Darcy Casselman's weblog. Just like old times.
Introductory note: we just sorted out Internet connections in the hotel. Day 1 is now pretty much finished, but I’m going to go ahead and chronicle Day 0 first. It’s that good.
And so it begins.
I’m still sitting in the passenger seat of Bill’s VW Golf in Ottawa. In a few minutes we will embark on our grand journey to Baltimore and onwards to Otakon. To infamy!
We have snacks and water and ice and we’re headed for the border. Ah, road trip.
I fear for my life.
I’m still thinking about starting a little shareware company some day. A microISV, as it were. It’s pretty much a back-of-mind thing, but it’s there. The seed of an idea sittting around waiting for the right soil conditions or water or temperature or whatever else seeds in extended metaphors wait for.
Tangentially, we went to see Richard Stallman give a talk at the CSC a while ago. RMS is an interesting guy. He believes, of course, that no-one should be in the business of selling software. He goes as far as to consider it practically criminal.
The RMS talk I went to wasn’t a free software talk, incidentally. Maybe I’ll talk about what it was actually about at some point. He started off, though, with his four fundamental freedoms of free software:
And, you know, on a fundamental level, I totally agree with him. On another level, I’d like to build a software product and be able to sell it. Hell, I work for a company that does exactly that.
I’m trying to figure out how I reconcile those levels.
Having followed the ideas of people like Cory Doctorow for a while, I’ll happily talk about how musicians and artists and other people really should start to let go of the idea that they can make a living selling bits. There’s no scarcity in bits. If it can be copied, it will be. I guess to some extent that’s because software “piracy”'s been around so long that it’s just something I accept as given. I expect musicians and filmmakers and artists have to catch up.
The response to how a musician will make money if they give their music away for free (or it’s taken from them, either way, it’s inevitible) is they’ve got to change the model to making money off concerts and merchandise. From what I hear, that’s pretty much how any small to midsized artist with a label makes any money anyway. The music is marketing. It gets people in the bars or stadium seats.
RMS says something similar about programmers. 95% of programmers, he says, make their money from custom development. So it’s no great loss if no-one can make money selling software. Software developers still have jobs, because custom development will always need to be done somewhere.
But people do make money from selling software. Just like people will keep on making money from selling music even after record companies give up suing their fans. The question is, should they? Is it really in their best interest? Giving the content away for free might be, counter-intuitively, profit maximizing. There are lots of musicians out there. Your greatest challenge as a musician isn’t stopping kids from pirating; it’s actually getting an audience. People won’t pay any attention to you if they don’t know who you are.
Taking the music marketing analogy, the open source software you write and projects you contribute to becomes marketing for your skills as a developer. There are lots of shareware companies out there. People won’t use your software if they can’t see the value in it. I want to make software; I don’t want to be a salesman.
However, I also don’t particularly want to work commission for some bank writing crappy database entry forms all day ( not that there’s anything wrong with that…).
I’m not a free software zealot by any stretch, but I do very much see the value of a rich ecosystem of free software out there. And personally, I’d rather use free software than stuff I’d have to pay for, even if I was able to get it for free (not that I would, of course).
I know there’s a way to make this it all work, just like I know the whole thing with music and movies will work itself out in the end. We’ll all be richer for it when it does.
Warning: There’s a spoiler in here for those who haven’t been downloading Doctor Who lately, or who haven’t been following third season casting announcements. I expect most of my readership either knows what’s going on or doesn’t care.
A couple times in the new series, the Doctor’s dropped hints about his family. No detail, just off-hand comments. Like in Smith and Jones, he mentioned something about having a brother.
Odd that the Master shows up at the end of this season then.
It’s always been a bit vague as to the Master’s precise relationship to the Doctor. Like most aspects of the Doctor’s past, it’s largely left undefined. That’s kinda what Doctor Who is about. Hence the title.
All we really from the original series is that the Doctor and the Master went to the Time Lord Academy together. It’s hinted that they have some amount of shared history, but it’s left intentionally vague. Mostly, though, the writers of the original series were content with leaving the Master as simply a really mean Time Lord bent on (a) survival at all costs and (b) universal domination. Oh, and vengeance against the Doctor, probably for his interference with (a) and ( b). He was basically just a pulp-style arch-nemesis for the Doctor. Ming the Merciless to his Flash Gordon. Something like that.
I don’t get the impression that Russel T Davies will let it go at that, though. He’s all about character. He’s going to try to define the relationship between the two Time Lords, at least for himself, because he has to know what having the Master back means to the Doctor on an emotional level.
I have a theory about what he might define that relationship to be. I’m not sure he will do it, or even that he should, but I want to put it out there just so if it turns out to be right, I can gloat and say I called it.
It may very well turn out that the Doctor and the Master are brothers.
It’s not a particularly new idea. Back in the 90s, there was a series revival attempt that’s referred to as Fathers and Brothers. It was utterly apocryphal and talked about how the Doctor and the Master had to go out and find their lost dad Rassilon (otherwise known as the founder of the Time Lord race) or some nonsense and it sounded pretty horrible. ( There’s a book about Doctor Who revival attempts that I should really get some time…).
What’s fueled most of the fan speculation, I think, is a hard-to-make-out line in the 5th Doctor episode Planet of Fire. The Master says to the Doctor, “Would you show no mercy to your own–? Argh!” and then dies in a fire. The Discontinuity Guide writes this off as referring to their shared heritage or biology as Time Lords. The novelization of the episode omits the line entirely. But the question was always out there: your own what?
So RTD has been easing us up to the idea of the Doctor having family and needs an emotional kick for the Doctor and a convincing reason for the Master’s crazy vendetta. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to reveal, at the climax of the season, that they’re more than just old school chums? Maybe even brothers? Hm…