Mr.Buyot’s Orgy Observations

Photo by Sumardi.

And RMS will down a teh tarik for you. That’s Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software Movement.

Last weekend was the FOSS.my 2009, a conference for free, Open Source software enthusiasts. We had a lot of rockstars who were gladly to come over to our shores and share their knowledge & experiences with the local community. We had our own rockstars like John Lim of AdoDB & Dr. Yusseri of Omnilogic. It was the BOMB! Cantik menarik kau memang the BOMB!

But my FOSS high was flipped over when I saw this on Facebook (you need to be logged in Facebook to view the status post. You can view the tweet as well). That my friend, is totally not right.

That statement is misplaced because you are giving the impression to developers in OSDC.my to not to advocate the free software philosophy. That is just not right.

Without Free Software Movement, there will be no Open Source Software movement. That is history. True, proven, factual history of real life. Point one. 500 Internal Server Error.

RMS shocked a lot of people. He amazed people in the room with his own personal stand in the Free Software Movement.  But after his talk, a lot of people have found themselves having a tough time to separate the man & the philosophy. Although the man is the founder, he admits that the philosophy was not built by him alone & him alone. He carefully use the word “we” if you listened carefully.

RMS is the most extreme example of a Free Software Movement believer. It is his personal stand that he doesn’t believe in the open source philosophy. That is his opinion. That is his opinion. That is his opinion. Point two.

There, I repeated it 3 times. We cannot take home all of his opinion just because he is Richard Stallman.

But we can take him as an example of how life as a software hippie can take us to different, greater heights. Do not confuse yourself with the debate between RMS and Brian Aker of Drizzle. Brian Aker already made millions by working on Open Source projects (aka MySQL) and RMS have millions of followers worldwide by advocating the freedom of software for all these years. These two are out of my league and yours too. Both have valid arguments & the necessary experiences to have that kind of fight. You need to understand that.

What is dangerous is that some people now sort of “realize” the differences between the free software philosophy & the open source philosophy. Referring to something a fellow peer have said, “Free Software is a philosophy. Open Source is pragmatic.” Which is true. It’s like Barisan Nasional & Barisan Rakyat. BR is a philosophical coalition party (welfare based state, remember?). BN is a pragmatic coalition party. And I literally support none of them. But I understand why each has to be different, although the same.

And what makes it more extremely dangerious is that some of these people can influence national policies. If you can’t grasp the philosophical concepts behind Free Software & Open Source at the beginning stage, then I utterly have no confidence in the policies that you will imply in the near future. That doesn’t worry me as much, but I worry for the developers because I am one of them. I am one of the guys from that room who writes code for a living. I really think that some of you must take the time to fully understand how this works in real life. Point three.

I will say this again: don’t confuse yourself. Learn more about the force. It is just sad to know that our Malaysian mindset is not ready for someone like Richard Stallman. And all these while you keep saying “Malaysia Boleh”. Funny. Point four.

Bored, due to the uninterestingness of tasks at hand, I intend to steer very far away from the objective in front, to another object of obsession. Geeks are obsessively compulsive dudes. OCD in short. Today’s subject: writing an exception handling for money politics.

Money politics does not only exist in politics, but also in corporations, federations, associations & communities. We all know the problems behind & before money politics. Instead of tackling that problem head on like everyone else, I prefer look at the problem & figure out what makes a situation rectified to be involving money politics.

Then, I stumbled upon this post about how Tweetmeme is having mad beef with ReTweet.com. It’s about somebody stealing another person’s 20 lines of code. Realising that this is also a good example of a possible trademark/copyright wars, inevitably involves money & politics in the long run, should Tweetmeme decides to pursue.

Based on this, I wrote a simple formula to start assessing the situation:

(steal) ? copy = true : copy = false;

With the power of crowdsource, harnessing feedbacks from @cheeaun & @ngeow, I came out with this in the end:

You can download a copy of the code right here.

Rinse & repeat. The common stigma.