And now for something completely different

Open Source

I am coming more and more to the conclusion that philosophy is useless without praxes, as Heidegger so beautifully called the art of doing. Theory for the sake of theory alone is a recipe for disaster -at least when one aims to influence one's life-world with such theory- for only the environment of the mind will put the mind's children to the test.

In my particular case I -apart from being me in the world- am also a software engineer and electrotechnical engineer, although I do not often use the latter experience that often, except maybe when something does not work at home.
My (professional) praxes are therefore mainly that of programming, and has given me first hand experience in the developments in IT since the Eighties of the previous century.
One interesting change that happened is that programming developed from a mainly solitary activity to -if one chooses to- a team effort that spans the entire globe. Especially if one is an open-source enthusiast.

I currently host three projects through the World-Wide Web. One is a framework that has quietly being developed in the past four years called Aieon-F, another -my first- is a now dormant attempt to create a framework for artificial intelligence, and a third is basically a 'had-to' project that became important when I started to adapt Aieon-F to work in a peer-to-peer environment, that is provided by JXTA. This project, called jxta-eclipse, aims to integrate JXTA with Equinox, one of the most promising programming frameworks of the moment.

It is quite funny to see that lately this somewhat mandatory project has been keeping my quite busy. Different people from all over the world suddenly post me with questions or remarks about the project. It makes me realise that open source development is an historically unique phenomenon that deserves more attention that -just- as a (pain in the ... of ) business models.
I tend to be quite Nietschean in my (albeit good-natured) cynisism, so you won't hear me saying that open-source is a model for humankind -international, egalitarian, usually respectful to others and somewhat blind for cultural and societal differences. But...
...having said that...
...it does come close to achieving at least some of those ideals in a practical being 'in-the-world' with others.

I have always thought it remarkable that technology seems to have that trait of bridging gaps between (technically oriented) people. When I still travelled the world to install machines at customers, I always liked the relative ease in which I could connect to the techies at the customers. Somehow technology is quite a strong connecting force and shared interest in technology makes strong bonds.

Anyway, I'll be posting more here on the practical issues of my little projects here!