> It seems silly to say that one would democratize elite bicycle racing.
This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's satirical and dystopian science-fiction short story *Harrison Bergeron <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron>* (1961). 😊 Full text <http://wordfight.org/bnw/bnw-unit_packet.pdf> (20 pages). Remember that Oracle acquired MySQL. It is now a free product (likely with no meaningful updates, not sure) but with an option to upgrade to supported Oracle extensions at a premium. Hopefully, PostgreSQL, which can compete with Oracle, will remain open. ESRI accommodates PostgreSQL for geodatabases. I always appreciated that along with their replacing Visual Basic scripting with Python. Anywho ... On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:52 AM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > Glen writes: > > "This reminded me of my (postmodern) criticism of open source (in spite of > any of my advocacy of it), that open source *can* be exploited by an elite > set of people who are elite by their capability to know how to read, use, > and think about code, or design google queries, or SEO. It's only > "democratization" IF the skills and resources to use it are available to > everyone." > > How about bicycle racing. Not everyone can achieve > 80 ml/kg/min VO2 > max, but a few people can. These are biologically gifted people, and > then they train like hell too, and/or sometimes use performance enhancing > drugs. There are some people that can train like hell but always be > beaten by someone than trains as hard or less. They just don't have it. > > Open source as a meritocracy is attractive to its adherents because it > selects for individuals that succeed in developing a particular kind of > sustained intellectual productivity, based on nothing else but the fact > that they do. You can't just go through a particular training procedure > and come out a productive peer in this community. It doesn't matter if you > are born a citizen of a hypothetical Code Nation. People from all over > the world end-up being recruited to major tech firms who can see the value > of their work, and not just the bullet points on a resume. > > It seems silly to say that one would democratize elite bicycle racing. > > Marcus > > ============================================================ > 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 > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ 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 FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove