No, of course not. I never meant to suggest that it was. I did question whether there is as much interesting stuff going on as before, and I'm still not sure.
rasmus, in his very thoughtful response, puts his finger on a key point: the standard for things being "interesting" is probably much higher than it was. The application that got me truly excited about free software, the Gimp, was truly trailblazing in its day. Nobody had ever done a modern GUI application as free software before. It changed the world. Nowadays, if a pair of Berkeley undergrads started cloning a proprietary GUI app, it would be old news. Similarly, the Linux kernel isn't very interesting to me any more because it just works.
There was definitely a hype wave around free software and open source. Probably the biggest damage it's done is create a lot of unrealistic expectations. People who do free software as a hobby simply cannot tackle huge software efforts as quickly and effectively as those who are being paid full time. Also, the hope that Corporate America would find it in its best interest to fund lots of free software development has largely failed to pan out (it was never true before - what had changed to make people expect that it would, other than the publication of Eric Raymond's essay?).
Lastly, the rise of the hype wave was, I think, fueled by two very, very good ideas that were enthusiastically adopted in the free software world, but with much more reluctance in the Windows world. First, the Unix philosophy of processes with separate address spaces, and a relatively simple, file-centric interface for dealing with the rest of the world. Second, TCP/IP and the Berkeley sockets API for programming them.
Now that the latest generations of consumer platforms have adopted these ideas, it's easy to forget how much of a lead we had. In 1994, when I started doing free software, Windows was at 3.1, and you'd get on the Internet with all kinds of strange hacks (anyone else remember TIA?). Those, such as myself, who ran Linux boxen enjoyed a commanding lead in terms of robustness, connectivity, and a sane programming environment, even as we sacrificed on the GUI front.
I don't think there's anything now, at the end of 2001, that is comparably such a good idea. Java might have been, if Sun hadn't botched it up as a desktop software delivery platform and shown an attitude of indifference shading to hostility to the free software world. XML certainly isn't - as Phil Greenspun has written, it solves a relatively trivial syntax problem, without helping at all with the meaning of all that tree-structured data. P2P is very interesting, but it's too hard.
It's not all bad news, though. There used to be things (like GUI's and WYSIWYG word processing) that proprietary software did pretty well and we absolutely sucked at. Now, there are at least mediocre free counterparts of just about everything in the proprietary world, and in some cases quite a bit better than mediocre.
So I think the bar will keep rising, we will learn to do more things, and slowly the good ideas will rise to the top. I think patience will reward those who expect a lot from free software. And I think the reasons to take part in it now are just as strong as they were before the hype wave. So I plan on doing free software for a while.
Xmas
We had a nice Christmas at Heather's father's house. Alan got a lot of games this time, including the 3D Harry Potter one. He, my mom, and I played Set, and again I was amazed at how quickly he caught on. Max got a couple of motorized trucks, and spent a lot of time happily driving them around.
Spam
I get a lot of spam. When I moved my mail and web server, I decided to try out some free spam filtering software, so I installed Spamassassin and Razor on casper.
The good news is that it works pretty well. It actually does filter out most of the spam, and passes most of the real mail.
The bad news is that it's far from perfect. A half dozen or so spams a day get through the filter, and it's also blocked some legitimate mail. I'm worried that its effectiveness will drop dramatically as spammers get wise to it and figure out workarounds. Quite a few of the rules in spamassassin imply test RFC compliance. Many of the others could be trivially circumvented by a spammer who was trying to do so.
Something else that bothers me deeply is that the rules are very harsh on non-European languages. One of the legitimate mails it blocked was from a Russian colleague, whose default mailer signals a koi8-r character set (even though the mail in question was all in English). A lot of the spams out there are in random languages, but blocking non-Latin alphabets seems like a step backwards for world unity.
In the long term, I really do belive that trust algorithms are the answer. In the mean time, I guess we'll just keep pouring in time and energy on our side of the arms race.