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standing in the shadow of giants

ideolalia.com · 1,565 words · saved by 1 readers

The narrative fallacy is that past events prefigure the future. It is especially common in biographies, where the subject’s early life is reduced down to a collection of events that suggest that their future path was obvious, if you only knew how to look. It ignores all the other people who did almost the same thing, and ended up somewhere else entirely. The term “open source” was officially adopted in 1998, fifteen years after Richard Stallman began the “free software” movement, which itself was built upon a long-standing tradition of open collaboration in the academic programming community. Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar was published a year earlier, and shaped the open source narrative. It guided the reader through the lifecycle of an open source project, which first “[scratches] a developer’s personal itch”, and then accretes contributors until it becomes world-class software. This was undeniably possible; the Linux kernel existed (as did Raymond’s own fetchmail projec

The narrative fallacy is that past events prefigure the future. It is especially common in biographies, where the subject’s early life is reduced down to a collection of events that suggest that their future path was obvious, if you only knew how to look. It ignores all the other people who did almost the same thing, and ended up somewhere else entirely. The term “open source” was officially adopted in 1998, fifteen years after Richard Stallman began the “free software” movement, which itself was built upon a long-standing tradition of open collaboration in the academic programming community.

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