Monday, November 3, 2008
Information or Art?
Last week, I found Karl Fogel's discussion about free software and the open source movement fascinating--especially when he talked about what software and computer codes mean to a community/culture/world at large. Computer codes, unlike numbers in a phone book or the human genome, are not information but artfully crafted configurations arranged by clever, brilliant "nerds." Fogel posed the question: Is software a cultural artifact? According to Fogel, he can more often than not look at a code and be able to recognize the mastermind behind it. In the realm of copyright, there is often a fine line between what is considered to be information and what is deemed a cultural artifact. Fogel made me realize that it's not about "1s and 0s" but the tedious, meticulous, and pre-meditated craftsmanship involved in assembling the ones and zeros into a piece of art.
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1 comments:
Very glad you enjoyed the discussion!
Just to clarify: what I was saying was that in a project where I'm already familiar with the other programmers, I often recognize who wrote a particular stretch of code just from reading it. The same is true of others in the project (we've talked about it).
In other words, there's style and individuality here, on top of the strictly utilitarian semantics of the code.
However, this does not mean that I (or anyone else) can look at any code excerpt, from any program, and recognize the hand behind it. There are too many programmers in the world for that. Also, recognition is independent of whether the programmer in question is a "mastermind" :-). They might or might not be -- either way, it doesn't affect the recognizability of their code. (By analogy: the children in a classroom might not be little Picassos, yet the teacher can usually still recognize which child made which drawings.)
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