Incoherent and disjointed opinionated drivel from somewhere near London

Sad news – the legendary Arthur C. Clarke has died. He’ll be greatly missed; Clarke novels occupy a full shelf of my floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and Rendezvous With Rama stands proud as the finest sci-fi it has ever been my pleasure to read.

Aside from his very visible mastery of sci-fi, however, there is much to remember Clarke for. He is responsible for popularising the concept of geostationary orbit, which is very important for practical global telecommunications. When you watch the Olympics on TV this summer, you can thank Clarke for the fact that you haven’t had to go to China to see it.

Perhaps best of all, though, is his now-infamous Third Law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke’s Third Law has been quoted, referenced, and paraphrased copiously since he coined it, and it is almost axiomatic for many technologists. As a software engineer, I get a wry enjoyment from Gehm’s Corollary, i.e. “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced” – a sobering thought when confidently hacking away on the next big thing!

If your users don’t think your software is magic, then you have room for improvement. I believe Clarke would have approved of that sentiment. R.I.P.

Jeff Atwood has an article up today bemoaning the fact that seemingly nobody “gives a crap about freedom zero”. Well, my initial reaction was that surely nobody could care about something with such a thoroughly ridiculous name. Freedom Zero? Really? I know this is the FSF‘s first freedom, and programmers count from 0 don’tcha know, but it’s still rubbish.

But the real reason is that it simply isn’t important enough to override everything else.

Certainly, for some things you want the freedom and reliability of open source. I write my essays in OpenOffice, I use Vim as my text editor for all programming languages other than C#, and I write maths papers with LaTeX. I want my personal output to remain usable and not at the whim of some company somewhere, I agree with all that.

But do I need my MP3 player to be open? No. My videogame console? No. My phone? No. My movie editor? No (though only because I always archive the source material). The irony is that people do indeed care about freedom – the freedom to choose, and the sad fact is that there is a certain type of zealot who only espouses freedom as long as it’s their type of freedom. And that isn’t freedom at all.

Now, as it happens, Linux is my operating system of choice. I don’t own any Apple computers, though I do have a first-gen iPod Mini, which is distinctly showing its age. I use Vista for .Net development, but I don’t think anyone could reasonably call me an Apple zealot or an anti-freedom capitalist whatever.

But you won’t catch me criticising Apple for their closed platform. If it results in a decent product, I’m all for it. I used to have a G4 iBook and liked it a lot. When I’m in the market for an ultraportable later this year, I will give due consideration to the Mac Air.

A Mac is a product – calling the hardware nothing more than a dongle is a ridiculous argument. You can run Linux on Mac hardware, and OSX on non-Mac hardware (suboptimally, granted). Would you call a Ferrari Enzo a dongle because you need one in order to run the Enzo engine management software?

And it should be said that Apple isn’t quite as closed as some people suggest – I can still install Firefox, Thunderbird, and other open source tools if I want to tackle the hostile internet with a trusted armoury. And OSX comes with things like Apache and SSH installed out of the box.

So do I give a crap about freedom zero? Only in as far as it suits my needs. If a piece of closed software does a better job, and the risk of losing data forever is within my tolerances, then sure I’ll use it and I won’t let ideology get in my way.

On the flip side, I care about interoperability, and I contribute or donate to a few open source projects, and will strongly oppose anything – legal or technological – that attempts to muscle open source out of existence. An open source tool deserves the right to compete. I use Amarok not because it’s open, but because I like it more than iTunes. Conversely, I use Visual Studio not because it’s proprietary, but because I prefer it to SharpDevelop.

Use the best tool for the job.

Woohoo, frist psot. This is my whole-sort-of-general-mishmash blog, in which I will be irregularly posting coding insights, recording handy bits of obscure info I want to be able to easily find in the future, writing the odd essay, musing on literature and mathematics (and occasionally considering how they are linked to programming), riffing on other blog posts, bemoaning the sorry state of the film industry, raving about how great films are, and generally whatever the hell else I feel like doing.