Confused Of Calcutta » About me
Thanks to Chris Locke for pointing me in the direction of JP Rangaswami’s blog. It’s nice to see a kindred spirit when it comes to one’s inspiration for Open Source. In my case it wasn’t the wild day I spent with Richard Stallman in 1991, at the dawn of the Free Software Foundation, nor is it my attachment to Tux the Penguin, but goes back well before to my first online community experience, The Brokedown Palace, a simple BBS for swapping Grateful Dead bootlegs. The Dead’s former approach to their music — encouraging tapers in their audience, permitting swapping as long as there was no profiteering — this is the inspiration behind my approach to intellectual property rights.
“Which naturally makes me passionate about opensource as well. In democratised innovation. In emergence theories a la Steven Johnson. None of which should surprise the reader, given that my thoughts on opensource were probably more driven by Jerry Garcia than by Raymond or Stallman or Torvalds et al.”
Kind of a funny side note, but I’ve spoke at a few conferences as an “unaffiliated consultant” recently, and I met the real Dead chef. Not the guy at Google who was their chef for 2 years, but the guy who hired him and was their chef for 8 years. He’s now the director of mobile at a large agency.
He had seen something like 685 shows. In one particularly telling anecdote, he tried to encapsulate Jerry’s personality for me, letting me know that whenever he put out a food plate, Jerry would always come over and ask him “can I take this?… or may I have this piece of white bread?” That was the type of person he was. I like knowing that and thought you might too.
And about this post:
“It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken,
Perhaps they’re better left unsung.”
Hope all is well, David.