If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
People are happiest when they’re the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples’ agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me? Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners? Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs? Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier – Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types. Eric S. Raymond Read Quote
