[Info-vax] East Coast and West Coast, Cathedral, Bazaar <<< nothing new under the sun?

[gérard Calliet]

Le 28/12/2018 à 19:41, Stephen Hoffman a écrit :
> On 2018-12-28 14:14:21 +0000, gérard Calliet said:
> 
>> What has been invented is more than open access to sources, but all a 
>> new way of thinking and determining copyrights, and with this and the 
>> ideas behind open source has been a huge business success.
>>
>> I'm not a fanatic open source fighter, but I think we have to 
>> understand why they have been successfull when in the same time DEC 
>> was dying, althought there was alos strong ideas behind it.
>>
>> Something based on strong ideas won in the west coast, and something 
>> based on strong ideas failed in the est coast. Perhaps we could think 
>> about it when we relaunch something in the est coast.
>>
>> (I don't speak about IBM or MS, because their succeess are more based 
>> on pure structural business causes, and my purpose here is to think 
>> about relation between fundamental ideas and story of business 
>> computing).
> 
TL;DR is perhaps the first thing our friends can say about our posts. 
Yours are always almost exhaustive and always with very interesting 
references. Mine are always too long and referencing (silently) too much 
scientific domains. But TL;IRY I Read Yours, because it is always worth it.

I have to apologize first because I'll dare use you as somehow an object 
of observation.

Your post here is for me a sort of confirmation of what I wanted to say 
(briefly, schematicly) about a cultural difference between East and West 
Coast.

Your style is some oceanic mesh of causes and effects. And I understand 
it as an ethics of "being rational". Being rational, thinking 
objectively, sounds for me very East Cost, Boston Area. Very good 
points, and at the time of DEC foundation, these qualities explain part 
of the structural qualities of their OS's.

*But* encyplodedic observation of world meets the usual scientific 
paradox of observation. The observer is already included in his 
observation, which causes relativity of his observation, and thinking 
there can be a sufficient remoteness of the observer to get a definitive 
objectivity is an illlusion.

Here is in my opinion the necessity of epistemics. It is impossible to 
get a total knowledge, but it is possible to take a step backwards and 
think about the way we constructs our theories. It is not *the* 
solution, but it can help a lot and preserve against some illusions.

Another important side consideration about the observers and the actors 
is the idea of motivation. Why people engage in an idea or another, how 
this engagement products things.

It is very simple to confirm these two side causers if we talk about 
beginnings of computing. Computer sciences are born after the failure of 
founding the mathematics by formal logic, and getting an epistemic sight 
of this situation. Motivations of Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing,... Ken 
Olsen explain the following.

And, yes, in the ocean of causes and effects, there is a strong 
coefficient, *the Market*. But, as the market is a recursive notion (the 
market is determined by the market) it cannot be the unique cause, and 
even if it is probably impossible to understand, as God, perhaps it is 
not God.

End of the introduction.
> Copyright is far from new, and Steamboat Willy will seemingly always be 
> protected.  There's not much new arising here, other than whatever flies 
> out of the usual sorts of adjudication that's been going on since the 
> invention of the contract, the codicil, and the barrister. Creative 
> contracts and licenses are far from new, particularly around commercial 
> software.
> 
> More centrally to what you're referring to, we've seen the scale of 
> software and the associated software development teams increase 
> massively in the past couple of decades, and we've seen consolidation 
> among fewer packages and configurations.
> 
> Newer open-source packages do arise—such as nginx—and older packages 
> that no longer meet requirements can and do fade.  But the scale and the 
> complexity of many of these software, hardware and firmware projects are 
> massive and increasing, as compared with what was routine in the 
> previous millennium.
> 
> There are very few direct commercial closed-source competitors against 
> functional open-source packages, too.  Tough commercial market that, 
> competing against folks that give away their products, and with the 
> software replication costs near or at zero.
> 
> And as for the "Cathedral" or "East Coast" approach that you're 
> referencing—the original design of OpenVMS—that was quite good, though 
> that design reflects trade-offs and limits from ~forty years ago.  In 
> this era, parts of the OpenVMS designs are old and very limited, and 
> variously very broken.  These design problems are both technical and—by 
> all appearances—are also inate within the traditional DEC software 
> licensing, and within the DEC business, marketing and sales practices.
As usual I speak epistemics, you speak ocean of facts and references 
(thanks for them).

I had to be as short as I could, but referencing Open Source is 
referencing a specific long and complex cultural phenomenon. You cannot 
say about it "nothing new under the sun".

I cannot deploy here all the topics about it, but I can say there are 
been a conjonction of technical choices (ip as a basis of internet, C 
for simplicity, Unix for the same reason), social-epistemic beliefs 
(Guttenberg galaxy and the idea the internet will change the 
civilization), political engagements (Open Source as a way of social 
organization and opposition to the current organization), marginal 
initiatives (Linux). This defines a global way of doing things and 
changing the way they had been done. Not to mention the fact that a 
large part of these actors in the universities at that times were 
political activists, so it was not only a scientific attitude but it was 
thinked as global personal choices.

On the other side it is possible to see almost the opposite. Complex and 
structured architecture or langages (DECNET PHASE V, Bliss, VMS), 
political and social-epistemic agnoticism (for the DEC workers, 
computing is an exciting *work*, not a way of changing civilization), 
being part of the building of a world company.

I'll be back on the specific DEC guys motivation. But what can be said 
here about the "berkeley guys" (to have a name) is they were very 
motivated persons, who thought that their motivations can create things. 
It is some sort of opposite from the observer paradox. Because their 
somehow blind engagement succeeded a lot which prooves effectnivness, 
but also because in some results they obtained the opposite of what they 
were willing. At the end of the "Berkeley" era the internet opens the 
era of (Google,Facebook,Samesung...), the people of "don't be evil" 
launch Dragonfly and Red Hat is bought by IBM. Strong motivation helps 
doing things, but sometimes not what you imagined (like for C or Linux? 
no, no just a joke).

About the era of Open Source, simple software, Linux, etc... (my 
"Berkeley" era) I think you miss it as the global event it is, with its 
essential causes and effects.

I'm sure something is ending of this era with (Google,Facebook,...) and 
with the purchase of Red Hat by IBM. But I think that there is a need to 
have a synthesis of this era to understand how it worked and what it 
produced.

Same remark about your evaluation of VMS. You are right on the facts: 
"the original design of OpenVMS—that was quite good, though that design 
reflects trade-offs and limits from ~forty years ago". And wrong in the 
interpretation. In the context of the limits ~forty years ago the 
choices between the trade-offs was more than quite good, there were 
excellent. This excellency is the proof that the epistimic attitude was 
very good. Some cause/effects chains are better than others and doing 
the better thing in a specific time is a criterium of your scientific 
value. Something which is always a need, because in all times there are 
limitations specific to the time you live in.
> 
> As a specific example of problems, the default OpenVMS development 
> environment is seriously inadequate, as compared with the tooling 
> available on other platforms.  The oft-vaunted security is another area 
> that needs substantial work.  Try using TLS on OpenVMS.  Create a TLS 
> connection and verify the certificates on both ends trace back to 
> currently-enabled commercial certificate authorities.   I *dare* you.
> 
> The mistakes and the limitations are something VSI will be working on of 
> course.  
"VSI will be working on": You are here for me a major example of an 
"East coast observer". Because of the fundamental values behind DEC and 
VMS, an OS is not a shared culture, but a product, in an ocean of other 
products, a specific product which deserves an objective evaluation, and 
about which the only thing to do is waiting for the supplier to do things.

I have been hugely disapointed these years about the quasi-total 
inactivity of the VMS community for VMS. Because I had imagined the 
community could do all the other (berkeley-era-oriented) communities do: 
fighting for the product, taking initiatives... The sea-oriented 
metaphor is: "you see a boat where a lot of friends are on it in a 
tempest, you are on the shore, and instead of doing something to help, 
you take a tea with friends and have fundamental discussion to determine 
*if* it will sink or not". I was not only disappointed but a litle bit 
angry.

I didn't realize my mistake. My understanding now is that it is about a 
strong cultural difference. The "East" ethics (again it is a name, a 
synthetic "ideal-type" as said by the sociologist Max Weber 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_type)) are about rational 
evaluation first, and VMS professionals are not idealist ideologs but 
think about work just as work. So we use VMS when it is rational to use 
it, and our motivation about choosing what job we do is only about how 
we get our earning the more pleasant way you can get it. Other 
motivations are not pertinent and can become foolish ideology dead ends.

I have made the same mistake with VSI. I spent years trying to explain 
them it were a good idea to develop relationship with the community. 
Totally deaf on that. And I would have understood what importance they 
give to relation with the community when they fired Sue Skonetski. I 
have been deaf myself. VSI doesn't think the community can help, and the 
community agrees with that.

I can know explain why I spoke about epistemic differences between the 
"Berkeley era" and the "MIT era". I agree with the fact these era are 
closed. For me IBM buying Red Hat closes the "Berkeley era" and the "MIT 
era" was closed - to have a date - when Compaq bought DEC.

It is a real need thinking about these closed era, the way they have 
been successfull and not successfull, what were the motivations, the 
epistemic orientations, the way these orientations met the business 
realities. Because my opinion is that VSI will success only if they are 
able to evaluate from where they go, for what - bizarre - reason they 
survived, what are their true motivations, how can they be better than 
DEC and have new success.

Again my opinion is VSI and VMS will have success only if they build a 
more collaborative business context. I don't wish VSI people take the 
"Berkeley" paradigm, it should be absurd. But they can learn from 
aspects which caused for sometime its success.

About the sea-oriented metaphors. I understand VMS people are not 
"flower power" people and they have the entire right to think about them 
only as liking to get good money for good job.

*But* I can see on someone (you) people here and elsewhere lot of 
goodies from the old DEC (photos of the Mill, for example). So I 
understand also that a lot of VMS people do *like* VMS, and so are not 
pure (paradoxal) observers. And I think there is a lot of work to be 
done to understand what are the VMS people motivations. Because, as I 
said, analysing motivations is a part of the analysis of reality.

Though so too will be the competing vendors, and the
> open-source developers.   And the OpenVMS product has to provide enough 
> revenue to matter, or VSI is gone.  Which means a focus on the installed 
> base, for the foreseeable future.  Which will lead to more than a few 
> compromises and lingering messes—undoubtedly including BACKUP and its 
> design and error mishandling, for instance—and which will mean that VSI 
> will be working to capture and keep as much of the installed base as 
> they can.  And the many folks outside the installed base are going to 
> continue to use Windows and Linux and other open-source packages, absent 
> a good reason to select and migrate to and use OpenVMS.
> 
> Best too to ponder the implications and the effects and the outcomes of 
> ideas such as _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, too.  The author of that 
> work has become a controversial figure in recent years too, to say the 
> very least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7608563 among other 
> discussions.   And for those inclined for deeper thought on this and 
> related topics, _Open Source Culture and Aesthetics_ and suchlike: 
> https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462202
> 
> As for your reference to "they", Open source is already part of and will 
> continue to be a fundamental and increasing part of OpenVMS, and of the 
> environments that OpenVMS is installed and used in and interoperating 
> with.   And again, VSI has to make a profit.  Which means they're going 
> to use open source where they can, rather than writing and supporting 
> their own and—at the scale of complexity we're increasingly 
> working—less-than-competitive alternatives, absent very good reasons to 
> the contrary.
> 
> TL;DR: Markets just don't always go where the adherents of particular 
> platforms and tooling might want.  Bizarre, right?
> 
More bizarre is the fact a so old and mistaken environment like VMS 
survived and around 60 people found motivation to make it survive. Even 
more bizarre if you know there are not idealists.

Your mistake, in my opinion, is about not evaluating this very "bizarre" 
event. Among all the facts - you know almost all - there is the bizarre 
fact VMS is surviving. This fact was unpredictable in 2013 - I can 
reference the discussion here where almost everyone explained to me that 
thinking about VMS survival was an utopia -. You must admit that, in 
2013, I have been right.

So, because you are a scientist, you can have a look on the reason why I 
thought VMS would survive:
- epistemic exactitude: the best trade-offs in their time (VMS and 
cluster structure, departmental computing),
- cultural involvment: a "MIT workshop" remains a "MIT workshop"
- professional motivation: all the VMS professional I know share a same 
value of doing a correct job
- realities involved: the uses of VMS where VMS is still there are 
realities with strong neccessities (transport, medical,...)

Because of these reason the VMS ecosystem is resilient (I speak about 
the whole ecosystem, not about specific applications).

The next step, on my opinion is to make a resilient ecosystem into a 
successfull re-emergent ecosystem.

I aggree totally with you that the first step will be to consolidate the 
resilient basis - total necessity for them, and the only successful task 
that can be done now -.

This step will be better made if we are able to understand the real 
causes of the resiliency of the existent, to explain to the customer why 
there were right to go on, for example. And this step and the next steps 
will be possible only if we become "involved observers".
> 
TL;DR: The market will always be here, as a principal causer, not 
bizarre, just usual, and a little bit boring, because so predictable and 
never really new. Nothing new under the sun :)

Very gratefull you took time to answer. A very good new year eve, and a 
happy new year.

Same wishes for the more-than-thifteen :) active contributors and all 
the c.o.v.ed passionate.

Gérard Calliet
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