The State of the Onion 9
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
And finally we come to Mr. X. I don't know much about Mr. X, because nobody knows anything about Mr. X except Mr. X himself. We can only guess.
Mr. X seems to be highly placed in his organization, because all his information is of high quality, and of strategic value. Mr. X seems to believe in clean interfaces, with no extraneous information. He's a master of the deaddrop, and other forms of message passing. He seems to understand Perl 6's concept of delegation, so he's probably in management. Perhaps he's the CIO. Or maybe he's the CFO's assistant. Who knows?
In any event, he may be someone with some decision-making power, but he can't afford to compromise his position by being overtly in favor of open source. At least, not yet. Nevertheless, he may be the most important player in the eventual success of open source. Mr. X is future-oriented, and as enigmatic as the future itself. We sincerely hope he turns out to be a nice person.
That's our organization in a nutshell. We sincerely hope you'll join up. Unfortunately, if you don't join, we'll have to liquidate you.
Well, enough of that. If this were an ordinary State of the Onion speech, I would now go into my standard spiel about how diverse the open source community is and how it's such a great thing that we can pool our various strengths and produce something greater than any of us can do alone. And if this conference were still in California, I might say it again anyway, since diversity in California is not just encouraged, it's actually required, culturally speaking. Californians have gotten to the point of being completely intolerant of non-diversity. But we're not in California, so let's just assume I said all that again and go on to something else.
I'd like to leave you with one thought, along with all these pretty pictures.
As I was thinking about the intelligence community and its recent obvious failures, it kinda put a new spin onto the phrase, "Information wants to be free," or my own version of it, which is that "Information wants to be useful."
We often think that intelligence failures are caused by having too little information. But often, in retrospect, we find that the problem is too much information, and that in fact, we had the data available to us, if only it had been analyzed correctly.
So I'm just wondering if we're getting ourselves into a similar situation with open source software. More software is not always better software. Google notwithstanding, I think it's actually getting harder and harder over time to find that nugget you're looking for. This process of re-inventing the wheel makes better wheels, but we're running the risk of getting buried under a lot of half-built wheels.
And there are two take-home lessons from that. The first is that, as an open source author, you should be quick to try to make someone else's half-built wheel better, and slow to try to make your own. We're making progress in this realm in the Perl community, but I don't think any open source community ever gets good enough at harmonizing the dissimilar interests that sometimes lead to project forks. We can always improve there.
The second take-home lesson is this. Pity your poor intelligence analyst back at headquarters. He's not all that intelligent, after all. The intelligence of the intelligence community is distributed, and it's often the Tinas and the Wheelbarrows of the world that know when they've got a piece of hot information. But somehow that meta-information gets lost on transmission back to headquarters.
So my plea to all you agents out there today is to use your own initiative in figuring out which things to bother us with, and which things to work out for yourself. You're smart, and the worst that can happen is that we tell you that you've wasted some effort. Just think of it as a kind of commit and rollback mechanism. Recent studies in multithreading show that hard locks do not scale as well as Software Transactional Memory, which is just such a commit/rollback mechanism.
Look around you. We are a multithreaded organization, so the same is true socially. It's easy to get offended or discouraged when a rollback happens, but just don't. The whole community will function more efficiently that way.
But if you get rolled back on something you know is important, just keep pushing. Those of us back at headquarters try to stay flexible and open-minded, but we don't always succeed. So keep that good intel coming in, because good analysts can change their minds occasionally, too. At least, that's what I think this week, and this year.
