Showing posts with label contrarians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contrarians. Show all posts

18 January 2008

Let Us Now Praise...Facebook

Facebook has been getting a lot of stick recently over its Beacon system, so I thought I'd be contrarian by pointing out what a good open source citizen the company is:

Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software, and we are proud to give back to the open source community through various open source projects.

It's generally taken for granted that Web 2.0 companies will be based on free software, but we hear far less about who does and who doesn't contribute back, which is a pity. (Via RedWriteWeb.)

07 August 2007

In Denial

This is an important story - not so much for what it says, but for the fact that it is being said by a major US title like Newsweek:

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

Even though the feature has little that's new, the detail in which it reports the cynical efforts of powerful industries to stymie attempts to mitigate the damage that climate change will cause is truly sickening. It is cold (sic) comfort that the people behind this intellectual travesty will rightly be judged extremely harshly by future generations - assuming we're lucky enough to have a future. (Via Open the Future.)

09 October 2006

God Bless this Contrarian, and All who Sail in Her

There's nothing like a good contrarian for rocking the boat. And with a blog posting entitled "Developers do not matter, Users even less. Part 1: He who owns the code shall rule them all" you can tell there are going to be some waves.

What's interesting for me, is that part 2 of this splendid rant ends with the words:

In part three of this essay, I shall try to examine the implications of the user-developer relationship when applied to the discussion on the GPL v3.

This is clearly setting up the big "user" versus "user" battle that underpins the current GPLv3 bust-up, something of particular interest to me at the moment. I can't wait.

03 July 2006

Of Blogs and Bears

Things are getting seriously dotcom dotty in the world of blogs, with silly money flowing rather too easily into blogs whose long-term potential is not clear. Good, then, to see that arch-cynic Nick "Old Nick" Denton take the opportunity to play the contrarian, cutting staff and putting some blogs up for sale.