Karl Fogel wrote:
> The recent discussion around the "/checkpoints" directory in our
> repository has given me an idea.
>
> Instead of "/checkpoints", with its implication of approved uses and
> conventions, how about "/anarchy" -- with the implication that there's
> room for experimentation with different ways of checkpointing?
>
> There's a history behind this proposal.
>
> Back in the day, the Oberlin College Computer Science department had a
> shared filesystem, and each student had a home directory with a quota.
>
> One day we got a big disk (I don't remember from where), and someone
> had the bright idea to just mount it as "/anarchy" and make it
> world-writeable. The idea was that it would be a self-organized
> commons shared by all the students. One could use it for whatever one
> wanted: a big project where full compilation would exceed the regular
> home directory quota, for storing image files, for whatever.
>
> It worked spectacularly well. The group had only a slow turnover rate
> (just like us), and every reason to cooperate, so they did. There was
> no "tragedy of the commons". If someone was using too much space,
> someone else would bring it up on the mailing list, and the problem
> would get taken care of pretty quickly.
One key difference: in our world, "taking up too much disk space" isn't
something we just hop onto the mailing list and take care up (unless you've
got an 'svn obliterate' implementation hidden in your left sock).
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato@collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
Received on Mon Oct 15 23:06:15 2007