As cool as Dynamicland is, I still don’t get why they won’t open source it or at least release it in some form.
I’ve heard various people give roundabout excuses, but none of them hold water. They often fall into one of the following categories:
- “People won’t get the core ideas and will use it to make things that go against the core ideas” — People who care about Bret Victor’s work will take the time to learn the ideas. People who don’t might try and make something Bret doesn’t like, but currently the world is full of things Bret doesn’t like, so I don’t get how that would be different than the status quo.
- “It’s actually ‘anti-internet’, reimagining computers as objects in physical space, without the intangible connections provided by the internet” — Cool! I’d like to use it to make an airgapped little lab thing for people in my city to play and experiment in, but I can’t do that unless it’s released to the community.
- “Yeah but remember it’s ‘anti-internet’, releasing it open source on the internet would violate the core principles.” — This feels too cute by half. I don’t consider this a legitimate objection.
- “Just come to Oakland, you’ll understand when you get here and use it.” — That’s way out of many people’s budgets. I also get the feeling that I wouldn’t come around just by seeing it, I think I’d want one in my city even more.
- “You’re not entitled to other people’s work.” — True, but most stuff done in this sort of research space is done with the intent of spreading an idea or increasing the public good. It seems kind of odd that the Dynamicland folks keep talking about what a revolutionary concept it is while preventing 99.9% of people from actually experiencing it.
Overall it just seems like such a weird attitude. I get that they’re worried about the world misunderstanding their ideas, but at this point there are tons of people who have been eating up Bret Victor’s work and have immense respect for his ideas, and would gladly watch, listen to or read whatever instructions would be necessary to help someone who’s already bought in “play by the rules” and get the best possible experience.
I think you can look at some of the other replies in this thread to see how deeply this can be misunderstood. And I think the fear is more about losing the meaning of dynamicland.
The source code isn't the idea, the idea is. That's what needs to be communicated.
The web page is huge, though, with an unbelievable amount of information if you want to build your own.
https://dynamicland.org/archive/2023/Front_shelf
there's also a much deeper explanation of the why here: https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/
I don’t like the answers they give on that page. Every single one feels like a dodge.
I read your comment, then I read the page.
I disagree on every single line.
This is not about software. Having the software on its own won't help you.
If in 2006, the year before the iPhone came out, you had the software as FOSS, would that help? There was no hardware yet. There was nothing even with a capacitative touch screen with multitouch yet. The whole point of the design was to do away with styli, but all extant touchscreen devices needed styli back then.
I was implementing corporate networks in 1991. I built them with NetBEUI for PC-to-PC comms, and IPX/SPX or DECnet for talking to servers. Occasionally all 3.
If I gave 1991 me the source of timbl's WorldWideWeb, it would be no use. I didn't have NeXTstep. My corporate workstation ran X11 and talked to servers over it but it didn't run TCP/IP. I had no TCP/IP in the building.
The point of the Web is the protocol, having clients and servers. Having docs is much more use than having code. Code is useless fragile stuff.
Android reproduces a lot of the interaction model of the iPhone but it came from seeing iPhones and trying iPhones. It did not come from getting source. Nobody ever got the source.
Forget the source. Source code doesn't matter. It's an irrelevant distraction.
Source code is not the big deal here. Inventing a new way to interact with computers is the big deal here. Getting at the software does not matter.
So if I want to do this I have to invent everything from scratch like he did?
You have to create a space and find collaborators and build it together from scratch, yes.
It seems to me less that they are a "dodge" and more that the two of you have philosophical disagreements.
If have taken the time to understand what he means when he says "Realtalk is not made of source code", and disagree with his conclusions, that's not quite the same as him being dishonest.
I get that impulse because Bret's pretty good about communicating his whole vision and it definitely has a large amount of philosophy attached to it beyond just the tech, but I fear it's more likely to smother the technology and the idea and ensure it doesn't get much adoption. Right now there's not even a space I could go to to check it out it sounds like because the old physical space was shutdown during COVID and the only implementations now are in a handful (or one?) lab. Much less if I had a space and was interested in trying the exploratory computing ideas for museums and education out before building a larger space I've got nothing to work with.
Ultimately trying to tightly control a technology because he wants it to have a particular impact seems like it's just going to ensure it stays a niche demo instead of making and impact at all. If the idea is strong enough people will adopt and adapt it for themselves because it's good.
It would be easier to agree with you if there were no examples of closed source software, or even non-software ideas (such as libraries), spreading and having huge impact.
Bret is also in no rush here, the plan has taken a decade so far and has milestones ahead of it for a decade more.
Not trying to say it's inevitable but it's way riskier. There's usually a company behind that selling the software making money to continue the process. Bret has a non-profit and now no physical location to evangelize from. Libraries are an exact counter example to this actually, first the idea doesn't require software and hardware, and second the concept is all there really is to it. Making a DynamicLand clone is clearly possible without access to the code but you have to do a lot of blind reverse engineering working backwards from the implementation.
Maybe this is also a little frustration that it's been 10 or so years and there's not actually much new news, it looks better but I'm seemingly further than ever from being able to experiment with it.
So like, if they want me to reverse engineer Dynamicland and make my own, fine. But I’m WAY more likely to misunderstand what it’s about through reverse engineering it than I would be if I had actual source code I could study. I’m sure there’s some truly revelatory stuff in the architecture of RealTalk OS, and a reimplementation would be missing all that.
If what they want is for people to try and reimplement Dynamicland without their guidance, then they’re certainly doing the right things. But if their goal is to convert people to a new way of thinking about computing, this is not a great approach.
What a low opinion you have of yourself. On the contrary, you're likely to learn a lot more (and of course, spend orders of magnitude more time) recreating something interesting from the ground up than you are simply copying the source code.
The source code isn't the interesting part.
Hell you might even make something better, which is I suspect one of the unstated reasons why the source is not released.
I think the problem is like what happened to "agile" after the manifesto. People took a term with a meaning, and ignored that meaning in promoting their own stuff, thus confusing the terminology and messing up discussion of the concepts.
So their antidote is just preventing the idea from gaining traction in the first place? Like, that will certainly prevent it from being misinterpreted the way Agile has been, but it will also ensure no one can use their idea at all.
They aren't trying to "gain traction" right now. They are nurturing a beautiful little flame of a vision and documenting it for the world to learn from, and possibly be inspired by, along the way -- someday it will be more publicly available, but for now it functions, to the general public, more as art than utility.
The typical themes of things that get posted on HN are not compatible with this idea, which is why it comes across so jarringly to many. They aren't selling, prescribing, recruiting, etc. They are sharing a vision, and to deeply understand and appreciate the vision you have to get your hands dirty and do some digging into what they've prepared for us to see thus far.
As far as I can see, Dynamicland is not open-sourced because it's a building and community exploring new ways of thinking and learning collaboratively. These collaborations involve novel interactions with physical things. So far, this has nothing to do with something that could be open-sourced on GitHub. It just so happens that this new way of collaborating with physical things involves giving them access to computation.
I know this comment will seem pedantic, but I hope it also communicates that the goals of this research project are different than you seem (at least to me) to consider. Bret Victor's goal isn't to design a system of projectors and cameras that run code on pieces of paper (just like Engelbart's goal wasn't to design the mouse). At a certain level, Bret Victor wants to explode our concept of computing.