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XANADU_VS_WORLD
July 22, 2010
Typically, people compare
Xanadu to the WWW, and
that makes some sense.
People who look at the world this
way though, tend to make some inane
criticisms of Xanadu.
They don't quite come out and say
things like "but why didn't they
use TCP/IP?", but that's the level
of confusion they often express.
They have trouble understanding that
there wasn't an internet there yet
to build a system on top of. There
was no usenet, there were no ftp sites.
But Nelson had a dream for a Grand Hypertext,
and he set about trying to implement it.
What was he supposed to do, wait for
someone else to invent half of what he
needed?
There's another comparison you can make,
between Xanadu and the Gnu project.
Richard Stallman also had an ambitious
dream (though perhaps not as grand as
the Grand Hypertext), and rather than
try to tackle the entire thing at once,
he thought of a strategy to subdivide
it into stages.
He began working in a peculiar,
inside-out way, nibbling at the
outside edges of the project:
First he worked on porting his
development environment
(emacs), then he began working
on utilities and compilers, and
only gradually worked his way This kernel project, the "hurd"
in to the center, and tried to was famously a failure, and he
develop a kernel. was beaten to the finish line
by Torvald's linux kernel.
This is a really interesting
approach, a clever, pragmatic There are a lot of things that can
compromise with reality that be discussed about this failure: the
RMS is rarely given credit reasons it happened, the rancor that
for... People seem to prefer developed from it, the long debates
a simpler story about a about the philosophical differences
crazy, uncompromising between GNU and Linux.
idealist. Arguably RMS is a
very practical idealist. His But free software
list of actual achievements projects "fail" in
is far too long accuse him of an interesting way:
not knowing how to get things they don't actually
done. die, they just slow
down... sometimes
He doesn't like proprietary software they slow to a
and since all the existing platforms halt. But there's
were proprietary there was none he never a point where
wanted to give his allegiance to. you can say "that
will *never* get
But as a practical matter, moving again".
until the GNU project was
completed, there was no We've already seen
other game in town. What a major example of
else could he do but pick a "failure" that
one of the least offensive turned out to be
of them (perhaps a a success: mozilla/
proprietary unix based on firefox.
BSD)?
I would argue that
Answer: he picked all of them. we're about to see (Dec 2021)
The GNU project went beserk on a similar thing Well, would
cross-platform compatibilty. happen with parrot you believe
Their code compiles nearly and perl6. Raku on the
everywhere, and so nearly Moarvm?
everywhere it competes with Who knows if the
proprietary code, and shows hurd might follow?
that there is another way to
go. (Before that though:
can the linux desktop
What a fascinating move... recover some
The ultimate "embrace and momentum against the
extend". windows and macintosh
worlds?)
(And will the
google android
prove stronger
than the tightly
locked down
iPhone?)
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