Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Sunday, 4 August 2002

Sterling on Open Source

Sterling on Open Source lots of great stuff here - read it through:
You know, I don't write code. I don't think I'm ever going to write any code. It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code want to tell software people their business. "Why don't they just," that's the standard phraseology. "Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other. Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of those people.

That's like people whose fingers are covered with diamonds complaining about the easy lives of diamond miners.

You're, like, seven miles down in this diamond mine, and these cats are laboring, laboring with these pickaxes and blasting caps and giant grinding machines. And it's like: "Why don't you people just put in a tomato garden down here? Don't you like fresh air in this diamond mine? How about some zinnias and daisies? You over there, with the carpal tunnel wristbands ? you sure look pale, fella! Don't you like the sunshine?"

They don't like to confront the sweat, and the labor, the human suffering.... Even people who are in the industry don't like to talk about what a massive drag it is, to sit there, grinding code, at 3 AM, as your eyes, and your wrists, and your spine, all slowly give out. Everybody has to come up with these farfetched, elegant, literary metaphors to describe this process.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:39

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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