To: Nettime
Subject:
[from http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html. this is the right reverend eric s. raymond’s response to an essay by nikolai bezroukov, ‘open source software as a special type of academic research (critique of vulgar raymondism),’ published by first monday at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4*10/bezroukov/index.html. whether bezroukov’s summation of ESR’s theses is accurate, i’ll leave to others to decide: afaict, ESR is an insufferable blowhard devoted to puffing up trivial observations into the eighth, ninth, and tenth wonders of the world, and reading his stuff is just painful. but it does look like bezroukov called his bluff on his neo-marxistical babble about how the “industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed to be out competed from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture” &c., &c. ESR’s response? “I am…implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism)” [sic ‘1999/10/08 17:25:42’ version]. i’m very curious to hear from our presumptively more sophisticated european contingents how we should reconcile the Contradictions that are erupting in the open source world, what with gift-givers kvetching about being left out of the red hat IPO (ooh — and now VA Linux is doing one!), the so-called gift economy being revealed to be a LIBERTARIAN practice, and the peer-consultation practices of open source being traced into ur-ur-history — all the way back to the early days of the MIT AI lab! cheers, t]
Response to Nikolai Bezroukov
(I wrote this in response to an article in the October 1999 First
Monday.)
Over the last eighteen months, dozens of people have written
thoughtful critiques of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) and its
sequels, Homesteading the Noosphere (HtN) and The Magic Cauldron
(tMC). I welcome such criticism; in many cases (as you can see in the
change histories attached to these papers) I have incorporated it into
later versions.
Nikolai Bezroukov’s article in First Monday, unfortunately, adds
almost nothing useful to the debate. Instead, Mr. Bezroukov has
constructed a straw man he calls “vulgar Raymondism” which bears so
little resemblance to the actual content of my writings and talks that
I have to question whether he has actually studied the work he is
attacking. If “vulgar Raymondism” existed, I would be its harshest
critic.
I wanted to like this paper. I wanted to learn from it. But I began to
realize this was unlikely when, three paragraphs in, I tripped over
the following: “he promoted an overoptimistic and simplistic view of
open source, as a variant of socialist (or, to be more exact, vulgar
Marxist) interpretation of software development.”
There are many sins of which I can reasonably be accused, but the
imputation of “vulgar Marxism” won’t stand up to even a casual reading
of my papers. In CatB, I analogize open-source development to a free
market in Adam Smith’s sense and use the terminology of classical
(capitalist) economics to describe it. In HtN I advance an argument
for the biological groundedness of property rights and cite Ayn Rand
approvingly on the dangers of altruism. And the entire body of tMC
develops the thesis that open-source development and the
post-industrial capitalism of the Information Age are natural allies.
In fact, I find the imputation of Marxism deeply and personally
offensive as well as untrue. While I have made a point of not
gratuitously waving my politics around in my papers, it is no secret
in the open-source world that I am a libertarian, a friend of the free
market, and implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism
(which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism).
Mr. Bezroukov then proposes an analogy between open-source development
and the practices of the scientific community as though it is
something I have culpably overlooked. Apparently he somehow missed the
fact that two sections of HtN are largely devoted to exploring this
connection and suggesting sociopsychological reasons for it.
Gross and peculiar distortions of my analyses follow. Here are a few
of Mr. Bezroukov’s more obviously false readings of my work:
Open source is a completely new progressive phenomenon (bright
future of mankind) with no analogs in history.
Somehow Mr. Bezroukov’s has missed, or ignored, those sections of CatB
which explicitly relate the Linux bazaar mode of development back to
Gerald Weinberg’s “egoless programming” and earlier open-source
communities including the MIT AI lab and Berkeley. He has also failed
to address those portion of HtN in which I relate open-source
development to the history of experimental science and engineering, or
the section of tMC in which I suggest an analogy between current
developments in open-source world and the preindustrial system of
aristocratic patronage for the arts.
All open source projects are the same and employ the so-called
“bazaar model”.
In CatB itself, I criticize the Free Software Foundation for not
applying the bazaar model to its free software/open source projects.
Microsoft need [sic] to be destroyed.
Neither CatB nor any other of my papers ever makes this claim, even by
implication. I grepped them and reread to check.
While I have made no secret of my detestation of certain of
Microsoft’s business practices, I have publicly (a) refused to
cooperate with the D.O.J lawsuit on grounds of free-market principle,
(b) repeatedly exhorted open-source developers that we need to be for
software quality, not just against something, and (c) given my talk to
a mostly friendly audience at Microsoft!
The open source movement consist of ideal cooperative people.
How Mr. Bezroukov reconciles this reading of my work with all the
material in HtN on conflict resolution is hard for me to understand.
The “ideal cooperative people” he supposes me to believe in would not
need conflict-resolution mechanisms because they would have no
conflicts.
All these howlers take place in the first 10% of the paper. Most of
the remaining 90%, despite Mr. Bezroukov’s billing of it as “Critique
of Vulgar Raymondism”, doesn’t address or refute my work at all. It is
hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr. Bezroukov has glued an artificial
controversy with me onto the front of his paper in order to attract
attention to work that would otherwise have little to recommend it. It
is no credit to the referees of First Monday that they apparently fell
for this trick.
I tried hard to draw something of value from this paper, as I have
from many critiques in the past. But the parts of it that are not
tendentious nonsense largely repeat observations that other people
(including Jamie Zawinski, Alan Cox, Andrew Leonard, and myself) have
made better and sooner. I am irresistibly moved to quote Edgar Allan
Poe at Mr. Bezroukov. “Your work is both true and original.
Unfortunately, the parts that are true are not original, and the parts
that are original are not true.”
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