
Mob Software (2001) - teddyh
http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html
======
mbrock
This guy and rms and probably a bunch of other people grew up hacking Lisp in
collaborative settings, which I'd humbly propose is a mind-altering,
psychedelic experience. They probably look at everything that happened since
1974 with weary unexcited eyes. Come on fellas, look at Doug Engelbart, look
at all the stuff we had at MIT, look at Smalltalk, what are you kids even
doing?

rpg, I think, is more of some kind of poetic libertarian personality, compared
to rms. So rpg will focus on the poetic aspects of Lisp hacking, exhilarating
experiences, beauty, pattern languages, and stuff. Whereas rms went in a more
ethical direction; he experienced the Lisp freedom as being most directly an
ethical concern threatened by secretive competitive businessmen, and so to
protect the hacker spirit it was urgently necessary to create a copylefted set
of core tools, and that is his entire mission.

rms says, for example, that GNOME is a successful project, because it is a
decently satisfactory desktop environment that is copylefted and open to
change. From an experiential standpoint, however, GNOME on GNU/Linux is a
miserable dungeon of despair, as far as I can tell, if you want to actually
hack on it, because it's all written in C.

I was in a chatroom last week where somebody was talking about how they had an
idea for a change they wanted to make to the Gimp, I'm not sure what but they
were eager to do some hacking.

But they couldn't get the autotools to work... then there was some missing dev
dependency... then something else was wrong... then they tried using Nix to
get a dev environment but that failed too... a few hours later they said "fuck
it" and probably went to watch TV, or to punch a wall.

I was a teenager when I tried to hack on GNOME. Actually I did get a few
patches in. I revamped the UI for their PDF reader, that was the highlight of
my youthful career in free software. I just wanted to contribute. But it was
so fucking boring and I'm never doing anything like that again. Just getting
the change you wanted to be installed on your own system is a nightmare. Are
you going to pack it into a new .deb? I don't know, maybe things have changed.

Pretty sure rms doesn't use GNOME. I don't think he even uses X. Probably
because he doesn't understand it. Because you can't. Because it's huge and
complex and boring and practically impossible to change.

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html)

Emacs is an enormous contrast. You can change anything easily. It's an
entirely different experience. It's actually fun to modify.

This is turning into more of a rant than I imagined.

I enjoy thinking about the psycho-social realities of open software
development. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if the people at GitHub
decided that their basic website is done & finished and they all took some LSD
and came up with some interesting ideas. Or what if rms and rpg got over
whatever political quibbles they probably have and did a weekend retreat with
lots of oolong tea and wrote a manifesto for inspired computing. Or what if
people just had spare time to work at anything but making money.

~~~
moron4hire
>> But they couldn't get the autotools to work... then there was some missing
dev dependency... then something else was wrong... then they tried using Nix
to get a dev environment but that failed too... a few hours later they said
"fuck it" and probably went to watch TV, or to punch a wall.

Aaaaargh, if you hadn't of said "last week", I would have thought that was me.
I've had that same experience myself, several times. I try again after a few
years to see if things got better, but they never do. And it's not just Gimp,
I've had it on several other projects, too.

Some people criticize me for my "reinventing the wheel", but if I can't easily
get a dependency running for something, I feel I have to write it myself. The
ease of including the dependency in such a way that anyone coming along to
start the project from scratch needs to be an order of magnitude less than
maintaining my own version, because the disappointment from failing to get a
project up and running, say nothing about making changes to it, is a serious
impediment and discouragment.

------
chippy
" a kind of semi-chaotic self-organizing behavior in which numerous small acts
of repair with a common goal in mind can lead to quickly built, complex, and
massive creations. Mob software is different—it explores the space of
possibilities. It includes users during design. It is highly incremental,
focusing on repair rather than master planning. Mob software takes coding out
of the closet and makes code literature. It is based on gifts. Mob artifacts
include massive software, built by the multitudes. It never goes down, it is
never totally stable but is stable in the aggregate. It is flexible in the
extreme. Anyone can add to it. Mob-software artifacts adapt, evolve almost."

When reading this section, all I could think about was OpenStreetMap. It is
rather an open database rather than open software, it does seem to share all
of the features. Massively collaborative, small, numerous acts. Mostly repair
(these days), flexible, gifted acts, crowdsourcing. Complex, massive it can be
quickly built with many eyes. Over half a million users have contributed to
openstreetmap - he writes than thousands and tens of thousands would
contribute to mob software, would the same idea apply with millions?

The example he gives in the essay is the Oxford English Dictionary.

~~~
mbrock
I like the metaphor that comes up when you think of OSM as software. Or
Wikipedia.

npm is also similar to OSM in a way, except somewhat clunkier. People are
always building little adapters, fixing up compatibility issues, etc.

Linux distributions like Arch or Nix are also kind of similar. Lots of
eyeballs and fingertips, people patching up different things, rapid
adaptation, etc.

Random thought: In the next decade, AIs will start to contribute more to open
source projects. All the work being done on testing, verification, proving,
defining interfaces, automatic formal logic, and so on, combined with work on
artificial creativity, combined with more and more machine power. Pretty
fascinating to speculate about.

