007-hyde-park-academy
Content
What is Open Source? Miles Patterson You can read, because I do publish that short document which Gerhardstein and Peter reference in these last two sections, but I have relegated that to the appendix. An editor
said that I need to provide a description of exactly what Open Source is. You had enough interest in Peter Kosinski to pick this book up, so I assume that you already know. There might be some who
find this book in a bathroom or end up on a long plane flight with it and don’t know. Peter gave this definition to students in his Linux-FromScratch class for Chicago Public Schools. I like it better than any answer I have given to the question. This was from an audio recording. He didn’t write it down. I believe I would know if he did. Trust me when I tell you that this was unrehearsed, pithy and off-the-cuff.
Peter Kosinski Hyde Park Academy, Chicago, IL Date Unknown All y’all were interested in taking this Linux class. I
was hoping that means you know something that I ain’t got to tell you. We are going to build it from scratch or “Source”.
We can do that because Linux is “Open Source”. If you let people know what the recipe is for something, you could call that thing “Open Source”. That is all it is. If you
It’s just letting people know what ever the formula is.
hold on to the secrets, someone’s going to figure it out anyway; given enough time. That is called reverse engineering; we can
discuss that another time. “Source”, in computers it is also called code. It is the
programming that makes up a computer application. You could take one of many tools, like notepad, to open a file of a program on your computer. You would see useless ones and zeros or even more silly-looking hexadecimal gibberish. The ugly and useless result is because the “Source” is now a program. It has been “compiled”. We are going to compile more
than you would ever want to in this class.
You are going to compile code until it really hurts, then I’ll make you keep at it. The Source itself is written in a programming language. If
programming is what you want to do, you could understand if you studied. Computer programmers interchangeably use the terms “Code”, “Source Code” and “Source”. They all mean the same thing.
If you write a computer program and want to make millions off of it, you need to keep the Source to yourself. Go ahead; pick up a book on programming now and try to write one more useful than the standard first try, which just runs and shows the words “Hello World”, you will find that it is hard and you would want to either quit or ask for help. Keep studying for ten years and you will get far, but still want to ask for help often. Ladies will tell that men never want to stop and ask for directions. To get help with your billion-dollar future program, you will need to cut the helper in for a share. In “Open Source” you are always getting help without paying for it. Maybe this is better. It might mean that everyone on the
road can get directions on a radio, like cops or truckers have. It million also means give up the billion large. I wouldn’t worry. If it really was a great idea, you will end up with some cash in the deal. There is also a nice amount of good faith to be allocated to those who share and help others. Folks share with each other how to make computer programs. Then it is all free. programs. I won’t show you how to write those
That’s because I don’t know.
I do know how to build and design and fix systems with Open Source stuff on them. This little computer runs Linux. All of
that stuff on it was free. Now who gives a rat’s ass if it’s free, if you can’t even afford a computer to do it on? What if you have to come to
school and stay after, to use the computer? I can afford one because I know the stuff I am going to teach you. I went to college. any of this. I was a piano player. I didn’t study
You can learn it on your own.
Open Source people
help others learn it on the Internet. If you can learn it, you’ll get some work. Then you could
go to college, or whatever. want”.
I say “whatever, or “Do what you I think I’m just
Don’t tell the teachers I said that.
supposed to say “Go to College”. more how I roll.
“Do what you want” is just
According to my notes, now tell you now about how this started. It was in Europe. That is a long way away, but You can talk to someone in Africa All of
nothing is really far away.
or China or anywhere on the Internet any time you want. those people will help you with working on these things.
The guy who kind of started this whole thing didn’t have money, but got people all over the world to help him. In the early 90’s there was a computer student in Helsinki Finland who was taking on a project for graduate school. wanted to make a version of UNIX that could run on any PC. UNIX is probably something you don’t know much about. It He
has been the behind-the-scenes workhorse of a lot of computing since the late 1970’s. It was developed in Berkley at the
University of California. One thing that is important to know about source is that when it is compiled, it only works on the type of machine is was compiled on.
Back then, big companies built big computers and made their own UNIX that would only run on what they sold. mostly fine. programs. It was only used by geeks for big company It actually This was
Businesses could afford these computers.
still works that way, but there is an alternative. UNIX was good at running programs efficiently, but was hard to use. Programmers wanted to be able to use it at home or They didn’t have a good
school to learn and develop things on.
version they could afford and run on a computer they could get their hands on. The guy in Finland was Linus Torvalds. It is the same The only
first name as Lucy’s brother from the Peanuts cartoon.
difference with the name is that it was said in Finland, and with a Finnish accent. So it is Lynn-us. The other difference
was that he wasn’t always holding a blanket. He was a very good programmer, but there is not a programmer in the world with enough skill to write something like that all by themselves. Internet. Google At the time the only people on the Internet were college computer geeks, and the military. The geeks couldn’t talk to He had a new thing called the
If you haven’t heard of it, that’s where they got the
the military, so they weren’t in the same group. (Peter opens a terminal window on his screen. text-only black screen for typing commands.) The other thing about the Internet back then is that it looked like this. No pictures No joystick They had games, but they looked like this. No naked women OK, they had that, but you had to know what you were doing to get them. What? OK, it is easy for you, but most of us have a harder time of it. We will get all the source we compile of the net. We will do that in the next session. install Linux. I don’t know if any of you have ever installed a Windows or First, we will just It was as hard as getting a real one. This is a bland
a MAC system.
Can I see a show of hands? We will divide you up into pairs. The ones That
That’s great.
who have done that should get with someone who hasn’t. will make things faster.
I am sure most of you have installed something else. have probably clicked on buttons that say “Next”. Linux we will install works like that. “Next” until it’s done. That will be the first technical thing you do. you do, the more money you can make.
You
The first
You make choices and hit
The more
I bring that up now because that is an important part about this whole “Open Source” thing. A lot of people hear about this
and call it something like “Computer Communism”. “Nobody makes a profit; what good is it?” I will tell you. doesn’t own Linux. That Linus is a pretty rich guy now. He
He asked for everyone’s help on it, and he He did register the name “Linux” as
let them all have it free. a copyright.
We know he wasn’t dumb.
This Linux-From-Scratch thing we are going to do is really hard. It will be the slowest build you will ever do. Back in
the time of Linus, every build was like this. Red Hat started back then. install and sell that cheap.
A company named
They wanted to make it easy to It was cheaper than anything else
you could buy to run a computer, and it ran on pretty much any computer. At that point, there was nobody better to have on board with your company Red Hat and another company just gave him stock to get his support. He is about twenty million large now. shit I was working at this company that said they didn’t want to use it. The bosses said they wanted to buy the expensive stuff They He made bank on free
and have a phone number to call when there were problems.
didn’t want to have to go out on the Internet looking for help. That problem got fixed really quickly. Red Hat and three After that
or four other companies started support phone lines.
was going, big computer companies didn’t want to be left out and even started selling computers with Linux on it. I always have one of those numbers to call for help, and I almost never use them. with the answer. I can almost always find someone online
I will call the company when the people online
all say “Me too, this sucks”.
Then I get mad and tell them to The best part
fix it, or at least write down that it is broke. is that the problems do get fixed. can have the solution.
The day they get fixed, you
You don’t have to wait for the next
version and then pay for it. If you use MAC, their systems are now based on Linux. It
is in every industry I know of. Every day I hear about new stuff that runs on it. Cool stuff Almost all of it is free. So there is money in this. … Let’s load Linux on these machines using the easy method. We will start the had road in our next session. It’s just in different places.
said that I need to provide a description of exactly what Open Source is. You had enough interest in Peter Kosinski to pick this book up, so I assume that you already know. There might be some who
find this book in a bathroom or end up on a long plane flight with it and don’t know. Peter gave this definition to students in his Linux-FromScratch class for Chicago Public Schools. I like it better than any answer I have given to the question. This was from an audio recording. He didn’t write it down. I believe I would know if he did. Trust me when I tell you that this was unrehearsed, pithy and off-the-cuff.
Peter Kosinski Hyde Park Academy, Chicago, IL Date Unknown All y’all were interested in taking this Linux class. I
was hoping that means you know something that I ain’t got to tell you. We are going to build it from scratch or “Source”.
We can do that because Linux is “Open Source”. If you let people know what the recipe is for something, you could call that thing “Open Source”. That is all it is. If you
It’s just letting people know what ever the formula is.
hold on to the secrets, someone’s going to figure it out anyway; given enough time. That is called reverse engineering; we can
discuss that another time. “Source”, in computers it is also called code. It is the
programming that makes up a computer application. You could take one of many tools, like notepad, to open a file of a program on your computer. You would see useless ones and zeros or even more silly-looking hexadecimal gibberish. The ugly and useless result is because the “Source” is now a program. It has been “compiled”. We are going to compile more
than you would ever want to in this class.
You are going to compile code until it really hurts, then I’ll make you keep at it. The Source itself is written in a programming language. If
programming is what you want to do, you could understand if you studied. Computer programmers interchangeably use the terms “Code”, “Source Code” and “Source”. They all mean the same thing.
If you write a computer program and want to make millions off of it, you need to keep the Source to yourself. Go ahead; pick up a book on programming now and try to write one more useful than the standard first try, which just runs and shows the words “Hello World”, you will find that it is hard and you would want to either quit or ask for help. Keep studying for ten years and you will get far, but still want to ask for help often. Ladies will tell that men never want to stop and ask for directions. To get help with your billion-dollar future program, you will need to cut the helper in for a share. In “Open Source” you are always getting help without paying for it. Maybe this is better. It might mean that everyone on the
road can get directions on a radio, like cops or truckers have. It million also means give up the billion large. I wouldn’t worry. If it really was a great idea, you will end up with some cash in the deal. There is also a nice amount of good faith to be allocated to those who share and help others. Folks share with each other how to make computer programs. Then it is all free. programs. I won’t show you how to write those
That’s because I don’t know.
I do know how to build and design and fix systems with Open Source stuff on them. This little computer runs Linux. All of
that stuff on it was free. Now who gives a rat’s ass if it’s free, if you can’t even afford a computer to do it on? What if you have to come to
school and stay after, to use the computer? I can afford one because I know the stuff I am going to teach you. I went to college. any of this. I was a piano player. I didn’t study
You can learn it on your own.
Open Source people
help others learn it on the Internet. If you can learn it, you’ll get some work. Then you could
go to college, or whatever. want”.
I say “whatever, or “Do what you I think I’m just
Don’t tell the teachers I said that.
supposed to say “Go to College”. more how I roll.
“Do what you want” is just
According to my notes, now tell you now about how this started. It was in Europe. That is a long way away, but You can talk to someone in Africa All of
nothing is really far away.
or China or anywhere on the Internet any time you want. those people will help you with working on these things.
The guy who kind of started this whole thing didn’t have money, but got people all over the world to help him. In the early 90’s there was a computer student in Helsinki Finland who was taking on a project for graduate school. wanted to make a version of UNIX that could run on any PC. UNIX is probably something you don’t know much about. It He
has been the behind-the-scenes workhorse of a lot of computing since the late 1970’s. It was developed in Berkley at the
University of California. One thing that is important to know about source is that when it is compiled, it only works on the type of machine is was compiled on.
Back then, big companies built big computers and made their own UNIX that would only run on what they sold. mostly fine. programs. It was only used by geeks for big company It actually This was
Businesses could afford these computers.
still works that way, but there is an alternative. UNIX was good at running programs efficiently, but was hard to use. Programmers wanted to be able to use it at home or They didn’t have a good
school to learn and develop things on.
version they could afford and run on a computer they could get their hands on. The guy in Finland was Linus Torvalds. It is the same The only
first name as Lucy’s brother from the Peanuts cartoon.
difference with the name is that it was said in Finland, and with a Finnish accent. So it is Lynn-us. The other difference
was that he wasn’t always holding a blanket. He was a very good programmer, but there is not a programmer in the world with enough skill to write something like that all by themselves. Internet. Google At the time the only people on the Internet were college computer geeks, and the military. The geeks couldn’t talk to He had a new thing called the
If you haven’t heard of it, that’s where they got the
the military, so they weren’t in the same group. (Peter opens a terminal window on his screen. text-only black screen for typing commands.) The other thing about the Internet back then is that it looked like this. No pictures No joystick They had games, but they looked like this. No naked women OK, they had that, but you had to know what you were doing to get them. What? OK, it is easy for you, but most of us have a harder time of it. We will get all the source we compile of the net. We will do that in the next session. install Linux. I don’t know if any of you have ever installed a Windows or First, we will just It was as hard as getting a real one. This is a bland
a MAC system.
Can I see a show of hands? We will divide you up into pairs. The ones That
That’s great.
who have done that should get with someone who hasn’t. will make things faster.
I am sure most of you have installed something else. have probably clicked on buttons that say “Next”. Linux we will install works like that. “Next” until it’s done. That will be the first technical thing you do. you do, the more money you can make.
You
The first
You make choices and hit
The more
I bring that up now because that is an important part about this whole “Open Source” thing. A lot of people hear about this
and call it something like “Computer Communism”. “Nobody makes a profit; what good is it?” I will tell you. doesn’t own Linux. That Linus is a pretty rich guy now. He
He asked for everyone’s help on it, and he He did register the name “Linux” as
let them all have it free. a copyright.
We know he wasn’t dumb.
This Linux-From-Scratch thing we are going to do is really hard. It will be the slowest build you will ever do. Back in
the time of Linus, every build was like this. Red Hat started back then. install and sell that cheap.
A company named
They wanted to make it easy to It was cheaper than anything else
you could buy to run a computer, and it ran on pretty much any computer. At that point, there was nobody better to have on board with your company Red Hat and another company just gave him stock to get his support. He is about twenty million large now. shit I was working at this company that said they didn’t want to use it. The bosses said they wanted to buy the expensive stuff They He made bank on free
and have a phone number to call when there were problems.
didn’t want to have to go out on the Internet looking for help. That problem got fixed really quickly. Red Hat and three After that
or four other companies started support phone lines.
was going, big computer companies didn’t want to be left out and even started selling computers with Linux on it. I always have one of those numbers to call for help, and I almost never use them. with the answer. I can almost always find someone online
I will call the company when the people online
all say “Me too, this sucks”.
Then I get mad and tell them to The best part
fix it, or at least write down that it is broke. is that the problems do get fixed. can have the solution.
The day they get fixed, you
You don’t have to wait for the next
version and then pay for it. If you use MAC, their systems are now based on Linux. It
is in every industry I know of. Every day I hear about new stuff that runs on it. Cool stuff Almost all of it is free. So there is money in this. … Let’s load Linux on these machines using the easy method. We will start the had road in our next session. It’s just in different places.
Sponsor Documents
Recommended
No recommend documents