On 9/13/13 2:57 PM, glen wrote:
If we know this is/will-be the case, then why press for absolute
transparency at all? Why not be anarcho-capitalist and allow for the
opacity of some, strategically allowed, opacity?
The anarcho-capitalist will try to extract every bit of value from any
vocabulary they own or influence. It's fine for them to try to do that,
but it is also fine to make them obsolete. For example, GPU vendors
own their hardware designs and their driver stacks. If their driver
stacks are open sourced, or reverse-engineered that gives a little more
insight into how their hardware works. If people know how their
hardware works, then some competitor can come along and create similar
hardware at a lower price point. Provided an open source effort can
come along and make a sort of similar VHDL design that puts them out of
business, it's all good. Most anarcho-capitalists aren't that, of
course, they are capitalists, and expect public investment to be there
to protect their IP for them, through copyrights, patents, and so on.
The GPU vendors want an interface like OpenCL so that they can keep
people away from the actual design. That's annoying, and misrepresents
the concept of `open' for their own selfish purposes.
Anyway, my point here is that working at the interface level carries
more benefit than cost for the same reasons that test-driven
development has taken over (at least in hype) the s/w development
world. I tend to view it as a "constraint based approach" to the
world. Forcing absolute transparency (even if only in the ideal)
seems like a low RoI commitment.
Some users can't afford to trust, and will have a very sensitive cost
function. Other users have a more risk/reward structure.
Lastly, it's also important to realize that your egalitarian concept
of of the diverse overlapping communities _might_ turn out to be naive
or overly simple. If we think in terms of gaming, there should arise
some seriously competent gamers who pool resources into a very small
(and controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the entire
stack than anyone else. And, not only will the transparency _not_
assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that cabal honest, it will
_prevent_ that because the cabal can hide behind the illusion of
transparency.
But it is ok if there are schlubs, if provided one chooses to be one.
Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital.
They can always say things like "It's all on the up and up! The
source code's out there. Check it yourself." ... all the while
_knowing_ that without their billions of dollars in assets we normal
people cannot "check it ourselves". Hence, perhaps similar to "green
washing", the good gamers will use our own ideology against us.
I've worked on a variety of types of code, and I don't find I need to
appeal to individuals controlling teams of people and domain experts to
understand the parts I'm interested in. There's a scale free property
to good codes that makes it possible to understand them. Understand
the goals, inputs, the outputs, and starting building out an
understanding.. If there is no source code it is much more difficult
(but not impossible).
Marcus
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