Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/24/2013 11:47 AM:
I see open source it as qualitatively different than the subjective openness one experiences in a large organization where there may not be day-to-day impediments to getting the information that is needed to do a job, but there are weak or complicated relationships reaching outside the organization. [...] However, non-flat organizations where people give up the option of opening (or, in the case you cited: closing) certain channels means they may be less free in exchange for other benefits. The morons you mentioned just failed to calibrate to their environment.
Were I to allow myself to think in terms of disjoint "open" versus "closed", I would agree. But I don't think they are disjoint, even in the case of open source (e.g. GPL to BSD). There are all sorts of gradations, some of which map well to legal structures (contracts, statutes) and some of which don't. In the case of the 3 event types: 1) improper individual actions, 2) [ab]use of privileged access, and 3) information hiding, channels aren't open or closed, transparent or opaque. They're translucent. A good case to consider is the "black" budget of the intelligence community. Even before Snowden's leak, that budget was really just a very dark gray, not completely black. On the other side, an open source OS like Ubuntu is really a very light gray (due to the inclusion of some non-free drivers as well as the sheer size of and variety within the distribution). To some extent, what makes the obfuscator competitions (and cryptography) so interesting is the navigation between closed and open. And I think the same can be said of both subjective and objective measures of organizations. And what makes human systems so interesting is their very dynamic ability to navigate between closed and open. You can see very subtle opening/closing of channels in almost any human interaction, pairwise or one-to-many. It's certainly what drives humor, that balance between banality and wisdom, literal vs. metaphoric, transparent vs. opaque. The primary qualitative difference I see is (merely) that humans are distinct from their artifacts. But that difference is a lot like "life" or "porn". You know it when you see the difference between, say, a piece of code and the programmer who wrote it. But to sit back and _define_ the difference so that it applies generically can be problematic. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella You ain't digging on my questions
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