Eric Raymond And The NYT

No longer am I just another small voice howling at The New York Times about distorted and misleading reporting on various aspects of the Internet. On June 27, NYT’s Critic’s Notebook contained “When the Geeks Get Snide” by Michiko Kakutani. This is typical, “Indeed geek-speak is flush with disparaging or defensive references to the real world and flesh-and-blood human beings. The nonvirtual world, so much messier than the one on line, is derogatorily referred to as a “carbon community” or “meatspace.” The piece generated a rapid response from head geek spokesman, Eric Raymond. Operating at Internet speed, the following day, June 28, Salon magazine printed Raymond’s retort, “Don’t Tweak the Geeks!”

Who Is Eric Raymond?

Arguably, two of the most misunderstood and inaccurately reported aspects of the Internet are hackers and open source software (OSS) programmers. Both belong to the species: geek. These subjects do not fit into neatly crafted 15-second media sound bites. Eric Raymond (known throughout geekdom as simply ESR) reluctantly emerged as spokesman for these arcane realms of Internet-land. (I heard ESR talk at a Connecticut Free Unix Group meeting in 1999.) While much has been written about this outspoken uber-geek, the May 1997 seminal paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (CatB) stands as the document that put him on the radar screen. Widely read and quoted by geeks (but infrequently read by media staff writers), Raymond’s CatB lays out a theory about “...two fundamentally different (software) development styles, the ‘Cathedral’ model of most of the commercial world versus the ‘bazaar’ model of the Linux world.” Using extensive examples of how Linus Torvalds (and a worldwide group of volunteers) developed the Linux operating system (the bazaar model), ESR contrasts it with the Cathedral model exemplified by Microsoft products (the Windows operating systems, 95/98/2000 being well known examples). The paper, written in an easy style, makes eye-glazing fare for non-technically inquisitive readers. The Unix-laced terminology overwhelms most casual readers. Nevertheless, as the author of CatB, ESR stands out as the right person to respond to set the record straight.

In “Don’t Tweak the Geeks” ESR comments, “...Kakutani tried to paint the geek culture as a cold, unfeeling place populated by geeks who, whatever their technical accomplishments, remain failures as human beings.” ESR explained how a recent hacker event he attended in Dearborn, MI, was concluded with a movie outing and ice-cream social. In addition, the motor-city geeks gifted him with over $1,000 “simply because they liked me and wanted me to part of their gang.” Cool behavior for NTY-esque “failed human beings” by almost any standard.

ESR continues with this observation:

“Ms Kakutani’s rhetorical style and politicizing invite the presumption that ‘celebrating diversity’ is important to her. If she had chosen to do that, rather than casting us as a menace, I doubt she’d have been as free with the negative generalizations. Indeed, if we were a sexual minority or the ethnic-victim-group-of-the-week, I’m sure she would have struggled gamely to praise our wonderfulness in spite of social isolation and possible neurological handicaps.” In this case, I shout: RIGHT ON! GO ESR!

The NYT piece, saturated with geek-speak (some words ESR points out are not geek cyberslang terms), completely misses an emerging term/trend flooding today’s Net: Napster. The Internet may be moving too fast for Napster to enter the hard copy reference materials used by Ms Kakutani as background material. To avoid any misunderstanding, Napster is file sharing software (specifically, MP3 format) developed by 19 year-old geek Shawn Fanning. It already has had a profound impact on netsters’ views of music distribution throughout cyberspace. As often occurs, media pundits lift, homogenize, and sometimes distort, words from other technology writers. Without the benefit of firsthand usage of the technology (or terminology), stories emerge distorted, or, as ESR stated, “This isn’t the first time a commentator has misconstrued my world through projecting his or her insecurities on it.” Frankly, we expect more from the NYT. However, its commentary on cyber-issues often falls woefully short.

Recently, CatB came under attack by Nikolai Bezroukov, professor of computer science at Fairleigh Dickenson University. In a paper titled “A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar” (11/99), Bezrouskov states, “An implicit assumption in CatB is that open source code (OSS) is the best thing since sliced bread. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a one hundred line program or a one hundred thousand line program.” Clearly, Bezrouskov has jumped to the wrong subroutine. He did not have the benefit of hearing ESR speak on this point as I did. Raymond stated to the live audience that open source works well in some, but not all, cases.

However, in another part of the paper, Bezrouskov is on the mark when he points out that Netscape is the wrong test of the bazaar model if Netscape execution does not work.

Clearly, ESR’s “CatB” and Bezroukov’s “A Second Look at the CatB” stand as important documents on an esoteric issue. NYT’s “When the Geeks Get Snide” is not. All the original documents remain on the Internet for review and criticism.

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of interest:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/28/kakutani/

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/27note.html

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/index.html

(Note: This is the 214th of a series of elementary articles designed for surfing the Internet. Next, “The Ten Dollar Modem” is the subject on tap. Stay Tuned. Until next week, happy travels through cyberspace. Previous issues of “Internet Info for Real People” can be found: http://www.thebee.com. Please e-mail comments and suggestions: rbrand@JUNO.com or editor@thebee.com.)