A Quiet Dissident

+ Kari Kohn

In the Charter Cities Initiative video, Paul Romer discribes dissidents and their importance in speeding up human progress in the following manner:

The history of progress is in large part a story of a few people, the dissidents, the ones who didn’t share the consensus view of the world, who thought something that others thought was inconceivable really was possible.

One of the dissidents mentioned in the video, Linus Torvalds, has quietly but drastically transformed computing. From readwrite:

Twenty-two years ago Linux was born as a “(free) operating system” that founder Linus Torvalds was quick to downplay as “just a hobby” that wouldn’t “be big and professional.” My, but how times have changed. So much so that Linux now dominates mobile (Android), servers and cloud....Earlier this week Torvalds celebrated the 22nd birthday of Linux by cheekily calling Linux “just a hobby, even if it’s big and professional” now in a way he never envisaged back in 1991.

The contributions have been many. Here are a few of the comments in readwrite's article from Eucalyptus CEO, Marten Mickos, and Cloudera Chief Strategy Officer, Mike Olson. From Olson:

...I think that open source was really a way to adopt the principles of scientific collaboration—i.e., publish your results, let your peers review and refine your work—to a field that badly needed it. I hope—I believe!—we are doing the same thing now with data and, to some extent, to services via cloud APIs....Open source has gone from a weird thing off on the fringes of hackerdom, through “cancer” and “communism,” to absolute mainstream. People now think intelligently about its different attributes—a collaborative development model, a frictionless distribution model, and a powerful way to win platform dominance.

From Mickos:

The purpose of the free and open source license and the governance model is not really to enable like-minded people to collaborate, although that’s a benefit too. It’s about enabling unlike-minded people to collaborate. The beauty of open source is that people who dislike each other can produce code for the same product....When people complain about your open source project, you need to hear them as saying “I would love to love you, but right now I cannot.” If nobody is opposed to your open source product/project, you are not really being popular… If you on a sustaining basis can truly love harsh feedback and if you can truly show enthusiasm and appreciation for contributions of whatever magnitude and type, you can be wonderfully successful in open source.

Tile image by Athanasios Kasampalis.

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