{"id":327,"date":"2009-01-02T17:00:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T17:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=327"},"modified":"2009-01-02T17:00:10","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T17:00:10","slug":"open-source-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=327","title":{"rendered":"Open source programming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a <a href=\"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?page_id=99\">contributor to Maxima<\/a>, I occasionally receive requests from students to fill out surveys. I got one today, and after completing it, felt obliged to add the following comment, which really applies to most such surveys that I&#8217;ve seen:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>You seem to be concentrating on things like prestige, reputation, stuff like that that I have no interest in and certainly play no role in my decision to work on an open source project. Simply put, the projects I work on I work on because of what they DO, not because they are open source or not. It&#8217;s not a self-serving activity&#8230; I no more think of it as &#8220;programming&#8221; as I think, say, of repairing my computer as &#8220;screwdrivering&#8221;. Programming (or using a screwdriver) is not the goal, but the means to reach a goal.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>I work on Maxima because I need it for my research, because its tensor algebra packages were broken and I was able to repair and maintain them, because I need the result, because by participating I can help ensure that the package remains reliable and useful&#8230; what others think of me is irrelevant. I left your last question (ranking roles by prestige) unanswered for this reason&#8230; you might as well have asked me to rank them by color.<\/em><\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=327' send='false' layout='button_count' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a contributor to Maxima, I occasionally receive requests from students to fill out surveys. I got one today, and after completing it, felt obliged to add the following comment, which really applies to most such surveys that I&#8217;ve seen: You seem to be concentrating on things like prestige, reputation, stuff like that that I <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=327' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-11-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions\/329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}