The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.
Interpretation
Sharing code fosters innovation, but it can happen outside your organization.
Bill Joy's quote emphasizes the importance of open source in driving innovation. He explains that while making source code available can lead to creative breakthroughs, those innovations may originate from external sources rather than within a company itself. By providing the tools and freedom for developers to experiment and create, organizations may benefit from external advancements that could elevate technology to new heights.
In practice
During a tech conference, you can use this quote to highlight the benefits of open source software.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.
Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It's just always all in the way you use it. So there's no - you can't really blame anything on the technology. It's just the way people use it, and it always has been.
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.
Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem.
In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.
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