The Incorruptible Blogosphere

John Dvorak is the original angry old man of computer journalism. I've been reading his stuff for decades now. It's striking that he's increasingly off-beam compared to the "good old days" of his column in PC Magazine, when he more than anyone had his finger on the pulse of personal computing. But he's still a good and entertaining journalist (after all, when has being right ever been that important in this business?).

Here's a good example of Dvorak at his best, writing about the essential incorruptibility of the blogosphere - not, be it noted, of bloggers, but of the totality of them:

While many bloggers seem eagerly corruptible — almost inviting it — it's not going to make any difference because there will be 10 to 100 bloggers pointing the finger at them and another 1,000 analyzing the finger-pointing.

Spot on; this another reason why open, non-hierarchical systems work so much better than closed, centralised ones in these kinds of situations. (Via Smart Mobs.)

Lear's Fool, Mac OS X, Windows and Open Source

Misled by his intentionally-provocative columns, people tend to treat John Dvorak as some kind of industry buffoon. But as his biography indicates, he's been around a long time, and certainly knows the computer industry inside out. That doesn't mean he's always right, but it does ensure that he writes from insight not ignorance. And let's not forget that the figure of the Fool in King Lear is the one who sees more than most, for all his jests and jibes.

Dvorak's latest effort is more of the same. It is entitled "Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source". What interests me most is not his argument, but the fact that the solution is open source. Moreover, the worst-case scenario is that Apple does nothing - in which case, open source can just sit back with Olympian detachment and watch Microsoft and Apple pull each other's hair in the closed-source playground.