iamgilesbowkett

I like @cpnks's thing about scale -- GPL making more sense for giant projects -- but I think of GPL as a legacy license from the days when open source was a radical idea.

I think you could argue that it took radical people with radical opinions to make open source what it is today, but GPL is overkill for modern development and (in my opinion) completely unnecessary.

Attempting to control what people do with the software they create is, in my opinion, not only wildly inappropriate but also very self-defeating, as it limits the number of people who can do anything with your license. Likewise, there's this:

"Take a look at pretty much any embedded Linux project and you will find a GPL violation. For example, most ARM devices are unusable without binary drivers that rely on specific builds of specific Linux kernel versions (example - you can't get sound or accelerated video on the Raspberry Pi!). I've had one plug computer maker tell me they have a custom version of Linux and they won't provide the source."

(from @sedachv's comment)

The sheer number of GPL violations out there in real life point to the fact that the license is unenforceable in practical terms, because of the legal budget a project would need in order to prosecute what is essentially an epidemic of victimless crime. If your project uses GPL, you're more likely to see an increase in corporations shrugging off open source licenses (or laughing at them) than an increase in corporations contributing code back. GPL violations are not a criminal matter. You can only enforce them with civil lawsuits. Who's going to pay for that?

Imagine if Linux aggressively asserted its rights under the GPL against every violator out there. it'd be a full-time job for a whole team of lawyers -- an astronomical expense which absolutely nobody would benefit from, except for the lawyers themselves.

There's absolutely no reason to expect companies to comply with the GPL, other than good manners and good ethics, both of which are rarer than they ought to be. The GPL just encourages those qualities to become even rarer. It's self-defeating and it's bad for open source in general.

the House votes on the bill on April 23, which is a week away. any opposition which happens needs to happen fast. (I think that's probably deliberate.)

"Don't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group! He takes everything too seriously!"

"Don't have parties at your confs! You're not being serious enough!"

I sometimes skip the parties at confs, but I sometimes go, and I've been to a few which were great. I think attempting to come up with some kind of Canonical Seriousness Level for all developer gatherings is doomed anyway. This is a matter of personal taste.

All you can do as a conf organizer is decide what kind of conf you want to run, and make sure people know before they buy their tickets. Or, if you're running a very large conf, set up loud options and quiet options.

There's also a flaw in his argument here, one which I hope is not significant:

"It's easier for overworked conference organizers to arrange a party than other evening activities which actually require planning."

On its own, this sentence is so dementedly off-target that it initially made me wonder what other wildly inaccurate assumptions he might be making. However, later in the blog post, it turns out that he might mean it's easier because all you do is hand it off to some company who wants to organize the party for you.

Of course, not doing anything is easier than doing something. Can't argue with that. However, if he really thinks parties require no planning, he either has no experience throwing parties, or the parties he throws are not good.

that's great dude but you didn't actually answer the question.

"If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades?"

a 37% drop over a few decades is a pretty dramatic change.

your argument is based on zero data and a whole bunch of rhetoric. not only that, it completely ignores the question.

if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change? (and realize that if you really want to take the discussion to the grand, sweeping level of human nature, three decades becomes a tiny, tiny timespan for such a sharp drop.)

ok, but do you get that the person you were responding to was a woman who didn't like how the blog was representing her?

do you get why I think it's weird that you dismissed her complaint because no 5-year-olds were present?

"I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are."

no, you absolutely do not. the onus is absolutely on the speaker here.

"The lack of women in tech (and lack of women in science and math in general) starts at a very young age - while boys are immersed in video games and girls are having afternoon tea with their dolls. I doubt those 5-year-olds are influenced by the way women in tech are reported."

I don't quite understand this. First, girls play video games. Everyone plays video games. Second, are you saying that portraying female founders in sexist terms is immaterial because whatever explains women being rare in tech has already taken effect after the age of 5?

That would imply that sexism in media only merits attention at all if children 5 or under can see that media. I think that's pretty unlikely.

And what about being a decent human being to the women who are already here? I mean say for the sake of argument that we go along with this theory that something utterly irrevocable happens at the magical age of 5. Doesn't a perfunctory nod to public decency still require that, if a woman in technology says "this article about women in technology does not portray people like me in the way I would prefer," anyone who is not in that category should acquiesce, or at least show a baseline level of respect for the request?

When I was a raver, and I saw stories in the media about ravers, and I told my non-raver friends "yeah that doesn't quite correspond to reality," they were curious to hear what the reality was. When, as a first-generation American with British parents, I spot some unrealistic British character on an American TV show doing something no British person would ever do, if I point this out to Americans, they tend to listen.

I think you have to just show respect for the fact that somebody in the category that the article was about disagrees with the depiction of the category. I think that's (no pun intended) categorical, and the larger issues of sexism are irrelevant here. I think that's just common courtesy, even leaving aside your argument that media only has an effect on the mental attitudes of children, and/or that the whole thing is a done deal by age 5 anyway so why bother -- OK honestly I have no idea what your argument was there. But I made a good-faith effort to tackle it and I think any discussion of women in tech should show a token level of courtesy, just on the offchance that they turn out to be human beings after all.

I'm glad to hear this. The sexism in SF/SV is one of the major reasons I moved away.

here's how I solve this problem. (ironically Chris Wanstrath, GitHub co-founder, created the technology my solution uses, and apparently did it in response to a random comment by GitHub engineer Ryan Tomayko.)

the tech is called dotjs. you can check it out at http://defunkt.io/dotjs. if you use Chrome as your web browser, it runs arbitrary JavaScript you define for any domain in your ~/.js directory.

my ~/.js/github.com.js looks like this:

$("div.news").hide();

you can check the full file for a couple other hacks: https://github.com/gilesbowkett/dotjsfiles/blob/master/githu...

but that's the gist of it (no pun intended).

I also created a Minimal GitHub Dashboard mini-app, built in Node against the GitHub API, but when they changed the API, I didn't bother to update it. I think it was really cool though so I'll link it up anyway. it just pulled a list of your public repos and put links to them in a very readable, very minimal UI.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minima...

also, just to be clear, this is not legal advice. I know absolutely nothing about the law and am just some asshat making shit up on the internet.

hey @racerrick, my mom's a retired lawyer. (for context.) lawyers issue threats the way other people say hello. if this person says to you on the phone that you have to prove that you don't own the site, guess what? you can't prove she said it, since it isn't in writing, and it's not against the law to lie about that in the first place.

you need a sharp lawyer who won't rip you off. hire one. free advice is worth every penny you pay for it. however, IN MY OPINION, if you had a sharp lawyer who wouldn't rip you off, such a lawyer would tell you how to translate "fuck off, this has nothing to do with me" into lawyer-speak.

the translation would (IN MY OPINION) be brief, clear, and non-argumentative. whatever you do, DON'T be upset by anything they say to you. provoking rash reactions is just a tactic they employ.

if I were a lawyer, AND I AM NOT, I would tell you to write a letter that looked more or less like this:

"Dear Whoever,

I read your letter with interest, and noted your request that I shut down XYZ Site. However, I am unable to cease operating XYZ, because I do not operate it, and have never operated it at any time. In fact, I have absolutely no connection to XYZ, have never had any connection to it, and am unable to help you. Good luck, and have a nice day."

Again I AM NOT A LAWYER, but that's really all you need to say. You put that in the mail, certified of course, with receipt, so you can prove they got it, and you forget this ever happened. Any aggressive, offensive noises they make other than "here is your court date" are just NOISES. Ignore them.

In the unlikely event they get you in front of a judge, the judge will hear your simple defense - "nothing to do with me" - and ask them if they have any proof of it being anything to do with you. Since they don't, it's a short conversation, and you go home.

If you find yourself saying anything further than what I just described -- "not me, got your letter, nothing I can do" -- STOP IMMEDIATELY and either hire a lawyer or shut the fuck up.

speaking of hiring lawyers, again, disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, grain of salt, your mileage may vary. seriously just hire a fucking lawyer because panicking, freaking out, and/or writing 10,000 words about this is just completely wasted energy.

there is no such word as "dependant." it's "dependent." really sorry to be that guy but it would hugely brighten my day if you could fix the spelling in the title.

well yeah. here you are making this personal, and what I said is I'm not going to give Yehuda any money because I criticized his PROJECT and he responded with 'fuck you giles.' so he made it personal, and you're making it personal too.

I'm not saying Bundler should be destroyed and it's a thing of evil. I said it was super useful but had very aggravating flaws which indicate that Rails went off the rails. If you guys can back off from all the making things personal about me for five minutes you might actually notice that "Rails went off the rails and is no longer entirely true to its original principles" is not such a vicious thing to say.

But is "fuck you giles" a response which is going to prevent you from getting my money? Yes, of course it is.

what I felt was rude was not the thing Bundler said but the thing Bundler does. if you know people are expecting rubygems to be the default, you don't tell them "oops you forgot to type rubygems, sucks to be you." you just make it the default.

you had an issue open for this on GitHub but it was closed with very little explanation. mind if I reopen it?

well, this is what's insane about Rails these days. we have a value which is correct in 99.99% of the cases, and we are (at best) debating whether or not to make it the default.

I say at best because obviously in my case I did not see a whole lot of debate. the GitHub issue for it is likewise extremely not-discussion-y. wherever the discussion for this incredibly controversial idea is taking place, I haven't seen it.

entirely fair, no, entirely funny, yes.

actually I hate to say it but one of the early (2006? 2005?) blog posts about the diff between Python and Ruby was that in Python's console, if you hit "q" or escape or ctrl-C or something, you get an error message like the 'source :rubygems' error message, which says "hit ctrl-D to escape." the blog post was saying this is basically the diff between the two languages, that Python would correct you if it knew what you wanted but you asked it the wrong way, whereas Ruby would just either support the most obvious option, or support both the most obvious option and the 'correct' option as well.

the idea in Ruby, and especially in Rails, is that if you know what the default is which most people are going to expect or try, you should support it. to say "we know you thought source :rubygems was the default, but it's not, you have to type it explicitly" is a little un-Ruby and a whole bunch un-Rails.

I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:

http://xkcd.com/927/

The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.'

If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money.

Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)

Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.

(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.)

Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop

http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

https://github.com/joshfng/railsready

So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard!

I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read http://railstutorial.com/

But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:

http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...

Step 1: make Rails hard

Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy

Step 3: PROFIT

sure, it's http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/

The filtering's hard-coded, and very opinionated. :-)

the code's on github here:

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper

I think this is absolutely correct. I'm a US college dropout who started taking classes again in 2001 or 2002 and have basically been constantly in some class for something (taking classes on the side) ever since.

if you're saying education isn't worth the time or money, I disagree, but if you're saying the US higher education system is so broken it's not even worth considering, I agree.

"Is it just me or is there a trend of reactionary posts (or just submissions?) on the same topic? A few days ago it was Go (why Go is awesome, why I'll never use Go, why Go has its pros and cons) and now it's college's turn."

it's not just you. it's a signal/noise problem. I read HN through a filter site I made and I've thought about clustering these types of stories on my filter site, because I don't think they really deserve separate billing. it's kind of like the site wants to have trees of links, instead of one flat list.

anyway, the reason I call it a signal/noise problem (and of course this is just my opinion) is because often the reactionary posts feature very, very unimpressive reading, and are really only there to serve as a focal point for discussion, or maybe to serve as something to upvote, for people who disagreed with whatever the story is reacting to.

This dude is completely insane but I admire his total steadfast belief. If he manages to one day apply that intensity of conviction to actual real information, he'll probably do very well.

Kurt, if you're reading this, for the love of God, stay the fuck away from east Palo Alto. At least look it up on Wikipedia. You'll read about an anti-gang-crime task force which included 500 FBI agents and plenty of other law enforcement people. You'll also discover the city held the highest murder rate in the country back in 1992. It's lost its champion status since then, but it's still in the game. Point being that it is NOT the same as regular Palo Alto.

Actually I made minor progress on it by just banning the msdn domain.

I think I've also figured out a pretty cool product idea from this as well. However I'm not going to get into it here because people have taken my product ideas and turned them into products twice now (actually one of them was a Hacker Newspaper iOS app which looks very, very, very similar to my http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/).

In terms of what I want, well, any ideas on how to improve signal/noise on HN, whether via automated filtering or some other method.

I have an automated filter site at http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/ -- "don't click on what doesn't interest you" is way inferior to "don't see what doesn't interest you."

I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams, but it's not what I come here to read at all.

"Phallacious" is hilarious.

Re yr first half, Stallman diplomacy vs Crockford diplomacy, Stallman seriously implies people who disagree with him are evil, while Crockford jokingly states it outright. So serious implicit vs joking explicit. Are they both less than perfect diplomats? Yes. But Crockford annoys me more because I don't use anything Stallman-related anyway, and although Stallman weirds me out, I kind of prefer serious, nuanced disagreement to blanket condemnation and completely unfounded presumptions of moral authority.

I don't know if you've ever been to Silicon Valley, but a guy with a lot of corporate authority, hand-waving away as "evil" any language use which he disagrees with, is a lot more noxious on his home turf in the southern end of northern California than he is as some random thing you read about on the Internet.

I apologize for the structure of that sentence. I'm a bit tired this morning.

Anyway as to this part:

I can’t bring myself to believe that Mr. Crockford was scheming to waylay lawyers and BigCo when he wrote that line. I also doubt he was trying to ignite an anti-evil fire. Most importantly, I even doubt he imagined that there might be some disagreement about what is or isn’t evil.

Not what I'm saying at all. I don't care what he thought or intended, I care what he did.

If there was, what makes you think he would have the right to decide?

I'm not saying he would have the right. I'm saying he has the privilege. That is to say, the language is sufficiently vague that he could sue almost anybody who used his software for almost anything they did with it. Some people believe that any and all forms of business are evil. Crockford could claim to agree, and use that to sue any business. Some people think all homosexuality is evil, all Christianity, all whatever. The term's lack of specificity constitutes a bona fide risk for any business. Crockford could decide freaking cupcakes are evil if he wants to and take that shit to court to shut down some bakery's web site. It's ridiculous.

Making the lawyers dance just because you can is certainly turnabout, and some say turnabout is always fair play, but to me it just seems irresponsible, self-indulgent, and lame.

To use your analogy, Stallman gives away coffee as long as people agree not to resell it. Most people give coffee away for free and all you have to do is agree not to hold them responsible if the coffee makes you sick (MIT license). Crockford sells you coffee on the condition that you not sue him if it makes you sick, but he also reserves the right to sue you if you do literally anything he disagrees with.

In practical terms, "evil" is so vague as to be unenforceable, but if it's in a legal document, then you can take people to court with it. Dragging somebody into court is expensive for them even if you lose and pay their court costs. There's still lost time and extra stress.

I mean follow that analogy through. Can you imagine the heinous pain in the ass if Crockford one day decides Google's/Facebook's/whoever's privacy invasions make it evil and demands they rewrite whatever they have which uses his code? That's like saying "I'll give you coffee for free, but I reserve the right to remove it from your digestive system at any time." Somebody would have to take existing code apart and rewrite it. Pain in the butt for some giant corporation, but imagine how much worse it'd be for some bootstrapped startup.

The use of "evil" in the Yahoo! docs disgusts me, although nowhere near as much as the YUI API does. I realize it was just a joke, but if it's in a legal document then it's legally binding, and in my entirely personal and idiosyncratic opinion, it reeks of Silicon Valley's arrogance and contempt for small businesses and fair business dealings. Yahoo! can afford to throw lawyers at any small business in the world. It's a very, very, VERY abstracted version of the joke where an aristocrat puts a sword to a peasant's neck and laughs about how he could run them through with it at any moment if he felt like it.

Ha ha ha.

Raganwald made his post either after or during a Twitter discussion with me. I'm pretty sure his post was more a response to the Hacker News discussion you linked to than to my own tweet or two, but it looked like an ongoing discussion to me, so I continued it from where it had left off.

OK, judgemental yes, fair enough, but not being a dick? Saying "you can't use my software because your code is evil" is not going to win anybody points for diplomacy.

Also, the vagueness of it is actually quite passive-aggressive. In functional terms, putting that in a legal document means "you can use this for anything you want, unless I decide that I don't like it after the fact." It's not an important passive-aggressive action to Crockford, I'm sure, because for him it's just a formality he's turned into a joke, but it does actually set him up with ridiculous power to disrupt a business's operations should he so choose.

Crockford has total license to create any license he wants, of course, but I absolutely hate that license of his, not just because the lawyers are right -- "evil" is not a term substantiated with definition, and all terms in a legal document should be defined and specifc -- but also because insofar as he has expressed opinions about what constitutes evil, I disagree with him.

The YUI documentation, and similar JS documentation from Yahoo!, is chock full of the term "evil" used as if it were an official technical term. At Yahoo!, it probably is. Crockford identifies certain features of JS as "evil" in his book.

This is a generational divide between modern open source and ancient open source. In ancient open source, being judgmental and controlling was socially acceptable; in modern development, if you don't like a feature, you either don't use it, or you create a meta-language which compiles to your target language and excludes the undesired feature.

Leaving the features out of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" was enough - if he'd left it at that, he'd have sent the same message without the weird moral condemnation.

Technically, it's possible that using eval() in the context of any of Crockford's open source code is against the law. Even Richard Stallman has never been that much of a dick.

is it fair to TL;DR this as "Objective-C is only hard if you've never used Smalltalk"? or is that overly glib?