Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2012 (1)
2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Why Create Software?

One of the topics that came up in yesterdays tutorials was about whether people will create new software, will innovate, if there isn't a clear way to make money. My position is that that is exactly what people have done and will keep doing. People will always create new stuff; because they have an itch that they need to scratch, a problem they need to solve, because it is interesting, or even just for the hell of it. I personally think that, from the perspective of the innovator, money is not the primary motivation for doing anything innovative - it is just a nice bonus. The example we used yesterday was web browsers. There was a misconception that although Firefox is a good quality piece of software, easily eclipsing all current alternatives, that this only occurred because the Firefox code is based upon the code from Navigator that was released by Netscape when the company failed. The argument was made that for the most part good quality free software only exists because it is based upon commercial software made by professionals. In the case of Firefox this is factually incorrect, the codebase has been completely rewritten at least once, possibly twice. Even if it hadn't though, Netscape Navigator was, in an early incarnation, called Netscape Mosaic. This is because one of the founders of Netscape, Marc Andreesen, was the developer of NCSA Mosaic, roundly regarded as the original web browser, the original innovation. So, not only is Firefox directly descended from the original web browser, Mosaic, but its code base originated in non-commercial research. In addition, Mosaic was also developed, not because somebody decided that the web would be the "next big thing" and that a web browser was needed to capitalise upon it, but because a developer decided that it would be useful, and other people agreed, and it snowballed from there. In comparison, the most popular completely commercial web browser (you can guess which) is roundly regarded as "not very good" in comparison to Firefox anyway. However, the next best browser, in my opinion, is Opera, which is completely commercial and closed source. I suppose the upshot therefore is that whether a project is free or non-free, whether it is developed by people just doing it for the money, or because they care deeply about the project, this doesn't necessarily have any effect on the outcome of the situation, the software might be good, or it might be bad. We can't really draw any conclusions about the quality of the software from the license under which it is distributed. However, at least if it is low quality software and free software then there is a nugget of hope, because you can always improve it by making your own changes. Addendum: It turns out that three Finnish engineers might have beaten Andreesen to the invention of the first graphical web browser according to this article. There is also a discussion over at Slashdot on the subject.
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Stephen Fry & the GNU

One thing that came up at the tutorials on monday was that Stephen Fry did a video called "happy birthday to GNU" in which he talks about free software, the GNU project, and the origins of Linux.  He explains the need for free-software quite nicely.
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