WikiLeaks to Leak 5000 Java Projects — cover art: a warm panelled corridor receding into the distance, every door down both walls padlocked shut, a panda in a waistcoat in the foreground holding up a single key, politely baffled, locked out of its own home. 😄

2010 · Stevey's Blog Rants · Satire

“If I make something private, it means that no matter how desperately you need to call it, I should be able to prevent you from doing so, even long after I've gone to the grave.”
— From WikiLeaks to Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects, July 2010
Read the essay

© 2010 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Stevey's Blog Rants.

AI Notes

One of Steve's purest pieces of fake news, built exactly to the form — wire-service dateline (an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano), fabricated sources with names and ages and home towns, official-sounding organizations like the "League Of Java Programmers For Deprecating The Living Shit Out Of Everything," and two bonus "MORE NEWS" briefs at the bottom. WikiLeaks will re-release thousands of open-source Java projects with every private/final stripped out and every @deprecated tag removed; straight-faced quotes from fake Java developers do the rest. The target is the reflex of defensive encapsulation. The central analogy turns Java's access control into a house whose owner is forbidden to open certain doors of their own home — the set-piece the piece's best escalation is built around. A closing voice from outside the Java world supplies the counter-philosophy Steve actually believes, landing the real argument under cover of the gag.

The 2010 WikiLeaks news peg dates the surface; the underlying argument — that the access-control and framework culture around Java is paternalistic — is one Steve had been making in earnest for years, and which lands here without having to make it at all.

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