Free software has long been celebrated by some as

"a highly effective vehicle for the transfer of wealth from the industrialized world to developing countries"
— How the Tech-Poor Can Still Be Software-Rich

and denounced by others as

"a transfer of wealth from the programmers who created it tothe corporations who use it without payment"
— Support for open source software is based on several misconceptions

but all of this high-stakes talk can give people the wrong idea.

I would prefer that the general public not think of people who choose to write free software as visionary philanthropists or – worse still – the unwitting victims of corporate exploitation. In fact, I suspect a lot of free software is written for the noblest of reasons: because it pleases the programmers who write it.

In support of my claim, I hereby present the following list of CPAN modules:

Lingua::Tolkien::BURL

an Orkish scripting language

Acme::MetaSyntactic::lotr

The Lord of the Rings theme

Date::Tolkien::Shire

implementation of the calendar used by the Hobbits (via Stefan)

DateTime::Fiction::JRRTolkien::Shire

(re-)implementation of the calendar used by the Hobbits

What, I wonder, might the capital value of this software be to someone in a developing country or to a corporation looking for code it can use without payment?

:>

When I think of the average free software programmer, I think of Wilson's bird of paradise — each indulging in an uncommon, seemingly gratuitous [*] display of beauty and grace [**] simply because it is (still?) possible.

[*] I know, I know: Eric Raymond claims that our exotic plumage and behavior (like the birds') are actually the product of natural selection and, not coincidentally, improve our chances of mating well, often, or at all. OMG! Does that mean I can hack my way to evolutionary fitness? Sweet! *hack* *hack* *hack* *hack*. Uh… no.

[**] I am talking about the "beauty and grace" to be found in program source code, of course; the free software programmers themselves can be as hard to find in broad daylight as the aforementioned Paradisaeidae! [See the foregoing endnote for a possible explanation and an egregious example of FAIL.]

A friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous on the web) pointed me to Leslie Lamport's unpublished paper on Buridan's principle and expressed her disagreement over the following statement:

[I]f the ball is positioned randomly, random vibrations are as likely to keep it from falling off as to cause it to fall.

I would love to know what “randomly” means here, since we're evidently constrained to placing the ball on the edge of the knife. Does it mean “not symmetrically about it”? In any case, I agree that random vibrations will not keep the ball on the knife's edge: it seems highly unlikely that the effect of a first de-stabilizing impulse on the ball will be subsequently countervailed by a sequence of corrective impulses that keeps the ball on the knife's edge, and even more unlikely that this continues indefinitely.

So, while I grant that it's possible for the ball to remain on the knife's edge in the presence of random vibrations, I also think it's unlikely that it will. Unless we've misunderstood what Leslie is saying here, it seems plausible that this claim about the "ball on a knife's edge" is partly responsible for the paper's rejection, as it is bound to trip most physicists' wires.

On 14 March 14 2006, Leslie Lamport gave a wonderful talk called Thinking for Programmers to first- and second-year undergraduate students at the University of Lugano's Faculty of Informatics. The following day, he gave a public lecture called How to Write a Proof at the University's Aula Magna. The above links lead to my accounts of these events.

I am (still) working on a document that can serve as a sort of LSD-Meth Explained to accompany LSD-Meth: The Lone Software Developer's Methodology. I've tentatively titled it The LSD-Meth User's Guide. The target audience includes the fun-loving, FPS-playing first-year students at the University of Lugano's Faculty of Informatics. Suggestions on how to improve this half-serious, half-humorous rant would be most welcome.