Learn

So Paul Graham, who's written several pieces I really like (check out his other stuff while you're at the site), has a piece called What Business Can Learn from Open Source. It reminds me somewhat of The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing Our Economy and Society}, a monograph that came out last year. Both argue that amateurs often do really good work. Amateur, after all, has its roots in love, and business, Graham argues, "still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture."

My dissertation study was largely about how it's important for people to create and share things that mean something to them, and I always hated school, so this stuff is close to my heart.

Here's an interesting argument he makes about Open Source Software [OSS] and the fact that lots of people are using Linux for servers:

More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.

I think that what most people think, though, is that if they had the kind of technical expertise that Google and friends do, then they wouldn't have to run Windows. "Until then," they'd argue, "we'll stick with what we've got. It may not work right, but at least we have some ideas how it doesn't work right."

He makes the point that some people dismiss blogs and OSS because the vast majority of it is so bad, but people don't read average blogs or use average OSS, they use only the very best. The very best blogs and OSS are, as it turns out, really, really good, and often better than even the best commercially produced competitors. Witness Apache, MySQL and PHP; witness Graham's web site (not quite a blog).

Here are his three big lessons that OSS/blogs have for business.

1. that people work harder on stuff they like,
2. that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and
3. that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

I'd argue that these things are just as true for schools. I would like to find ways to make schools be places that people can work on things that they like and do their best work, but I don't think I can make that happen today.

The Scientist also has an article about blogging for science. Their registration is highly annoying; another point that Graham makes is that such registrations often serve to make fewer people read things. Bloggers don't do that.

THEC has released this year's RFP for the ITQ. It's available at the THEC site if you'd like to see what else is available there.

William Arnold will be on campus on August 3 to conduct a workshop about this. If you're interested in attending, you should let Vena Long know.

Disclaimer: I have a degree in computer science, which came with an awe of Unix and I've been using Linux on my desktop for nearly 10 years. I've put Linux Terminal Servers in 4 classrooms with great success. I may be different from you. You might not know that Linux is an operating system that precludes the need for MS Windows. If you don't, check out The Open CD that lets you run Linux from a CD.

I read the LANMAN list at UT and am continually amazed by the stories of Windows viruses and worms and the work it takes people whose job it is to manage computers to solve these problems. I'm better at managing computers than most people (though not very good with Windows anymore) and when my mother's got a new laptop I painstakingly set it up with all of the service packs, virus and spyware detection stuff and a firewall. Within a few months, it was acting funny. Norton wouldn't get new updates & after I cleared the firewall rules, I found that it was contacting several sites in Russia as soon as it booted up. Since I didn't know what was contacting Russia, the only solution was to re-install the operating system. It hadn't been long since I'd done that and the last time it took me the better part of a day. I installed Linux on her desktop. A few things have been a little inconvenient for her, but the thing still works. So, yeah, my mother uses Linux as her OS. Clearly, I'm crazy.