Comments on: Sometimes I write these excessively opinionated blogs. But you don’t have to read them, you know.

By: pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:07:44 +0000

@dj: hmm, good point indeed.

By: DJ Saltarelli

DJ Saltarelli — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:22:30 +0000

Philip-

The only things that are truly absolute ‘black and white’ facts are relationships between ‘things’. This is the ultimate foundation of knowledge within a universe since it is only possible to have facts _about_ ‘things’ that in themselves cannot be absolutely defined (the things, not the facts, can’t be defined absolutely). For example, it is possible to say that some ‘thing’ A weighs twice as much as some other ‘thing’ B. Weight cannot be defined absolutely, neither can the ‘things’, but even so, we can see that the relationship between the two ‘things’ is an absolute fact within this universe. You could make the same example using length or relative position within space, etc.. These facts would be the same for any awareness, human or not.

Paradoxically, it’s what’s relative that enables what’s absolute.

/djs

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:59:44 +0000

@Philip - hence my last comment about followers and leaders. Yeah, thinking on it a bit more, you’re right that in most cases, the loudest people are the fans, rather than the coders. Perhaps it’s that the latter have a productive outlet for their enthusiasm, though the negative does surface now and then - you could probably name a few projects that have forked as a result of some uncompromising individual splitting the community.

But then, we’re really not all that different from the rest of the world. Some people get wound up over religion, some get wound up over politics, and some get wound up over sport. And as software people, we get wound up over our favorite programming language, or over whether the works of Microsoft are the works of the devil. Silly, but human nature.

By: pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:42:51 +0000

@Simon: It’s surprising that usually the people who DO the coding don’t take it too far at all. I have yet to meet the first coder in the community, at a conference, who’s not pragmatic about this. Usually it are the people who ONLY TALK about it, who turn into fundamentalists.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:56:28 +0000

A lot of the so-called “Free Software fans” have magically turned into a group of fundamentalists whom I, as a software developer, refuse to affiliate with. They decided start thinking ‘black and white’

I don’t think it’s so much “turned into” - there’s always been a strong zealous streak running through the free software community. Indeed, it’s practically a requirement - people who develop (or use) free software frequently do so because they’re passionate about what they’re doing, often motivated by the ideology of open access to source code.

So it’s hardly surprising that some of those people take it too far, appearing to others as real extremists. To those who agree with them, they’re visionaries. To those who don’t, they’re rabid lunatic nutjobs. Which says as much about the followers as the leaders… :)