Showing posts with label simon willison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simon willison. Show all posts

17 December 2007

Linus Says It's In Our DNA

Simon Willison has picked up a nice quotation from Linus he made a few years back, but what really interests me are some other things he said in the same post:

think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. "sheer luck".

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")

In other words, the open source methodology is hard-wired into us - right down at the level of DNA.

22 November 2007

Happy Birthday Internet

Watch out, there's a meme about:


The Internet is 30 today. Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet.

(Via Simon Willison's Weblog.)