Category: Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I found the following through Scripting News:

There was a cross-posting between Adam Curry and Greg Ritter about weblogging, school weblogs, and course management systems. Having contracted at both Harvard Business School as well as Stanford’s School of Business, I was curious about this mixture of course management with blogging, so I followed the thread.

The cross-posting started with a post Curry made about Weblogs in Education, where he discusses weblogging in academia, his school blogging server DataBarn, and the use of Manila. Curry also, briefly, described a business model associated with it (blogs and blog hosting are free, charge for the tools to enable higher level integration; however, verify my interpretation at his site.) Ritter responded with his views of the proposed business model, and the possibility of tying blogging APIs into Blackboard. In case you’re not familiar with it, Blackboard is a courseware management application. (Within education systems, courseware systems rank among the highest for being the most complex pieces of software.)

Curry posted a response to Ritter’s posting (as well as other commentary from what I can read). He was a bit uptight, which is surprising because Ritter’s comments were mild, more questioning than anything. Nothing approaching a flame or a rant (and I know both of these quite well).

However, RItter took “the high road” (as Curry himself put it), with a response explaining his original posting, as well as providing more information about the possibility of melding Blackboard with weblogging capability — the real focus of his earlier blog. At which point, Curry did a final post, gracefully following the lead that Ritter provided — the concept of melding courseware and blogging software together. What would it take?

I know this cross-posting threading is a bit tough to follow at times, but I found it very worthwhile. Reasons:

1. I’ve worked with courseware, and I’ve looked into the innards of blogging technology; I never would have thought about marrying the two. The concept generates interesting possibilities. At a minimum it highlights the usefulness of open APIs and interfaces.
2. I’m very impressed with Greg Ritter’s handling of a possible point of combustion. His graceful response re-focused the discussion on the issue of merging courseware and blogging technology, rather than the more sensitive topic of business models and the use of Flash. And he managed this without any obsequious manner in his response.
3. Adam Curry, in turn, gracefully followed the thread that Ritter gave him, continuing the discussion into merging courseware and blogging.

My own natural inclination is to burn in situations like this. And sometimes the burning is necessary, effective, and the only way to make a point. However, as these gentlemen demonstrated, you can rub two opposing views together and not create a fire. In fact, you might even find out that there’s no disagreement.

My New Year’s resolution: reason more, burn less. The stress generated by the burning is causing me health problems because, for me, with the burn goes high blood pressure. And in the last few weeks, I’ve had more than one night of overwhelming headaches caused by the burn. Bluntly, I’m too young to succumb to stress because of RDF, patents, and cheesy legal letters, open source discussions, and web standards and the WaSP. My preference is to live to be a dirty old woman and then die in bed. And not in my sleep.

Mr. Ritter, Mr. Curry, I doff my weblogging hat to you both. I’ll try to learn this particular “SchoolBlog” lesson.

P.S. This doesn’t mean I’m changing the name of my weblog to Reasoningbird…

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Nothing like Dave Winer from Userland cashing in on the open source non-debate by twisting the whole thing back to how we shouldn’t pick on Manila, we shouldn’t pick on him, we can’t pick on “his” XML-RPC, and then goes on to talk about how open source developers never listen to the users. WTF!?!

I suppose that’s why Mozilla cared so little for getting comments from users that they created an entire open source bug reporting system (Bugzilla) just to manage user responses. I suppose that’s why the Apache organization wrote the following:

Not a software developer? Don’t worry, there are plenty of other ways you can contribute. Our customers, the users of our free software products, are part of the Apache community as well. Organizing local user groups, volunteering to work on user conferences, and helping less experienced users on the various on-line forums are all ways in which you can contribute to the ASF projects. Likewise, the Foundation project can often benefit from people with administrative experience or access to specialized communication facilities.

Not listen to users? Bullpuckey!

FYI — I’m not an open source groupie. Most of my work has been for companies that hide their code behind lock and key (though that is changing a bit now). However, I do believe in giving credit where credit’s due, and the open source community deserves more credit than they sure have been getting lately. A lot more credit, and a hell of a lot more respect.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no competition between closed or proprietary software organizations and the open source community. If anything, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two. The proprietary software companies provide the salaries of the people who donate their time building much of the open source code. In turn, the proprietary software companies benefit from the innovation and creativity freely available as open source. Based on the benefits proprietary software companies have gained from the open source products, the concept of “open source” is a huge success.

I would even go so far as to say if there were no open source, you wouldn’t be reading this today. And if there were no closed, proprietary software companies, chances are you wouldn’t be reading this today, either.

-later-

Why am I getting into this BS? Arguing with the Userland Deus Ex Machina is like being nibbled to death by ducks — slow death by constant attacks by small, blunt toothless beaks. Chomp. heh Chomp. heh.

There’s this “tag, you’re it” type of thing that goes on — when one tires, another takes up the weblogging baton and it’s just you running against this big, bad remorseless Weblogging machine.

Anyone want to take the baton from me? I’m getting tired. All that “flailing” about open source, most likely.

I received an email about my weblog postings related to the non-debate about open source with John Robb. The person thought I was “silly” for calling John Robb a Suit, among other things. I thought I would repeat his email here, sans his name. Note to folks — you want to slam my weblog postings, do so within the comments, not via an email:

Far be it from me to defend John Robb, he can defend himself if he feels he needs to. I find him rather hard to take more often than not. But I followed a link to your site from his and I read the following:

I wonder what ever happened to debate? Or disagreement? Or even getting pissed at another person and coming out swinging — in writing that is…

…(rest cut as you can read this in yesterday’s weblog)

And further down the page:

However, I also realize that John is basically a Suit. He reads about
trends, and he reads about approaches, and he writes about them, and he makes recommendations, and he manages — but John doesn’t get his hands dirty. He doesn’t get into the technology. He might be called a “technology expert”, but he’s not a techie. So he’s not going to look at Open Source, or even P2P from the ground level. He’ll look at it from a bottom line, or from a spreadsheet, or from the viewpoint of counted lines in publications, or from conversations with techies, but he’ll never have a techie perspective. So, I’m tempted to cut him some
slack — he doesn’t really understand the technology. The industry, yes.
The business, yes. But not the technology.

And I wonder if you see the problem here?

Frankly, I find the earlier paragraph about John being a “suit” sort of
silly. Obviously, open source is some kind of sacred ox of yours that is
being gored by Robb. So after putting up something of a legitimate
refutation of his argument, you then close with this sort of adolescent
put-down. Why would John Robb choose to engage you in debate? You’ve already disqualified him from being able to intelligently debate you on the topic because he’s not a “techie.”

I find this even more amusing given your most recent entry regarding
your introduction to computers. One of the big advantages of
micro-computers was that it brought the power of computing to regular people and not just the “priesthood” of MIS.

It would appear now that there is a new priesthood of open-source
“techies” who are the only people qualified to comment on the technology because they are the only ones who get their hands dirty (as if!) with it and thus understand it.

Seems kind of arrogant (you deigned to “cut him some slack”) and closed minded (“he’ll never have a techie perspective”) to me. Which might go some ways toward explaining why you may not have got the online fight you were looking for. Why bother?

Happy New Year!

You know I could care less that John Robb doesn’t “know” anything about computer technology other than the running a tech business. If he does a good job of it, great — we need good management within software companies, and believe it or not, I respect good business management. And it’s true — “Suit” is about the worst put down you can apply to a person within the technology business (well, most businesses really). Bluntly, I wouldn’t have used this term except for Robb’s incredibly arrogant one line putdown of open source. “You get what you pay for”.

Indeed.

Anyone that can dismiss all of the incredible software that exists thanks to people and organizations who have freely provided this software via “open source”, with a trite, banal one line statement such as “You get what you pay for” deserves a resounding put down in return. When I read Robb’s background and applied this to his “reputation” as being a technology expert, my first reaction was “What a typical Suit”. Hence the weblog posting.

As for my weblog entry about my introduction to computers: I wrote this as a way of explaining why I love technology so much, why I spend so much time with it, and especially why I argue about it so passionately. I was actually trying to share a bit of myself with my weblog readers. And all the person who sent me the email can respond to is that Thank God the micro-computers have come along and brought the power of computing to the little people rather than priesthood of MIS.

Is my writing so obscure and poor that the whole point of what I was writing was that lost?

Why do I bother writing to this weblog? Especially about technology? Technology’s never been anything but a good ole boy network. Yeah, you can comment on standards — as long as you follow WSP’s party line. Yeah, you can go after an obvious putdown of technology, but only if you follow some form of “gentlemen’s rules”. Something along the lines of:

Well hey buddy boy, John. I’m sure you didn’t mean that nasty putdown of open source, now did you buddy boy? I’m sure you meant something more on the lines of “Open source isn’t living up to it’s hype”. Hey, don’t take offense *wink* *giggle*. And I bet you want to take back that sentence: I am beginning to think there isn’t any real intellectual rigor behind the open source movement. *wink* *wink* *giggle* LOL!

Gag me.