> >That being said, I'd spread the award among Linus, RMS, and Jimbo > >Wales, for creating/enabling their globally used tools, and sites, > >that transcend culture, people, politics, and nations.
When thinking about projects like securing the Nobel Peace Prize, think in terms of optimizing for a successful outcome rather than optimizing for proper distribution of credit. Right now, there is a controversy in the electronics community about which individuals should have gotten the Nobel Physics Prize for the CCD imager. There was a cast of thousands, including at least one PLUG member. Where do you stop? If we include the deserving Mark Shuttleworth and Richard Stallman and Jimmy Wales, shouldn't we include Ward Cunningham, for example? How about Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson? Kirk McCusick? Tim Behrners-Lee? Bob Metcalfe? Vint Cerf? Lawrence Lessig? Bill Gates (gasp)??? The list is endless - and that is our most powerful selling point. Would you demand Richard Stallman if the result was the inclusion of Bill Gates as well? Remember, we can suggest (indirectly), but we CANNOT CHOOSE. It is a committee of 5 Norwegian politicians who make the choice. Think about their decision making process, and the pressures they must respond to. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to communities, usually in the form of their most visible and least controversial leader. Study the history of the prize recipients. Yes, there are some flavors of the month, and there are plenty of individuals who later proved unworthy of the prize, but across the broad sweep of history, the movements they represented mattered, and still affect us today. For example, the award to the Current Occupant is not for the particular accomplishments of that person, but to the American election process. Amid much contention, we still did something that would be impossible in most of the rest of the racist world. If the result of that is more free and open elections in the rest of the world, it takes away some of the sting for those of us who preferred different candidates. Many may not agree with the particular result, and we may all regret our votes before the 2012 election, but this is the kind of process that the Prize committee rewards. We need to match their expectations. I suggest we focus our efforts on a single well known, long established, and relatively uncontroversial candidate, because we can succeed best that way. We make it clear that by honoring Linus Torvalds, we are honoring the entire open world creative community, and all the other contributors who will be thrilled to see L.T. get it (that is, everyone on the list above except Bill Gates). We are honoring the work of the 1962 Nobel Prize committee, whose award to Linus Pauling had a direct effect on the production of Linux and of its principal author. And we draw support from every country in the world. We open the door for other twentieth anniversary prizes, such as the 2021 peace prize for Wikipedia to Jimmy Wales and Ward Cunningham, the 2021 literature prize to Lawrence Lessig for Creative Commons, and the 2024 peace prize for Ubuntu to Mark Shuttleworth. This is our first opportunity; if we do it right, it is by no means our last. That is how we sell the idea to Linus Torvalds - he will be helping establish the Nobel Hackers Club, which will eventually include computational physicists and chemists and physicians, collaborative literature groups, perhaps someday an A.I. entity or two. It is time to leave the machine closet and take our place in the sun ( the bright thing in the big blue room )! Finally, framed in those terms and establishing those precedents, does anyone here think Steve Ballmer will EVER get a Nobel Prize for the monkey boy dance? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
