Another one in the genre of “describe open source without saying X”.
I’m not sure the War and Peace intro’s really worth its length, but I sure enjoyed it.
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I liked the intro, for what it’s worth - I’m not familiar with War and Peace but I am familiar with the Great Man view of history and its flaws. I would also very much like to see a people’s history of open source, and there’s a parallel universe where I’d jump at the chance to write one, but I wasn’t there and I don’t want to put in the research to fill all the gaps.
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What elicits a wry, inward smile for me is whenever OS zealots pronounce that it was invented by Perens/Raymond and carried away from the FSF by business. A little known fact was that the actual term, ‘Open Source’ was invented by a woman. It’s depressingly common in computer science from victorian days…
Also, @kemitchell I love this from Hilary Mantel:
“[History is] what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.”
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