Better Living through Software

mitch wagnerresponds tomy earlierposton palladium. he makes some interesting points. first, he points out that speculation is all anyone should expect when microsoft makes sweeping and generalized marketing pushes. that’s fair enough. he also defends the propensity of some tech journalists (he is a tech journalist) to be skeptical of microsoft’s trustworthiness. he bases his defense on the fact that microsoft gets sued constantly, and it is the job of journalists to be skeptical and vigilant anyway. this, too, is something i can ack.

but, it still seems like most of the reporting is “we don’t know what microsoft is planning, and we don’t know whether they can pull it off, and we don’t know for sure if it is a conspiracy. but at least we know that it is called palladium, and it is probably bad for the fish.” mitch does a good job of explaining why that is the general buzz. and i can’t really fault anyone for responding this way. but i hope that people reading the reporting are not misled into thinking that there is something more substantial than that.

speaking of vigilant journalism, dave weighs in on the reportage outagethat left us blind to enron and worldcom. he mentions blogs as filling some of the deficiencies of bigpubs. dave is a living example of this; he was one of the very few voices during the past five years who regularly expressed his beliefthat the “new economy” was fundamentally a fraud.

so i would not begrudge mitch the right to be a vigilant journalist. but i think that some people, and especially the gpl politicians, cross the line into territory that is completely counterproductive. as an example, read the so-called “tcpa faq“. it’s a shameless piece of fud by a self-proclaimed open-source economist. you can summarize the entire faq as “tcpa will eliminate privacy and freedom for everyone but the boogey man, and will destroy puppies and the gpl.” it is a great read for a student of rhetoric, because it illustrates all sorts of specious reasoning constructs. it reminds me of a joke that some friends and i used to make aboutthings like communism andgrandiose distributed object frameworks (like forte used to be). we would ask “how could a conceptual framework so riddled with flaws attract so many adherents?” then we would shrug our shoulders and say “who cares? it keeps them busy and out of my way.”

but it’s not exactly as easy as saying “flypaper traps flies, and i