I woke today thinking with sleepy nostalgia about some of the things that happened when I worked in libraries.In particular, a couple of deeply amusing things. Like when the German-born head of the science library sent out an all-staff email apologizing for not providing some resource because he “got a virus on my dick”. Instead of floppy disc, you see.
There’s a part of me that wants to go back there.
At the other end of the day, here’s a spill I made on somebody else’s WordPress just now:
Like the man said, neutrality is a chimera.
Long ago, Bill Gates famously “described free culture advocates as ‘modern-day sort of communists’.”
https://boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill-gates-free-cult.html
Maybe ‘modern-day communism’ is really more like socialism. Maybe it’s anarchic. Or maybe, in it’s purer forms (not the debased Linux Foundation version) it’s just best described as … anticapitalista.
Precise vocabulary aside–Gates might be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one. In essence he saw his enemy quite clearly.
The company he founded will never be ‘Linux-friendly’ until ‘Linux’ gets so co-opted, stuffed full of lennart droppings, and more useful to profits than freedom that we all have to abandon the GPL ship with a sad smile for the OpenBSD life raft.
The humor and the seriousness are both part of the emerging coati dynamic.