Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Free software didn't start out as competitive with proprietary software. It became so only because a bunch of ethically motivated hackers were willing to "subsidize" the movement with their failed, and successful, attempts at free software and free culture projects and businesses.

— Benjamin Mako Hill

The architecture of the system should correspond to the implementation style. Schemaless, heavy on magic, untyped approaches are suited for modular systems where each individual module is of limited complexity, and where the modules are isolated from each other and can recover from failures. The more complex the individual modules (and sometimes the complexity is inherent to the problem), the more benefits from "conservative" techniques.

— Gintautas Miliauskas

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Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 17, 2012 12:01 UTC (Fri) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

For a few of the original hackers of free software no doubt ethics may have been a consideration and a motivation. But I suspect the desire to learn and to share what has been learned was a factor which motivated more relevant work in this field than altruism. Many if not most people who work in Universities are paid to be curious, and to share what we learn with our students or for peer review, and those working in computing science and related fields don't learn as much (in my view) from the user interfaces, documentation and testing which is available and possible using sealed and unchangeable programs, the internal workings of which are inaccessible.

I expect others who use free software in commercial activities are likely to want to add that making provision of their services to their customers more cost effective, and carrying out paid work for customers motivates most work on free software nowadays. The surveys published by the Linux Foundation and on LWN.NET concerning who contributes to the kernel supports this view for that particular program.