January 14, 2004
Open Source Democracy
This post from Glenn Reynolds, and Roger's post here talk about Dean (and the other dwarves) being sliced and diced by the blog fact checkers.
I have two comments. First, the short one. I have never cottoned to anyone trying to communicate to me the things they thought I wanted to hear (or perhaps better put, the things they thought the majority wanted to hear). It's disingenuous, patronizing, and offensive.
The 2004 Democratic candidates, Dean and Clark especially, are being driven by raw-meat polling numbers taken from the chum-fed hard left. Now, if either one of them actually believed what they were spouting, I'd have no problem with that. Kind of like a Democratic Alan Keyes. Never much cared for Keyes' extreme positions, but I was quite satisfied that his views fit naturally into his moral and political universe. Dean and Clark are leaving a wake of inconsistencies, lies, and switched positions, sometimes on a daily basis.
The second comment, or concept (which I personally think is kind of neat), is the analogy one can draw between Proprietary software vs. Open Source software, and what I'll call Big Media democracy vs. Open Source democracy (to save my fingers, let me use the acronyms PSvOSS and BMDvOSD.
For those who do not know what the PSvOSS debate is about, in a nutshell it is typified by Microsoft vs. Linux (if you do not know about Linux, then I am afraid this analogy may be lost on you; if you do not know about Microsoft, then I am afraid you have been dead for 10 years). Eric S. Raymond likens the PSvOSS analogy to The Cathredal and The Bazaar. Eric's CATB abstract:
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail,
that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories
about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux.
I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally
different development styles, the ``cathedral'' model of
most of the commercial world versus the ``bazaar'' model of
the Linux world. I show that these models derive from
opposing assumptions about the nature of the
software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument
from the Linux experience for the proposition that ``Given
enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'', suggest productive
analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents,
and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this
insight for the future of software.
The Cathredal is a black box. No access permitted except to the chosen few. The Bazaar is a white box (interestingly, there really is a term "white box"; white boxes are PCs built with all off-the-shelf parts, which can subsequently be easily serviced by end-users). Access is cheap and unrestricted.
The operative sentence in Eric's abstract is: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
Isn't this exactly what is happening with political blogging? In the BMD era, lies, deceptions, and position changes were not only not easily discovered, they were oftentimes known but not reported. No access permitted except to the chosen few, and those chosen few may have had agendas of their own.
In the OSD era, which I might suggest we have entered, the democratic process is open to massive debugging. Access is cheap and unrestricted.
I, nopundit, who am really a great big nobody in the political, media, or entertainment universes, get to create and post my opinion. And it will get read because I'm clever enough to put it in Roger Simon's comments section! Imagine myself walking onto the Entertainment Tonight soundstage and asking whoever the infoskirt is nowadays that I would like three minutes of camera time. Now that cracks me up.
I do not believe BMD will ever go away, nor should it, largely for the same reasons PS won't and shouldn't go away. They are the best development models for certain things. However, I am very glad to see OSD creeping into the political process. And here's why: I want to see less poll-pandering and more genuine position-taking.
To all the candidates: take a position, speak your mind, ignore the polls. If you speak from your convictions, the Internet's infinite memory can not do you any harm.
Thanks for reading. You can find this post here.
Posted by nopundit at January 14, 2004 07:24 PM