LIS5362 - Week 1 Slides - Intro

Some big ideas

..YMMV

The Ticker Tape Theme

Human communication? NO. DATA.

(there are a LOT of ways to express this)

A L'IL ECON

The marginal cost of software (and anything else "digital") is zero,
and economics (for better or worse) tells us that its real price will approach zero.

A reasonable idea

If software is infinitely reproduceable and can be shared everywhere for free;
then no piece of software should *ever* be rewritten;
and everyone should always have the best one.

A reasonable idea THAT DEFINITELY DID NOT HAPPEN

If software is infinitely reproduceable and can be shared everywhere for free;
then no piece of software should *ever* be rewritten;
and everyone should always have the best one.

Instead?

A lot of people are sharing and that is awesome...but also
to figure out how things are going,

consider software as a free resource, not a product

NNT's "Lindy"

A good predictor of how long something will be around in the future..
... is how long it has been around in the past

Evolution

Individual pieces of software are sometimes intelligently designed...
...but the ecosystem is DEFINITELY evolution.

(i.e., a lot makes no sense

See also luggage wheels aka)

Luggage wheels.

Y'all.

We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.
ARE YOU SERIOUS.

LAW

yeah, if that existed on the internet that'd be nice

JOKING SORT OF (I take this seriously in Info Policy?)

Digging deep into the web

You find two things:
Free and Open Source software (esp Linux)
AND
Text

(these two things are STRONGLY related)

The Prof's Million Foot View

1) More open generally wins in the long run
2) Piracy? Meh

The First PCs

Pioneers of Freedom?

Apple II/Macintosh series

Apple v. IBM (COMPATIBLE)

MS Windows v. OS/2

The Dominance of MS

Probably not Windows the OS, but ...

The Dominance of MS

Probably not Windows the OS, but ...

How (not) to kill a giant

Direct competition?

They just buy you out.

Government Intervention?

The original "Surface" (2003-2007)

The Microsoft Tablet (2002)

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

(I didn't make this up, they used it INTERNALLY)
Either BUY OUT your competition, or E,E,E.
(e.g.)
.Net
ActiveX
DirectX vs. OpenGL
Attempted with odt.
This prevents you from having to competitively innovate.
(and is kind of understandable.)

Not even the (U.S.) gov't.

United States v. Microsoft, 253 F.3d 34 (2001)(mostly over IE.)

Europe did, but without much consequence...except that you can legally now say "Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft"

Wow, so how DO you kill a giant?

SLOWLY.

With The Internet
+
With Non Computer Devices

(both of which run on...guess what)

Missed it...

"Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority." - Bill Gates

Microsoft:

Home Computer as Household Appliance(running proprietary/closed source software)...

but what about those other big computers and networks and stuff...old school?

Unix

Unix

The Unix Way

Unix Descendants

(aka, why am I talking about all this?)

LITERALLY LINUX:

e.g. Ubuntu, Mint, PopOs, Raspbian etc.
Windows Subsystem for Linux

Unix Descendants

(aka, why am I talking about all this?)

Super close ("Posix Compatible etc)

Unix Descendants

(aka, why am I talking about all this?)

EVERYTHING THAT ISNT WINDOWS*

Open Source

A bit more complicated than one might think...

Free v. Open

Free software existed first.
"Free as in speech, not free as in beer."
Libre v. Gratis

Real hard to sell stuff when it's called "free"

So, "Open-Source" is adopted.
All free software is open source, but not all open source software is free (as in speech or otherwise)
And so, you get a pretty good mix....

Open (but not free) Source

You can do most anything with it, including lock it back down and making it unfree.
(BSD, Apache, anything MIT Licensed

Free Software

You can do most anything with it yourself..
EXCEPT you may NOT re-release it closed.

GNU/Linux, Firefox etc.

What is the internet made of, software-wise?

Historically?
Free and Open Source, overwhelmingly

Today?
Free and Open source, overwhelmingly,
but with weird business models...

Evaluating Tools

Like I said, LINUX and TEXT.

But there's A LOT OF MONEY in between, aka PLATFORMS

"Platforms"

Any layer between "the bare metal machine" and "what you see on the web"

(this is a BROAD category)

(flypaper is not a bad analogy here)

Things to think about re: Platforms

Distinguish between those generally open/free .. e.g.

Apache, Wordpress, Wikipedia
(there REALLY aren't many of these)

Things to think about re: Platforms

..and not. (this can definitely be a spectrum)
Nearly always those with a for-profit business model:

facebook, docker, wix, twitter, canva, canvas, blackboard,
adobe, microsoft, react, d3, apple, amazon, netflix etc etc etc

Things to think about re: Platforms

Two ways to analyze the businesses:

Specifically, what will they prevent you from having access to?
What are you not allowed to have if you don't pay them?

vs "what they actually do?"
(e.g. Netflix is VERY DIFFERENT from Facebook)

So: understanding Unix/Linux stuff

will help you immensely with understanding
the shape of the web.
ESPECIALLY file management, one of the most important things.
This is the main reason why I'm focusing on "knowing some Linux."

Also, "the cloud"

There is no cloud, it's just someone elses computer.

Almost *always* running Linux.

Web hosting, etc.

(e.g. the LAMP stack)

The other thing you find when you dig deep..

Relatedly:

TEXT.

Now, what's on top?

LOTS of possibilities here — But by default, we will look at the possibility of being self hosted.

more to come..