[TUHS] John Sundman's takes on Evgeny Morozov, Open Source, et al

Ronald Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Mon Jun 3 10:05:19 AEST 2013


I had no great love for Tim O'Reilly dating back to when he put my HOME telephone number in one of his early books on UUCP without even the decency of dropping a phone call or email to ask if it was alright.   Even so the whole Morozov is appears to be the drek from someone who was hardly even on the fringe of what he's writing about wanting very hard to be in side.    I suspect I know more about Eric Raymond and RMS then he does.   Both were regular visitors to my house (unfortunately) during the eighties.

Nice hearing from you again, uh Clem, didn't know you ended up at Stellar for a while.   I have an amusing story on that.   We had brought both the Stellar G1000 and the Ardent boxes (and even the Oki box) in to the government to show what a commercial imagery application could do on standard high performance hardware.   As a result I had to port (and we sold to a few people) Motif libraries for both boxes.   One afternoon, Stardent called and stated they needed their loaner machine back.   I loaded up it up in the shipping case (it was a tradeshow box) and put it out by our dock door.   Stardent ceased operations the next day.

About a year later I'm out of the dock and notice this monster is still there.     Then the director of sales calls me in the office.  On the phone is a guy who wants Motif for the G1000.   I laugh.   He says "yeah, I know they're out of business."   I say "Today's your lucky day, I still have one."   I powered up the thing and sent him a tape.   Gratis (we'd gotten out of the Motif biz by then).    Eventually one of my coworker lopped the wise PC  off the top of the thing for some purpose of his.   One of the boards persisted for a long time as a wall hanging in our conference room.




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