I tried to read it, but my brain kept powering itself off as a self-defense mechanism. Then I tried to skim it, and it started getting worse, e.g.: "Another apt example of O’Reilly’s meme-engineering is his attempt to establish a strong intellectual link between the development of Unix [...] and the development of open source and the Internet." At this point I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself...

Ironic that it should deface Unix, because I think that dmr's immortal words[1] are particularly apt here: this piece is "a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271

>I became blind with nerd-rage and headed over here to cleanse myself... Ironic that it should deface Unix

Agree with him or not, all he's saying is that the code sharing involved in creating Unix was no more than regular academic sharing of ideas, and that retroactively claiming it for "open source" is spin. The article takes no issue with Unix, maybe you should read in more detail before becoming enraged?

Morozov is wrong; you just don't know the history.

Keith Bostic has gone on record as saying that he was inspired by Richard Stallman to try to make a fully free version of BSD. The GNU tools were a crucial tool on every Unix by the mid-1980s, and indeed played a major role in making Unix useful. While you can argue about whether it was a good idea to try to rebrand Stallman's "free software" movement as "open source", it doesn't make sense to argue that Unix was somehow unconnected to the free software movement.

Furthermore, there was already a movement afoot to build software under free-software licenses in commercial companies many years before the Open Source Initiative was founded: Sun, DEC, HP, and so on, were members of the X Consortium, which continued the development of X-Windows as free software many years after its original (academic) maintainers had stopped; Cygnus effectively took over maintenance of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain from the GNU project by about 1990; Sun published NFS, Yellow Pages, Sun RPC, and so on under free-software licenses starting in the mid-1980s, and later funded development on Emacs; Lucid forked Emacs to form the basis of its IDE, giving us XEmacs and its high-quality open-source C compiler, lcc. None of this was "regular academic sharing of ideas" — while these were companies with academic roots, they were judged by standards of business, not academia — and it all happened on Unix.

And many of the people who built that open-source software that made Unix what it was were also founding members of the Open Source Initiative.

At the same time, there was perhaps an order of magnitude more programmers using IBM PCs under MS-DOS. The only significant open-source software I can think of from this era on that platform is the various open-source FORTH systems. There was lots of user-group and BBS-scene software, but it was usually distributed without source, or occasionally with source, but under "no commercial use" licenses — you could maybe even put the IBM PC BIOS source code into this category. There were occasional exceptions — the WaZOO source code from Opus, say, or PC-HACK, ported from Unix — but not many.

So I think that it's perfectly fair to describe the "code sharing involved in Unix" as a unique nascent movement, separate from the "regular academic sharing of ideas", which at some point decided to (mostly) call itself the "open source" movement.

It's not entirely spin. The free software movement was largely a reactionary movement to various attempts of that era to take the "academic sharing of ideas" back in to the proprietary fold. It (and the later open source movement) was very much trying to defend/establish/whatever the environment under which Unix evolved.

So it is not so much retroactively claiming it as open source as it is acknowledge open source's heritage.

Yes, it's a long-ish article but it covers a lot of factual ground (it's in effect an O'Reilly biography from a very critical perspective). It contains a lot of historical detail that is interesting in its own right; the author has done a lot of research, down to digging up some notebooks edited by O'Reilly in '76. There's a good summary in smacktoward's comment below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474090

It also covers a fair bit of nonfactual ground that purports to be factual :)

Several points were being made, as I can tell from a single reading. Note that I don't claim to do anything more than summarize, and that, probably badly. Read the original to rebut/clarify my take...

- The open source movement separated from libre source in the pursuit of profits; Mr. O'Reilly was heavily involved in that.

- Mr. O'Reilly has changed & massaged certain words and meanings in a masterful art of propaganda.

- Mr. O'Reilly's influence & the approach he favors has demoted the individual's ability to effectively govern themselves.

Additionally: the author does not support O'Reilly's (or any "Randian" for that matter) politics.

That the author (a great writer) would use Rand (an awful writer) as the strawman here indicates he's never read her work (it sucks, fyi) and is only reacting to what he thinks it is.

Say what you want about Rand's political views, it's clear that the author doesn't understand them... implying that he doesn't understand O'Reilly's either.

The first half of the article was an interesting historic lesson for me. The last half of the article, less so.

Hey, what a surprise - the top comment on a HN post comes from a reader who dismisses the post outright despite failing to actually read it in its entirety.

Your ad hominem attack against me is not appreciated, nor is your attempt to treat me as a category and stereotype rather than a real person behind a keyboard.

Like others here, I make it a general rule to read everything, and even consulting other sources, before commenting. Like others here also, I had not the time nor the inclination to go through the entirety of a 16,000 word behemoth of writing when the first 8,000 words were rote reptitions of a single point already copiously made within 1,000 words. Being no stranger to long-form writing, and seeing no visible structure to the work that would suggest it's going anywhere besides more reptition of the same point, I gave up - like others here did.

A basic modicum of civility is desirable, and this includes blatant labeling and name-calling.

I did not call you any name (unless you count "reader"), nor was I attacking you. I was merely sarcastically expressing my frustration at a trend I've observed on HN in which the top comment on an article which I highly enjoyed is almost invariably someone disagreeing outright, often without having read the entire post.

If you read half of that behemoth of an article, good for you - you can't be accused of not giving it a fair chance (although I found that second half to be more interesting and insightful myself).

I just find it aggravating and perhaps indicative of a negative attitude amongst HN readers that contrarian comments almost always end up at the top of the thread. That is all. Sorry if I hurt your feelings.

I think this wasn't a case of middlebrow dismissal which you rightly rail against. The original comment seems to be directly complaining about the style of the author rather than just dismissing it off hand. When it comes to Morozov this is a salient aspect, because while he certainly does his homework he tends to revel in polemic bordering on vitriol.

I'm sad 'potatolicious got to say this before I did; he's one of my must-reads on HN. It's also sad how quickly a critique Paul Graham has of the environment on HN gets twisted into another way to degrade the environment on HN.

What sanctimonious rubbish. The top comment added nothing to the debate, and failed to engage with anything the article said.

And now you dress that comment up as reasoned and adding value. Wow.

LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.

In fairness to the author, this piece was written for a print publication, The Baffler, and included in that magazine's most recent print issue. Longer-form articles fit better in print than they do online.

OK, thanks to this and a few other intriguing defenses I went back and finished. It does eventually make a real point, although the ratio of actual quotations and other data points to the vaguely FUD-ish storytelling that he starts off with is pretty poor, especially considering the amount of research he claims to have done.

I'm left with the vague feeling that I could probably use the same approach to tear down Gandhi or any other more or less untouchable folk hero by using long tracts of insinuation interspersed with a few phrases in scare quotes.

In fairness to magazines, they usually aren't intended to carry 16,000 word novellas. This thing needs chapters.

They could have at least provided IDs for the paragraphs so I could book mark where I left off. At 16,729 words I don't think you can call this a single serving read.

That's like 50 pages. An hour or so. (I skipped to other tabs too, I admit it.)