Raleigh, NC
I'm a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University with an intense affection for all things FOSS. I'm particularly interested in leveraging Open Source in the classroom and expanding the commons of freely-licensed educational courseware. I'm a Computer Scientist, so FOSS is obviously a big part of what I'm interested in, but I would particularly like to see Open Source and Libre Culture penetrate the non-technical disciplines, since there's a whole lot more to it than computing!
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I've had the CC license badge on the footer of my blog since day one. What's wild is that I've actually had an educator contact me to talk about it, even though I don't really mention it much in the content of my posts. ^_^
The one line from the op-ed that really bothered me was "<em>there is no such thing as a body of code without bugs</em>".
First of all, to take a line from the great Edsger Dijkstra, the usage of the term "bug" is dishonest and deflects responsibility of the failure from the programmer when the bug is more properly called a "fault", and a program with a fault is more properly called "wrong".
But on a broader level, I think it's a crying shame that we, as a society, have become so accustomed and desensitized to software failures that we don't hold computer programs to the same standards of quality that we expect from roads and bridges, cars and planes, power infrastructure and water treatment facilities.
What I love about openness is that it provides accountability for the engineering behind software. Open source developers have the advantage that they can leverage that openness while holding their own work to a higher standard, establishing more <em>confidence</em> in their code.