On 07/17/2015 11:22 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > My claim is that free software developers, and GPL developers in particular, > have a preference for exploring this broader type of connectivity, and are > especially interested in the frustration of the interconnections amongst the > global bits than in the relationship between individual preference bits or > the relationship between the individual and global bits. Any slice or subset > of bits might not be interesting by itself, but the concept of growing and > compressing the totality of global bits is a core value.
OK. Yes, I agree for the most part. Free developers will usually have a more synoptic view of software and more ... cumulative (for lack of a better term) goals. But the point I was trying to make with those 3 articles still stands: that people who join communities for community's sake are not necessarily only drags on, disrupters of the system. They provide something like a dampening baffle that traps and eliminates the noise of the extremists, the purposeful missionaries. In fact, without _enough_ of that sort of "middling" or "joiner", a project is more at risk when/if extremists fail to cohere. And I think this is true in open source projects as well as proprietary ones. > A hard problem is one that takes more intelligence to solve and that will be > limited by individual human ability, not just orderly communication and a > command and control apparatus. I'm still not convinced. 8^) I think there are some hard problems that succumb to the "wisdom of crowds" and brute force ... but then again, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my career writing simulations, which are numerical solutions to problems I'm not smart enough to solve analytically. So, of course, I'd have that bias, eh? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
