As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. Open Source started as a fun place. People were coding to Have Fun, in the broad hacker meaning of fun. See that recent (and reoccuring) flame against Crockford's "not for Evil" licence. Why are we denying people right to do that? It was a joke, he did it for fun. Hackers like jokes. Fun is a part of FLOSS.
I believe that Open Source community needs not to become adult. It needs place for fun, humour, role models, rockstars, religious preachers; place to agree or disagree, to judge people on their merits and just plainly do whatever one wants. It's how creativity is born.
>As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things.
uh... no.
to steal a joke: it used to be a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
IT used to be serious people with post grad degrees working with multimillion dollar machines. it keeps moving towards not away from cargo shorts, flip flops and "rockstar code ninjas"
"As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things"
I guess it depends on your point of view, but I personally love the fact that: a) my field is becoming more grown up, which means more recognition of its importance to the world, and b) the field is growing up, meaning the people who nowadays hold huge amounts of power over many other people, are taking this power more seriously.
I also don't think it's a problem to still have fun in our field - but there should be professional limits. When some engineers get together to build an engine that goes into a car, I'm all for them having fun while doing it, and making jokes, etc. But I also want them to be professional and for the end product to do its job. Usually the two don't conflict. In cases like the "nor for Evil" license, some people think they did conflict. Perfectly valid for Crockford to do it, perfectly valid for other people to say "this kind of humor means we can't use your product, much as we'd like to".
Replying to this post and its parent: In the world of distributions there is CentOS/RHEL for the blue shirted suit wearers and me on week days. Then there is Arch/Antix/Absolute and the truly wonderful #! and Puredyne/Dynebolic (which both appear to have died a death) as well as blag linux for the ones who want to do slightly mad stuff.
I suppose over time, we will have the same split in applications and services. All of 'em will use the project that Torvalds manages, which is why I imagine he lets off steam in irrelevant directions.
As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. Open Source started as a fun place. People were coding to Have Fun, in the broad hacker meaning of fun. See that recent (and reoccuring) flame against Crockford's "not for Evil" licence. Why are we denying people right to do that? It was a joke, he did it for fun. Hackers like jokes. Fun is a part of FLOSS.
I believe that Open Source community needs not to become adult. It needs place for fun, humour, role models, rockstars, religious preachers; place to agree or disagree, to judge people on their merits and just plainly do whatever one wants. It's how creativity is born.
[0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769230