obstinate.org

I recently went to a party with people I mostly didn’t know. I started talking with this guy who was working on his thesis at Cal Tech. He was a computer science major and specialized in optics. He worked on grants that funded his work on the DARPA grand challenge.

So this dude is talking this party up on his work, how the funding process works and the type of work they do. The kind of work he was doing, was very un-spectacular to say the least. The types of things he was working on was very ‘middle of the road’ in terms of complexity. Furthermore – he went on to boast that all he had to do to get this big funding was to get ‘a few papers published’ so that he could report something back to the government grant comitee a the end of the year.  I was disgusted.  I left the party.

This sort of attitude would never cut it in the corporate world – where results are what pay the bills.  Must be nice to live in a world where you are judged on just ’showing up’ – reminds me when I was 8.

I have to wonder if the government pays into these sort of research programs with no hope of any sort of meaningful return? This reminds me of a grand parents that pays their kid to do chores around the house – it’s sort of an excuse to give them money, because in the long run you know that they will have some sort of benefit from it.

Open source projects are neat, they allow ideas that otherwise would go unheard in businesses to gain traction and development time. Open source code development is a great thing, I do it. I have seen lots of great code come out of open source developers. As I see it, all open source projects are destined to one of these 4 basic categories:

1. A ‘real’ project / service that is monetized
2. A clusterfuck of a bazillion developers that lose track of the original insight
3. A clearly guided project of a few individuals who spend their spare time developing something out of the goodness of their heart.
4. Total Failure.

In my opinion Options 1, followed by 3 are the best outcomes. If the idea is any good, it will fall into category 1, 2 or 4, if not it will fall into category 3.

The reason open source fails is for one blatent reason: The Community. Recently I have seen several open source communities start to destroy the enviornment that they benefit from. Everyone wants something for free, and the Open Source communities are blatantly at the front of the bread line.

Over and over again I see the real developers driven away from their once beloved projects by people who take personal offense from skilled programmers from making money. Why would anyone want to stick around for that? The second that any developer starts to think about monetizing their creation – the ‘Community’ swoops in and scolds them for being selfish bastards.

With this kind of reaction all developers (me being one of them, sort of ) will always prefer to take their skills to the private industry. Sure, they might contribute here and there to something or another, but their skills can never be fully utilized as they are fully devoted (as they should) to the job that pays the bills, not the one that they take undue criticizing via chat / email / boards from on a daily basis.

If I had a manager that I worked for speak to me the way that I see people treat hard working developers, I’d punch him in the fucking mouth.

Since the last time I updated this blog, lots has changed. I got married, I started working for a high-tech startup, I moved to LA, I traveled internationally. The list could go on forever. One major thing that has changed for me is that I don’t have time, time to dick around with coding my own blogging engine for one (hence I have changed to Wordpress.)

I guess mostly I just want everything to be easy, technology I think is complicated on purpose – to give people excitement. I was one of these people who had 87 servers in my office just so that I could do statefull packet inspection on the 4mb of traffic of daily traffic I had.  I had the super-hacked WRT-54G with the sweet WDS setup with my Airport Express in the living room so that nobody could hack me.

Recently my WRT broke and I had to get a replacement. I bought a Buffalo something or another and set it up, no WEP, simply because I don’t care if somebody uses my wireless. What, are some kids going to come along and hack my laptop when its closed? Whatever.

I think too many people in this world are concerned with how complicated something is and forget how important simplicity is. Maybe its growing up, maybe its getting lazy, but I still know people who arent in either category that get stuck in this state of hacking their phones / cars / ipods / xbox / myspace / [insert posh tech toy here] for no particular reason, and i’m over it. I have better things to do than to mess about with that sort of thing anymore.