[ThrowAway123543]

Urbit is the most brazenly audacious computer science project on Earth, it's entirely open source, and yet, every time it gets mentioned on the world's most popular forum for programmers, virtually all of the discussion is non-technical.

Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro based on the maintainer's political blog? "Oh, one of the devs said something in 2007 about immigrants I didn't like, and..." uh huh. What about the insanely ambitious attempt to replace unix, any comments on that?

[ekiru]

First, the person above you didn't say anything about caring about the underlying ideology; they said that they cared that the project seemed to them to be an art project designed for ideological purposes and unlikely to succeed as a result.

Second, people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on ideology. The Debian project, in particular, has a very well established ideology. They also choose which distributions they spend money on or donate money to (the relevant comparison to purchasing stars as discussed here) based on ideology.

Third, Urbit is a different category of thing from a Linux distribution. Urbit is a network. A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have retreated from that since.

[nyolfen]

>A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have retreated from that since.

this is certainly the case -- the scarcity of resources (about 4b cryptographic identities called 'planets', along with an associated reputation system) is meant to introduce something like proof-of-stake, where incentives are created that make it more expensive to act in bad faith (trolling[1], spamming) than the bad faith behavior is worth.

this is an interesting read the head developer wrote a few years ago about these subjects: https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/03/future...

[1] 'trolling' in this case would be determined by local 'communities' on the network, and not a central authority a la the current internet (fb, twitter, etc)

[ThrowAway123543]

> people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on ideology

Sure, sorry, I meant that it's not the norm, not that it never happens ever. My post was unnecessarily argumentative in tone, due to frustration with some past urbit discussions here.

> A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act

This is a very abstract point, which may be true in the general sense, but I was talking about Urbit in particular. Consider two assertions:

1. Urbit is so amazing and useful and wonderful that it's reasonable to imagine people all over the world using it every day for decades to come 2. The guy who wrote Urbit is racist/authoritarian/something else, as proven from a close textual analysis of his old blog posts

The point I was ranting about is that it seems like the truth or falsity of those two statements is completely separate, and that the former ought to be a lot more interesting than the latter. I don't think that's proven to be the case.

[dragonwriter]

> Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro based on the maintainer's political blog?

Yes, people pick Linux distributions based on the maintaining organization's ideology (heck, they pick Linux itself for ideological reasons.)