Reading Notes: The Pirate’s Dilemma Ch 5

AP Language

May 25th, 2009

Themes: , , , , ,

“[T]he parties were a blueprint for a way for things to work or function without a hierarchy as much as possible” (Mason 141).

 

Software creators’ response to open collaboration include Linux, the open-source operating system; Firefox, created by Mozilla (they have also created open-source email box and calendar programs); Google Code allows developers to play with Google’s software to support new uses…. The list is massive.  [Skip to the next paragraph if you aren’t interested in this stuff.] SourceForge is a great place to start looking, and Open Source as Alternative allows you to find, well, open-source (free) alternatives to the most popular software out there. I found Inkscape (a vector graphics creator/editor) and GIMP (a bitmap graphics creator/editor) through this website.

 

The bottom line is that things (software, albums, radio broadcasting, ideas, lectures, information, education, storefronts) that were once too expensive or proprietary are now open to the public. We can all try to imagine what this will mean in the future, but by looking back (as Mason is doing brilliantly in his book), we can get a more precise vision of trends.

 

Here’s the Rolling Stone article mentioned on page 144: “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” by Stewart Brand. By hugely wonderful synthesis of history, Brand was one of the founders of the Whole Earth Catalogue. This is how the publication is described on the website:

 

With a seemingly haphazard arrangement of information within its categories, the CATALOG was the desktop-published equivalent [of] an early search engine that invited readers to learn something new on every page—and to connect unrelated ideas and concepts. It was read by nearly every segment of American society; even disparate groups could find common ground within the pages of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. (Whole Earth)

{Synthesis goosebumps}