Love it. This seems to be the answer to a question that Facebook forgot completely. To help you improve your social life with the people you really care about. Not just distract you with irrelevant information. Keep it up!
I saw many comments and had some good programming books to suggest but thought that a little fun would not hurt. but it looks like according to the -4 i got i should have not make that joke. jokes are not allowed here?
While I really thought that Venus Project ideas was interesting but a little bit naive, there is something going on with cryptocurrencies. They can save us from eternal deflation of our money as the Zeitgeist documental expose. That means that our central banking system (in every country) would have troubles trying to produce more money over thin air (causing inflation). An inversion of control could happen here. Who knows.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It's inspiring for embrace Open Source collaboration and also very useful for manage projects. In Guy Kawasaki's quote "The most important book about technology today, with implications that go far beyond programming"
It is free to read at the above link. I had read many of the chapters some years ago. Pretty interesting stuff.
It consists of multiple chapters, each written by different well-known people associated with prominent projects from the open source movement, at a time when it was relatively new (1999).
The paragraphs that I remember the most from it are from this chapter:
Future of Cygnus Solutions
An Entrepreneur's Account
Michael Tiemann
(Cygnus Solutions was a company which initially ported and improved GCC and its toolchain to multiple Unix platforms, and made a business out of it, before open source was a gleam in many people's eyes. They did well and were acquired by Red Hat some years later.)
Here are the paragraphs:
[
Again, a quote from the GNU Manifesto:
There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction.
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness.
Heavy stuff, but the GNU Manifesto is ultimately a rational document. It dissects the nature of software, the nature of programming, the great tradition of academic learning, and concludes that regardless of the monetary consequences, there are ethical and moral imperatives to freely share information that was freely shared with you. I reached a different conclusion, one which Stallman and I have often argued, which was that the freedom to use, distribute, and modify software will prevail against any model that attempts to limit that freedom. It will prevail not for ethical reasons, but for competitive, market-driven reasons.
At first I tried to make my argument the way that Stallman made his: on the merits. I would explain how freedom to share would lead to greater innovation at lower cost, greater economies of scale through more open standards, etc., and people would universally respond "It's a great idea, but it will never work, because nobody is going to pay money for free software." After two years of polishing my rhetoric, refining my arguments, and delivering my messages to people who paid for me to fly all over the world, I never got farther than "It's a great idea, but . . .," when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!
-F = -ma
Isaac Newton
You'll never see a physics textbook introduce Newton's law in this way, but mathematically speaking, it is just as valid as "F = ma". The point of this observation is that if you are careful about what assumptions you turn upside down, you can maintain the validity of your equations, though your result may look surprising. I believed that the model of providing commercial support for open-source software was something that looked impossible because people were so excited about the minus signs that they forgot to count and cancel them.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
There was one final (and deeply hypothetical) question I had to answer before I was ready to drop out of the Ph.D. program at Stanford and start a company. Suppose that instead of being nearly broke, I had enough money to buy out any proprietary technology for the purposes of creating a business around that technology. I thought about Sun's technology. I thought about Digital's technology. I thought about other technology that I knew about. How long did I think I could make that business successful before somebody else who built their business around GNU would wipe me out? Would I even be able to recover my initial investment? When I realized how unattractive the position to compete with open-source software was, I knew it was an idea whose time had come.
The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in theory, but in practice it is very large indeed.
Anonymous
In this section, I will detail the theory behind the Open Source business model, and ways in which we attempted to make this theory practical.
Interesting. I use AdBlock on this page and the ads keep popping. Have they a way to bypass AdBlock? (maybe with websockets I dunno). I can't really read the article.
NodeJS works great as a simple web or network container, if you're trying to create a complex enterprise app in Node, basically you're doing it wrong. Simply it's difficult to design complex nested logic or algorithms in a clean manner. It's possible but it's harder than other languages.
I just removed the tilde and caret of all my dependencies (in my package.json) and maybe that's the way to go. Seal a local version of your packages and don't update unless is completely needed. But I'm still worried about the fragility of the package environment.
I've done something similar with programming languages, and that comic got me thinking a lot :)
By the way if anyone want to check it and have some feedback would be cool. http://nkittsteiner.github.io
Totally agree. The motivation for learning a tool starts trying to solve a related problem. In me case I want to explore which programing languages are more relevant today so I made a little experiment at nkittsteiner.github.io for measure more popular languages but without the context of the problem we are trying to solve it's irrelevant
