On 9/13/13 6:40 PM, glen wrote:
Membership in the cabal comes from cognitive investment, not capital.
I disagree. Membership in the set of cabal _tools_ ... the
technically competent person, comes from cognitive investment.
Ownership/control of those tools comes from capital, usually in the
form of "golden handcuffs". What percentage of geeks do you know that
wouldn't opt for a 6 figure salary in exchange for their indentured
servitude? ... at least for a little while?
What kind group would contain an instance of such a cabal? An open
source development team at Intel or Google? A big university software
team? I can't think of a lot of examples of open source development
done for its own sake. I agree about this distinction between a cabal
purposes vs. the human tools that achieve it. Usually the technological
tools are closed too (with open as the exception), serve the human
resource tools, which then serve the cabal (e.g. the company's deciders).
I'm talking about a different sort of cabal, like the folks that develop
and direct a large package like LLVM, Postgres, GHC, or R. These
projects involve developers that span universities and corporations.
The software serves as a research vehicle, and/or the basis for another
specialized product. The people that work on these packages may even
work for competing companies that provide the golden handcuffs (and jump
between the companies to the extent their aren't legally restricted from
doing so).
Marcus
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