Posts

Reading 11: Some concluding thoughts

Linus Torvalds faced a lot of growing pains that seem to stem from the fact that Linux wasn’t meant to be a business endeavor. It had grown to be so much more than just a passion project. For instance, there was the hurdle with the trademark of Linux. Because people working on the project were hackers instead of business people, no one had thought to check the trademark register (I wouldn’t either). However, through these growing pains, more and more people got involved in the project, which has made Linux what it is today. I think that Linux’s success is proof of the power of hackers in the bazaar. Although open source is a loud and chaotic place, smart people are contributing to projects they are passionate about, and this can produce amazing things. I’ve read about various hackers throughout the semester, and I am always so impressed by people’s passion for what they do and how much of themselves they are willing to pour into their projects. Because the open source community draws
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 09: I really don't understand business

I’m going to preface this blog post by saying that I am not an economics major; I don’t know much about business models; I don’t normally like to think about the business world. Yet, I will try to respond to ESR’s “The Magic Cauldron” because it’s a class assignment. I honestly don’t have many opinions on this topic, so I will probably be quick to change my mind on these issues. As I read the section about selling services rather than the software, I started looking through the apps on my phone. I think there’s a lot of truth in what ESR says here. Most of the apps on my phone were free to download but include a fee for certain premium features. For instance, Spotify is free to download but has a paid Premium membership program that provides more features. This sort of model applies to most of the apps on my phone (Life360, Lightroom, Forest, Tiny Scanner, etc.) and shows the rise of selling services rather than the software. In terms of this “services instead of software” business
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 08: I wish I had their motivation

It’s really difficult to figure out what motivates people. When asking people about their motivation, I feel like it’s difficult to get a completely truthful answer that captures the entire truth. Often times, we aren’t even entirely truthful to ourselves. Given this, I think there are two sides to the motivation question: (1) the reason we want to believe and (2) the self-serving reason. Both drives are true, and I think that they often exist together. First, there is the motivational factor that we often tell ourselves. For those contributing to open source projects, it might be something along the lines of: I believe that software should be free, so I contribute my time and efforts to make this possible. This is a very pure motivation, and I think it’s what we try to convince ourselves of. We want to believe that we are good people. Coupled with this, we have the self-serving motivational factor. I don’t mean to make this aspect seem bad in any way, but this is the part that we do
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 06: The reason I dislike business

Let’s start from the beginning. My mom’s parents were hard-working farmers. My dad’s parents were successful entrepreneurs. The reason I mention this is because I grew up with two very different sides of the family. My mom’s side of the family believes in diligence and patience while my dad’s side of the family is charismatic and risk-taking. I watched my dad’s brother (Uncle) found multiple startups; I watched Uncle scrap his startup the same number of times. I was always quite removed from the entire situation, but Uncle has given me a negative impression of the world of business and startup culture. Coming from this background, I think it makes sense that I don’t ever plan to join a startup. I don’t have even a smidge of business in my brain. For instance, while my friends invest in the stock market, I put my money in a savings account with 0.7% APR. That’s just the way I am – I don’t like risks and will always choose the path with certainty. The truth is, I’m not trying to get ri
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 05: We are multilingual

When I was in high school, I took a class called the Theory of Knowledge. It’s a class for students in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Was I in IB? No, I just really liked the teacher, so I decided to put myself through a try-hard class. Anyway, one of the ways of knowing that we discussed was Language. Did you know that Sanskrit has 96 words for love? I’m not sure how reliable the source is, but check out these translations if you have time: In English, we really only have one way to say “I love you.” You could be saying this to your parents, your significant other, or a pet! But languages like Sanskrit have many nuanced ways to express “love”. I’m not saying that English-speakers can’t feel the same level of love as Sanskrit-speakers, but it’s just easier to communicate the specifics of what I’m feeling in Sanskrit. In this way, I guess we could say that Sanskrit specializes in communicating love. Perhaps I’m making a bad analogy between human languages and progra
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 04: To be a hacker

Paul Graham and Steven Levy have similar ideas of what constitutes a hacker. To begin, Graham alludes to different parts of the hacker ethic throughout the various essays: He writes about the Hands-On Imperative in “Hackers and Painters” H e discusses how protecting intellectual property can be a threat to intellectual freedom in “Good Bad Attitude” He explains why hackers don’t like the government overseeing everything in “Good Bad Attitude” He mentions in “Hackers and Painters” that hackers are being judged by their publications, rather than how they should actually be judged – their ability to design beautiful software His essay “Hackers and Painters” explores the idea of hackers being makers who strive to create something beautiful Not only do aspects of the hacker ethic appear throughout the text, Graham talks about hackers being motivated by pure curiosity, an idea that was extensively discussed in Steven Levy’s book. Graham visits this idea explicitly in “Good Bad Attitude” an
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading 03: An interesting song

Ken Williams is a Game Hacker. Like the previous two generations of hackers, Williams became a skilled programmer who found beauty in computers. However, unlike the previous two generations of hackers, Williams “dreamed not only of the ultimate hack, but of fame and big royalty checks.” In the 1980s, skilled programmers were now being paid large sums of money to work at software companies. If curiosity was the reason behind the achievements of the True Hackers and Hardware Hackers, the Game Hacker was motivated more by financial reasons. I don’t think that this shift in motivation was because people were suddenly being built differently. Rather, this shift was largely due to the commercialization of computers and software. Only after the era of the Hardware Hackers was the general public becoming interested in computers, finally making it possible to dream of gaining fame and money from this profession. I’m sure that there were always money-driven people. They merely did not choose c
Post a Comment
Read more