for a successful startup, such as hard work, leverage, etc, but he seems to overlook how lucky he really was. He does note that the current age is different – we are living in the post-Industrial revolution age – but he doesn’t consider the timing of his start up.

For modern hackers, a fortune can be made, but only because there are corporations that want to be on the cutting edge of technology, and sometimes, due to the slowness of corporations, they must buy their technology from outsiders before competitors get the upper-hand. This means modern hackers benefit from free lancing if they can make a good product, but it takes more than grit and hard work to make a successful start-up, as Graham leads the reader to believe. Modern hackers must have the soft skills to market their product as useful, either to a customer base or the parent company.

This means for a hacker to be pecuniarly successful today, they must “sell out” and make a product not for love of the tech, but love of success using tech.

As for out society, I do believe it should encourage taking risks. Too much of society is focused on perfection, or close to it, in order to be successful in later iterations in your life. This can be devastating for somebody that does not benefit from the current structure of society and destroy their self-worth. It’s easy to tell somebody that received a bad mark on an exam that their grade does not define them, but when that causes a decrease on their GPA, which many jobs require a higher than average GPAs, it becomes easy to believe that that is simply not true.

This translates to businesses. If somebody opens a sandwich shop and it does not do well, they may think they aren’t cut out for the business world, and it’s likely that they’ve invested quite some time to open that sandwich shop. Perhaps they didn’t find their true niche. Or perhaps the world wasn’t ready for a sandwich shop at the time! Those factors should be considered when assessing self-worth, but is easy to ignore with the today’s society.

Does this mean everybody can make the next big business, it’s just a matter of trying? Absolutely not. There are some people that truly should not take the risk of starting a business. But they can take that risk and possibly learn that they actually enjoy the stability of working for another business and find their worth in that way. If one does not recognize their faults after so many attempts and put themselves in a poor situation financially, then I suppose it’s a tough lesson to learn, but that’s the beauty of self-agency.

The next big thing on the horizon. It’s a little service called blockchain. Actually, artificial intelligence. I read on Forbes that 2019 is the year of the smart home assistant. So maybe it’s actually IoT?

Actually, the next big thing is unknown. In one way, the current big thing is battle royale games, with an incredibly successful and slightly unethical freemium model. But how many people were realistically predicting that 2 years ago? While I can say I do believe the next big thing has to do with the Internet in some capacity, I can’t properly predict what it will be. I do hope that it includes something with artificial intelligence and smart home assistants. Maybe somebody will develop OS 1. But that’s merely a dream.

If history repeats itself, we are about to enter a whole new paradigm of experiencing technology, and I think AR will be the next big thing. However, this incorporates a lot of the above. IoT. Artificial intelligence and deep learning. Seamlessly integrated systems. It’s a technology that has been around for a while, but only recently has it developed into something that people genuinely like to experience, and the barrier to entry is getting relatively cheaper too. But again, maybe I’m just hoping to have OS 1.