“Back when I first discovered the internet archie was a
great search tool and tin was the best internet app I’d ever seen.
Back in those days (about ten years ago) no-one ever spoke about
the `free software community’, but there clearly was one. Nowadays
everyone seems compeled to muse on the nature of the community, but
it seems to me that it is now less of a community and more of a
clique.“
“In the early nineties the free software community was just a
lot of people who shared thier software patches over USENET, and
USENET was the keystone of that community. Nowadays however sites
like slashdot seem to be the keystone, and the differences between
USENET and WWW bulletin boards is, it seems to me, both disturbing
and destructive.”
“The main difference between USENET and bulletin boards is that
every bulletin board (advogato excluded) has an entry point that is
strictly controlled by the site managers and therefore gives
enourmous controll over opinions expressed by those managers. The
only threads started are those given the OK by the managers, and
typically every thread starts with a comment by the managers,
giving their opinions much greater significance than anyone elses.
Bulletin boards are really little different from the standard media
and are therefore anathema to the distributed, anarchic environment
that the internet allows and USENET impliments.”