WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Chinese Whispers

It's interesting to see how someone with a limited background of a topic (reporting this event and never heard of wikis?) and who is only half-listening covers a speech. My 'industry perspective' at Supernova last week was covered in tech-tabloid The Inquirer by Doug Mohney. I suppose I should really be gentle as the guy, despite not actually taking the time to interview me at the event, is clearly not too upset and at least spelled my name right. But let's take a look at what's been chinese-whispered:

Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun [he was listening to Kevin's introduction, then], give a semi-interesting spin [high praise] from his perch. He said not all the smart people in the world can work in one place --- make me wonder if Boss Scott's has heard that [sure he has, I said this was one of the Bill Joy quotes most cited inside the company -and Jeff says it's obvious] – so innovation happens elsewhere (than Sun, I guess) [a whole load happens at Sun too, buddy - can you say "NFS" or "Java" or "JXTA" - it's just most people have heard of it before and didn't need telling, this was not a sales pitch] and "community-based peer product" ["community-based peer-production" actually, a phrase coined by Prof Yochai Benkler, which I explained] was good, steering carefully around [actually steering directly into and explaining what I was talking about so even those only half-listening could get it] the phrase "open source." He described "Open Source" as being the beta ground for commercial software [Actually, no, absolutely not what I believe and not really close to what I said. I was not giving a talk about open source; I was explaining my view that the chief driver towards decentralised technology was actually societal, the emergence of a massively-connected society. What I said was that the open source approach was like the beta test (should have said "release candidate") for the software development methodology of the massively-connected era. I also said that nEcho was an interesting early alpha for the standards process of the massively-connected era. I gave other examples too. I clearly didn't say "massively-connected" enough though] . There's a Sun "experiment" called MadHatter that will see if "community-based development" can build enterprise-class software and if Sun can build a business around it [I don't even know where to begin, maybe he needs to read more...].

I could analyse the second paragraph too, but it's not really worth it. I clearly failed to communicate my true point - that the chief driver towards decentralised technology was actually societal, the emergence of a massively-connected society, and not technological - because Doug Mohney only heard the examples out of context. Still, Cory Doctorow got it. Or maybe Doug just has an axe to grind with Sun (his previous coverage seems to suggest it's because his stock portfolio has hit the deck) and decided to take some cheap shots?

posted at 2:13 AM (UK) | |