Synchronicity

I logged into my blog today to make a belated comment about the OpenSim April Fool’s “joke” that the OpenSim devs felt like visiting upon their community of users. When I logged in, I saw an unapproved comment waiting in my queue so I checked that first. It was a comment from an RKOSTER who I assume is Raph Koster, the designer and general dude behind Metaplace. I had written that I couldn’t log into Metaplace for some reason and the comment basically said “you shouldn’t have any problem and please submit a bug report.” The problem, apparently, is an issue with the Adobe Flash 10 player on Linux. I also said some shitty things about Metaplace which I will get to later as it relates to the newbie experience but first I want to contrast RKOSTER’s response to a response (which I presume is *the* response) from the OpenSim developers concerning the power-gaming head trip they laid on their unsuspecting users. Really, my point should be obvious.

An obscure blogger writes a small post on their equally obscure blog saying that they are having difficulty accessing some beta software. The designer of said software (or a representative using his name) miraculously discovers this post and makes a small encouraging reply, even going so far as to include a smiley happy face! Like so Brilliant, I say, this is what serious grown up people do. Note that serious grown up people *DO NOT* reply like this “Hey it’s an open beta so what the fuck do you expect. Go outside and get some fresh air.”

Ok, next up. On April 1st, the OpenSim developers commit a prank patch to the OpenSim svn trunk that turns all avatars into stick insects. There are just so many things wrong with that. It’s juvenile, practical jokes are never funny, practical jokes are power-gaming, practical jokes are for the weak, geez, we could go on all day but the main issue I have with the OpenSim devs is in a reply I read by one of them on another blog. This is it:

“The April Fool’s joke was in completely good faith with the hope that everybody in the community would enjoy it. It was a funny and inventive change (in the best tradition of creative coding). As you’ve written, it happened last year and was always going to happen this year. All the core developers supported it.”

(If you agree with that statement then we share absolutely no common ground upon which a reasonable discussion can take place.)

So what’s my point? It’s simple and it’s one I have tried to make numerous times. It doesn’t matter if you are “open source” and that :”nobody is getting paid”. That DOES NOT give you the right to fuck with the people who use your code. Oh, but it was harmless, you say. No, you fucked with them when you forced them to accept your puerile definition of what is “harmless fun*. Professionalism is professionalism is professionalism, PAID OR NOT! I am so sick and bloody tired of opensource fanatics who insist that people who use open source software have no leg to stand on when they *expect* the code to work in certain ways.

A famous young man once said “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Open Source, as it is practised by the OpenSim gang does things because they are easy. It’s easy to develop a thing in the solipsist’s basement, no peer review, no UAT, no boss keeping you down and making you work to schedule, no user’s clambering for this or that function. They dare talk about creativity! Creativity isn’t easy.

What is hard is doing a Metaplace, or a Second Life, or a moon shot! What is hard is reigning in the rampant coder ego long enough to realize that a machine without users is a machine without function or *PURPOSE*.

My brain is “madly off in all directions” this morning. I just wanted to get some of that stuff onto “paper” as it were. Maybe I will flesh it out in the comments.

Just quickly, my problems with the Metaplace “new user experience” were much more related to the craptacular computer I was using to access it than it was to any flaw in the Metaplace UI. Yes, I prefer proper 3D like Second Life but Metaplace has so many likeable things about it that have nothing to do with eye candy that I will keep coming back to it. The TOS is brilliant, for example. Ever since Prokofy first wrote about it (what? a year ago?), I have wanted to see a world that had such a constitution built into its bones. If I may, “what’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh”, as we have seen in the case of OpenSim.

There was a massive comment thread on Slashdot a few years ago on the subject of placing easter eggs in code. Slashdot is a geek community generally but, on the whole, I think it’s fair to say that Slashdot is an *open source* geek community. There were two sides in the ensuing debate. Those open source developers who worked for a living who were mainly aghast at the idea of easter egging code and those open source developers who are really just students or unemployable (sorry, self-employed, sorry, self-under-employed!) sociopaths who took the position “it’s my code, I can do what I want, the luser can patch or get the fuck out.” I mention this because it would be unfair if this post suggested that *all* open source advocates have the social maturity of developmentally delayed 3 year olds.

One last thing. Prokofy’s April Fool’s posting announcing he was open sourcing himself actually *WAS* funny. I mean, it was *really* funny in the way a good April Fool’s joke should be. Nobody was made to look the fool, nobody felt foolish, there was nothing mean spirited or power-trippy about it.

Ya, ok, I’m done with that for now and will go take my meds (that’s tea and a cigarette) You can’t get the good stuff any more as it is all being shot into V.V.’s butt to keep her from posting on Second Thoughts.