Some necessary background: George R.R. Martin is a science fiction and
fantasy author who's been writing (and editing) in the field for quite a
while. In 1996, he started a new epic fantasy series entitled
The
Song of Ice and Fire, a hugely complex and sprawling series telling the
story of an entire medieval world, with four volumes published and
something on the order of 19 viewpoint characters to date. The fourth and
last book to date in the series was published in 2005. It contained only
half the viewpoints expected (and in my opinion and that of at least some
other readers, the least interesting half). There was an afterword saying
basically that the book was cut somewhat artificially in half for length
reasons (it was 753 hardcover pages for what was there), the next book
would have the other viewpoints, and it was basically done.
Three years and some later, and after a few other optimistic updates, it's
not yet done. Some of Martin's fans are increasingly getting antsy and
sometimes abusive about this. This has increasingly been getting to
Martin, and he's responded in various ways in his personal blog, most
recently
February 19th.
See also
John
Scalzi and
Charlie
Stross reacting to his post.
Now, I'm not one of the people who is rabid about this series. I'm a
little disappointed that I haven't gotten to read the next bits with the
characters I really like in the series, and I didn't much care for
A Feast for Crows
because of how the book was split. But I have a thousand other books I
want to read (literally I've read less than half the books
I own) and if I don't get to see more of the series, oh well. I am,
however, very interested in the fan reaction to this delay and Martin's
reaction to that, because it has started reminding me of similar things in
my own life.
Some of the fans are just batshit insane, which is one of the things that
happens to a best-selling author; I feel for Martin there but there isn't
much anyone can really do about that. But among the sane people, there
are a bunch who say something like "I understand why the constant nagging
doesn't help, but on the other hand, when you start a big story with
unresolved plots, you have an obligation to your readers to finish it."
I call bullshit on that.
This same effect happens in the free software world. If you write some
program, you're perceived to have an obligation to support it, fix it,
release new versions, and so forth. I've also had this happen in other
volunteer contexts, such as Usenet. Often that obligation is based on
some comments that one makes about future plans, things that will go into
the next release, e-mail messages where you say that you'll look at
something, and so forth. It's not entirely groundless, and it's not
groundless with Martin either.
However.
As any software developer knows, time estimates for tasks are horribly
difficult and almost always too short. This is clearly what happened to
Martin, and bitching about the time estimates doesn't help at all. Some
problems turn out to be so much harder than you expect that time estimates
fail entirely. With creative work (including some programming) it's
particularly hard to know how much work is remaining. You may know
roughly how much you have left to write, but you don't know how hard each
chunk will be until you start it, and sometimes until you finish it. With
some projects, the only thing you can do is say "sorry, my estimates were
completely off and I don't know how to estimate this" and then stop
promising dates. Which Martin has already done. He was "wrong" in some
sense for setting bad expectations, but estimation is insanely hard and
the world usually doesn't let you get away with just refusing to estimate
anything.
So much for time. What about whether Martin has an obligation to write
the next book at all?
The equivalent question in the free software world is whether one can just
walk away from a project, or away from a volunteer position, leaving a
bunch of stuff undone that some people who were using the software were
counting on having finished. It's a bit easier to deal with in free
software, since usually just promises are at stake, whereas with Martin
he's sold a commercial product and people get weird about money. There is
a reasonable expectation that a series of this type will have a conclusion
(although I'll point out that the SFF world is filled with unfinished
series). Maybe you wouldn't have bought any of the series if you had
known that it wouldn't end, so now you're out $100 for the hardcovers that
you feel like you bought on false pretenses. Let's examine that.
First, I have a serious problem with people who use the economic
transaction as leverage in this sort of argument. This is a really piddly
amount of money for each individual person, generally less than I get paid
for one hour of work. Writing a new novel is way, way more than one hour
of work. Martin's fans are demanding that he do work that's worth many
orders of magnitude more than they're conceivably out monetarily. (And
the reactions are individual reactions of anger; the level of upsetness of
each individual shouldn't change based on the total size of the fan base.)
Furthermore, their economic transaction was with the publisher, and they
had no control and no say over how Martin got paid. From multiple
different directions, they're not his employer, have no contractual
control over how he spends his time, and have no legitimate economic basis
for asserting any such control. They can make a decision to not buy his
future work because they're disappointed, and that's it.
Second, it is absolutely mandatory to give other people room to be wrong
or change their mind. Human beings cannot keep every promise that they
make. We fail at things that we fully intend to do, particularly around
estimates, and particularly around one's dedication to decade-long major
life projects. People are wrong about marriages and children, which
involve far more serious consequences than a fiction series. I think it's
a good reality check here to note that his fans are placing
way
more restrictions on what he can do with his life than would be legal for
any employer.
Third, when someone doesn't meet your expectations, the response should be
proportional and rational. This is the one that really gets to me.
Choosing not to read the next book in the series because it's been too
long is entirely reasonable. Trying to make Martin feel like crap is not.
I would go further: nothing that an artist could promise to their general
public could warrant intentionally making them feel like crap for failing
to do it. That level of emotional consequence should be reserved for
things like marriage, parenting, or life-long friendship, not
disappointment that you didn't get to hear the end of a story you were
enjoying. I speak from personal experience here: this type of punishment
by guilt is a nasty, nasty business. It burns people out faster than any
other possible reaction, it makes it much less likely that Martin will
continue the series at all, and it's probably poisoning his feelings about
the entire world. It's burning down the bridge you're standing on. It
always hurts and never helps.
People already create feelings of obligation around things they've
promised, implicitly or explicitly, to do, and generate plenty of their
own guilt. That guilt is one of the major obstacles that one has to
overcome to be productive; if you don't believe me, read any good
productivity book, such as Allen's
Getting Things Done, and notice
how much it talks about getting past guilt. Intentionally going out of
your way to contact someone you do not know personally and pile on more
guilt is vicious, cruel, and tactically counterproductive. Trust me,
Martin didn't fail to notice that he missed his own deadlines.
I think Martin's post and the subsequent discussion is a great opportunity
for all of us who create or use creative and technical works to think
about how we apply the Golden Rule. There's a natural tendency to hold
people tightly to promises that we'll get something that we want. There's
a natural tendency for all of us to make those promises, since people are
grateful for them, and then pile guilt on ourselves for not meeting them.
All of the emotion wrapped up in both sides of that tension of expectation
and obligation can be exhausting and poisonous. It makes relationships
brittle because we don't let people renegotiate. We don't let people say
they were wrong. We don't let people change their minds. And we don't
let ourselves change our minds.
Here's my promise: the next time someone doesn't meet an expectation I
had, I will remember this discussion, give them space to be wrong, and not
pile on more guilt. Like all promises, I'll try to keep it, but I might
not be able to.
After a long hiatus for various reasons, I finally had the chance to try my
hand at loading a 
A new version of WebKit s GTK+ port is here, as also 
Earlier this week, 
I've not had that many problems with network-manager, until now. The new version in unstable is just completely broken on my machine. Sadly, I can't report why it failed as I inadvertently closed the terminal with the relevant output. 
For comparison s sake, here is a comparison of the fsck time of the same collection of files and directories, comparing ext3 and the original ext4 block and inode allocator. The file system in question is a 32GB install of Ubuntu Jaunty, with a personal home directory, a rather large Maildir directory, some linux kernel trees, and an e2fsprogs tree. It s basically the emergency environment I set up on my Netbook at FOSDEM.
In all cases the file systems were freshly copied from the original root directory using the command rsync -axH / /mnt. It s actually a bit surprising to me that ext3 s pass 2 e2fsck times was that much better than e2fsck time under the old ext4 allocator. My previous experience has shown that the two are normally about the same, with a write throughput of around 9-10 MB/s on for e2fsck s pass 2 for both ext3 file systems and ext4 file systems with the original inode/block allocators. Hence, I would have expected ext3 s pass2 time to have been 12-13 seconds, and not 6. I m not sure how that happened, unless it was the luck of draw in terms of how things ended up getting allocated on disk. So I m not too sure what happened there, but overall things look quite good for ext4 and fsck times!
Last week, I couldn't resist and bought myself an 
I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that 
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I've been dying to upgrade my