tag archive: quotes

Martin Sexton

Power of example
My mama said it and I heard
She says one ounce of action
Beats a ton of words.

– Martin Sexton, “Hallelujah”

Richard Stallman

[...] I didn’t write a whole free operating system, either. I wrote some pieces and invited other people to join me by writing other pieces. So I set an example. I said, “I’m going in this direction. Join me and we’ll get there.” And enough people joined in that we got there. So if you think in terms of, how am I going to get this whole gigantic job done, it can be daunting. So the point is, don’t look at it that way. Think in terms of taking a step and realizing that after you’ve taken a step, other people will take more steps and, together, it will get the job done eventually.

Assuming that humanity doesn’t wipe itself out, the work we do today to produce the free educational infrastructure, the …

I wouldn’t know anything about this from my past experience:

From past experience, I’ve observed a trend where these companies (whether it’s Oracle, SAP, or you name it) make big promises, a company “bites” (knowing that the problems outlined really ARE big issues they’d LOVE to solve), and then the vendor proceeds to bleed millions of dollars out of their new customer.

Eventually, something is constructed/customized that accomplishes SOME of the original goals, but does so in a rather clunky, bug-infested manner, while other items on the “want list” get bumped to “future stages of implementation” (which often never really get completed, because they’re too costly and complicated).

By this time, upper level management is forced to cost-justify the monstrosity, so they do their best to keep their jobs (and pride) by praising the software as a “big improvement” or “big step towards greater efficiency”. Vendor then makes sure to quote them on that, and moves to the next sucker… uh, I mean customer.

–King_TJ, Slashdot comment …

Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised Biography, by Mick Wall

I’m not sure if I should mention this, since it could affect the willingness of people to loan me books, but I do a lot of my reading in the bathroom. Some books don’t grab me enough to carry out of the bathroom and it can take a while to get through them. This wasn’t one of those books.

(Oh, by the way, I’m giving you a review of a book that seems to be out of print. I don’t even see used copies at Amazon as I write this.)

I wouldn’t say the book is especially well written. (Much like this post and web site.) It’s a bit fannish in parts. It can be overly exuberant. But I think it also captures the excitement and passion of the band and its music and fans. I enjoyed picking up on some British …

Glyn Moody points to Simon Willison pointing to an old 2001 post by Linus Torvalds. An oldie but a goodie, I’m including it here for greater memory permanence.

In response to a comment that “Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems to be making progress through sheer luck,” Linus writes:

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!

You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what – it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.

It’s you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design.

Right. “Sheer luck.”

Well, sheer luck, AND:

Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of “source code,” although biologists call it DNA.

A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this “survival of the fittest”).

Massive undirected parallel development …

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts:

All this is not to deny that Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers, Morse, and Whitney made big improvements and thereby increased or inaugurated commercial success. The form of the invention eventually adopted might have been somewhat different without the recognized inventor’s contribution. But the question for …

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

–Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line”

I haven’t read the story, but that seems to apply very well today whether it’s Disney buying Congressmen and longer copyright terms, or Microsoft and many others using patents to stifle competition.

(Shouldn’t those ors be nors?)

Bill Gates says that patents stifle innovation and competition:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

–Bill Gates, 1991

(Sure, you’ve probably seen this one, but it’s good to keep in mind.)

But it’s ok! As long as Microsoft holds the patents, I’m sure they’ll keep our best interests at heart. Especially if they don’t have to worry about all those pesky competitors.

I mean, really, the brazen impudence of these GNU/Linux companies, having the nerve to provide an operating system in which Microsoft doesn’t “earn” their monopoly profit. It all seems so unfair.

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s who. Not just one specific implementation of an idea, but the very ideas themselves. I’m referring to software patents, which have recently been used in a very direct threat against …

Updated, 11 July 2010: New YARQ post: WordPress Plugin, YARQ v3.0: Yet Another Random Quote. An updated and enhanced version compatible with WordPress 3.0. Includes the ability to edit quotes, among other cool things. Check it out!

I like quotes and excerpts. I’m not a big fan of the signature quote in emails and forums — it becomes repetitive to see the same pearls of wit and wisdom over and over and over again — but in general I like a good quote and have collected quite a few over the years.

(Skip ahead past techie background info to read about the exciting new MovingToFreedom.org site feature…)

I’d been thinking lately about adding some kind of random quote feature here, and this weekend after writing a couple of posts I needed something to prevent me from doing other pressing tasks, so I started toying around with the idea. I considered a custom PHP feature, and although it …

I first became aware of the P2P Foundation last year after Michel Bauwens sent me a nice email in response to “Free software is a weak mode of production?” I’ve since followed the P2P Foundation blog in my feed reader.

It is delightfully information-dense with good pointers and commentary about peer production. It can also be hard to keep up with, given my scattershot approach to information absorption. I should take more time to read and think about the ideas presented there by Michel and others.

An entry by Michel today is typically thoughtful and thought-provoking. He apparently has a deep well of enthusiasm and energy to draw from for this subject, and I’m glad someone is saying these things so eloquently. I love reading stuff like this, conveying so much and suggesting so many avenues to explore and learn more about.

Michel is responding to some critical remarks by Anthony Judge about the dark side of peer to peer. …